Carrie Soto Is Back

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

“Cortez crumbles as soon as she doesn’t control the court. And Nicki knows it.”

“Nicki’s powerful,” I say. “But she’s also hugely adaptable. When you play her, you’re playing somebody who is adjusting on the fly, tailoring their game to your specific weakness.”

“Every player has a weak spot,” I say. “And Nicki is gre...

“You are going to do whatever you want to do, pichona,” my father says. “That is how adulthood works.”

I am staring down forty, but still, somehow, his hands dwarf mine. And just like when I was a child, they are warm and rough and strong. When he squeezes my palm, I feel so small—as if I am forever a child and he is this giant I will have to gaze up at to meet his eye.

“We might lose … badly,” I say. “Prove to everyone the Battle Axe can’t hack it now. They’d love that. I’d tarnish not only my record but my legacy. It might … ruin everything.”

My father waved her away. “She’s destined,” he said. “It is plain as day. With your grace and my strength, she can be the greatest tennis player the world has ever seen. They will tell stories about her one day.” My mother rolled her eyes at him as she began to put dinner on the table. “I would rather she was kind and happy.” “Alicia,” my father said as he stood behind my mother and wrapped his arms around her. “No one ever tells stories about that.”

What I actually remember most about her is the emptiness she left behind. There was this sense, within the house, that there used to be someone else here. But now it was just my father and me.

In my first concrete memories, I am young but already annoyed. I am annoyed at all of the other girls’ questions: “Where is your mom?” “Why isn’t your hair ever brushed?” Annoyed at the teacher’s insistence that I speak English without any traces of my father’s accent. Annoyed at being told to play nicer during recess, when all I wanted to do was race the other kids across the field or see who could swing highest on the swing set. I suspected the problem was that I was always the winner. But I could not for the life of me understand why that made people want to play with me less instead of more. Those early memories of trying to make friends are all accompanied by the same twinge of confusion: I’m doing something wrong, and I don’t know what it is.

“And love? What does it mean?” “It means nothing.” “Well, it means zero.” “Right, you have no points. Love means nothing.”

Something I learned early is that most assholes don’t have comebacks.

“People are going to call you a lot of things in your life,” he said. “People always call people like us all kinds of things.” “Because we aren’t members here?” I asked as I put my things down. My father stopped in place. “Because we are winners. Do not grow a chip on your shoulder, Carolina,” he said. “Do not let what anyone says about you determine how you feel about yourself.”

“If I say your hair is purple, does that mean it’s purple?” he asked. “No, it’s brown.” “Does it mean you have to prove to me it’s brown?” I shook my head. “No, you can see it is.” “You are going to be one of the greatest tennis players in the world someday, cariño. That is as true as your brown hair. You don’t need to show them. You just need to be.”

we don’t cry when we lose, but we also don’t gloat when we win.”

“You’re not playing your opponent, you understand that, yes?” I stared at him, unsure. But I needed him to believe that I understood everything I was supposed to be—it seemed like an unbearable betrayal of our mission for me to be confused about any of it.

Maybe she lived free from all this pressure, this sense that she lived or died by how good she was at something. Was she burdened by the need to win everything she did? Or did she live for nothing?

“Because you are not yet who you will one day be.” I looked up at him, my guarded heart opening ever so slightly. “Every match you play, you are one match closer to becoming the greatest tennis player the world has ever seen. You were not born that person. You were born to become that person. And that is why you must best yourself every time you get on the court. Not so that you beat the other person—” “But so that I become more myself,” I finished.

No matter how good I was on the court, I was never good enough for the public. It wasn’t enough to play nearly perfect tennis. I had to do that and also be charming. And that charm had to appear effortless. I couldn’t seem to be trying to get them to like me. I could not let anyone ever suspect that I might want their approval. I saw the way they wrote about a player like Tanya McLeod, the way they had contempt for her for trying so hard to be cute. I had contempt for it too. But c’mon. That’s an awfully small needle to thread. And the eye of that needle just got smaller and smaller the more successful I became. It was okay to win as long as I acted surprised when I did and attributed it to luck. I should never let on how much I wanted to win or, worse, that I believed I deserved to win. And I should never, under any circumstances, admit that I did not believe all of my opponents were just as worthy as I was.

