Page 26 of Carrie Soto Is Back

“No,” I said. “I’m better for it.”

I could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t sure that was true. And I thought,See, Dad, this is why you’re not my coach anymore.

But after that, something broke open between us. We went to the movies together. We went out to eat. I bought him a new panamahat. He gave me his old chessboard, “because you must always keep thinking four moves ahead.”

On my last day before heading back out on the tour, I was packing when my father came and found me. “I wanted to talk to you about something,” he said as I gathered pair after pair of Adidas. They were my biggest endorsement deal after Wilson rackets, and I had been designing a shoe line with them, the Carrie Soto Break Points. While I was not as popular as Stepanova or McLeod, I did have my fans. You couldn’t deny that when I was playing, you were going to see a show. And the number of spectators—and thus endorsement deals—were starting to reflect that.

“Okay,” I said.

“You’re getting higher and higher out there on the court, reaching for Stepanova’s lobs.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. I stopped packing and looked at him. “And it’s working. I’m beating her every time now.”

“But you’re landing hard,” he said. “Maybe during clay season it won’t be too much of a problem, but on the hard courts coming up…”

“I’m landing fine.”

“Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. You need to bend your leg more when you land. I’m worried your knee—”

“Lars says it’s fine. Without adding in that height, I’d never—”

“I don’t want to talk about Lars with you,” my dad said.

“And I don’t want to talk about mytennis gamewithyou.”

“Está bien,” my father said. And he left the room.

—

We talked on the phone every day I was on tour in the early eighties. And we started opening up about things we’d never discussed before.

He finally started talking about my mother, telling me how much he missed her. I told him I thought about her when things around me got too quiet. He told me about the things she had wanted for me.

“She never thought tennis was terribly important,” he told me once, when I was in Rome for the Italian Open. “She thought joy was more important.”

I laughed. “Winning is joy,” I said.

“Exactly,pichona,I tried to tell her that. But she was less competitive than you and me. More happy in the moment. And she was so open-minded and accepting about things. She probably would have been fine with all your dating. But,cariño,I don’t know if I want to see many more of these photos in the magazines of you and your…suitors.”

I sighed. “I’m having fun. That’s all.”

I didn’t know how to tell my father that these men weren’t suitors, that they rarely even called me twice. But I let him assume that it was me who chose not to see them again, instead of the other way around.

I was “the Battle Axe.” I was cold. I was a machine. Sure, a lot of them were intrigued by the idea of the sheer power of my body. But I was not the woman that men were looking to bring home to their mothers.

I reminded myself not to fall for the bullshit they peddled. How much they admired me, how I was unlike anyone else they had ever met before. So often there was talk of going on vacation together, ideas of renting a yacht in the south of France, conversations about some imaginary future. I knew I had to ignore the promises they made so casually, the promises I wanted so badly for at least one of them to keep.

“Maybe you can find someone good for you,” my father said. “Someone for more than one date.”

“It’s not that simple, Dad. It’s not…” I wanted to get off the phone. But at the same time, I did want to tell someone, anyone, the growing fear that had started feeling as if it could corrode the lining of my stomach.No one wants me.

“You are picking the wrong men, like that Bowe Huntley. Whatare you doing being photographed coming out of a hotel with that walking tantrum? He’s the number two player in the ATP and he’s screaming at the umpire? That’s not the guy you pick.”

“So then who is the guy I pick?”

“That Brandon Randall is a good one.”

Brandon Randall was the number one player in the ATP. They called him “the Nice Guy of Tennis.”

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