Page 18 of Carrie Soto Is Back

By the end of the year, I was ranked number four. Stepanova was three.

In an interview withSportsPages,Paulina was asked how she feltabout “Soto vs. Stepanova” becoming a rivalry for the ages. We had gone up against each other in the final of two Slams that year, as well as a number of tournaments around the world. Sportswriters were calling it “the Cold War.”

“Carrie Soto, people talk about her a lot now, yes,” Stepanova said. “But she needs to lose about ten pounds or so if she wants to win against me when I am not injured. That is not a rivalry.”

When I read that quote, I put the magazine down and then kicked a trash can in my hotel suite, sending it across the room and making a dent in the wall.

My father shook his head. “Control yourself,hija.You are not competing with her. You are competing with yourself.”

“Iamcompeting with her,” I said. “And I’m losing.”

—

“This is a long game,” my father said to me as we were flying back from the Australian Open in 1976, where I’d lost to Stepanova in the semifinals and she’d gone on to win the damn thing.

“I’m done with the long game,” I said. The flight attendants had just served us a full breakfast, and my father had devoured his. Mine was untouched. “I need to win every single time I go up against her,” I said.

“She is playing better than you right now,” he said. “But you are capable of more. That is your secret, that you have even more potential. We will figure it out.”

I slammed my window shade up. “I don’t want potential. I want wins now.”

Despite the fact that I was eighteen, my father put his hand gently on my shoulder and said, “We are Sotos. We do not yell, and we do not throw temper tantrums if we’re not good enough. What do we do?”

“We get good enough,” I said as I turned my head away from him and settled my gaze out the window. For a moment, I couldn’tremember which country we’d left and which we were going to. I looked down, and that was when I remembered we were over the Pacific.

“Bien,” he said.

A few moments later, I turned back to him. “I’m holding my serve pretty well against her. She’s having to win in tiebreakers half the time.”

“Es cierto,” my dad said, not looking up from his magazine.

“But she has more power than me,” I said. “I have trouble taking her pace off the ball sometimes. I’m picking the wrong shots.”

He was silent.

“You said I’m supposed to be the greatest tennis player of a generation. You said I had to grow into who I would become. What are we going to do? I need you…” I said. “I need you to figure it out.”

He closed his magazine and looked at me. “Dame un minuto. I’m thinking.”

He stood up, stretched out his back, and started pacing along the aisle of the plane. Then suddenly he was back. “Your slice.”

“My slice?”

“Let’s refine it, make it sharper, make it bulletproof. It will take away all of her momentum. We make it deadly and then…” He nodded. “That will kill her.”

—

My father and I practiced my slice for months. We made it my very best shot. We perfected it over hours and hours of drills. My angle was brutal. And I knew how and when to implement it.

Amparo Pereira capsized when I used it. Tanya McLeod didn’t stand a chance against me anymore. Olga Zeman fell to her knees that summer and cried when I beat her in straight sets. After that match, a reporter asked me on camera what advice I had for the opponents struggling to keep up with me.

I said, “Honestly? Get better at tennis.”

That sound bite was played on every single sports show in thecountry. My father would shake his head every time. “That was unnecessary, Carolina.”

“But that’s whatIdid,” I’d remind him. “Why is everyone so sensitive about the truth?”

“They are calling you ‘Cold-Hearted Carrie’ now,” my dad lamented once.

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