The bulk of the commentators … they wanted a woman whose eyes would tear up with gratitude, as if she owed them her victory, as if she owed them everything she had.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is?” I shouted. It felt shocking to me, to hear my own voice that loud. “To give everything you have to something and still not be able to grasp it! To fail to reach the top day after day and be expected to do it with a smile on your face? Maybe I’m not allowed to make a scene on the court, but I will make a scene here, Dad. It is the very least you can give me. Just for once in my life, let me scream about something!”

“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.

I felt a million things. But I felt one thing the strongest: Whatever soft parts of my heart I had tentatively exposed to Brandon, it had been a mistake. I would never again be that type of fool.

“Fuck ’em,” he says. “You go win every goddamn match and you show them that you don’t care what they think, you are not going anywhere.”

“Next time I mop the court with someone, I’ll remind myself to pretend I’m ‘shocked that it went my way’ and that it ‘could have been anyone’s game,’”

I look at my dad. “This is kind of funny, right?” I ask him. “I’m thirty-seven years old, and still no one wants to play with me.”

“My ankle is shot. My wrist never really fully recovered from my surgery two years ago. My back is killing me. I’m the oldest guy on the tour. But I still have some fire. And I know you do too.

I know your game, Soto. I know you’re the best goddamn player tennis has. I don’t care how long you’ve been off the court. If I can hit a few balls off you—if I can learn from you—I want to.”

People act like you can never forget your own name, but if you’re not paying attention, you can veer so incredibly far away from everything you know about yourself to the point where you stop recognizing what they call you.

One of the great injustices of this rigged world we live in is that women are considered to be depleting with age and men are somehow deepening.

“Brand-new hearts too. They haven’t been shattered yet, haven’t taken a beating over and over. New hearts bounce back faster.”

“You know what my heart is—no, my soul? It’s like an old mattress that’s been bounced on so many times that now, if you put your hand on it, it leaves a permanent imprint. That’s what my soul is now. Just a big old mattress showing every dent.”

This is but the natural consequence of putting athletes on the front of a Wheaties box all those years ago. When they retire, they cannot stand to be like the rest of us, seeing our own faces only in family photos and mirrors. They yearn for yet another billboard.

Some men’s childhoods are permitted to last forever, but women are so often reminded that there is work to be done.

One cannot deny the toll age takes on an athlete’s body, no matter how unjust. She will be a shadow of the dominant Battle Axe we knew in the eighties. But that is far from the point. It is her right to have fun, to keep playing. To not help with dinner. And I, for one, am glad she’s exercising it.

It is obvious to me now that there is an element of Bowe’s game that I haven’t accounted for. When the energy of the crowd is there for him, when eyes are on him, he rises to it.

you can either beat the other players out there or you can’t. This is when you will find out. But I have never known you to be afraid of the truth.” I take a deep breath. The truth was always in my favor before.

I wonder how many—if any—of them have tickets to the tournament. If any of them will be in the stands watching me try to make something of all this. How many of them are calling me “the Battle Axe” but meaning “the Bitch.”

“When you’re out there—I mean, I’m not in your head so maybe I’m wrong—but with each mistake you make, it looks like you’re getting angrier and angrier. You’ve got so much on the line. If I can get you off-balance early, I can upset you for the rest of the match.”

“The difference is that I’ve made peace with my limitations and you haven’t. I can feel it. I can feel the struggle. I can see it on your face. And because of that, you’re easy to manipulate. If I can mess with your head, if I can get you mad at yourself for not being the Carrie Soto you think you should be—I will beat you every time,” he says. “And that means Nicki will slaughter you.”

Everyone playing you knows you’re old. They know your back gives you trouble. The first thing they’re gonna do is hit it wide every time. You have to conserve energy, and I get that. But if you actually want to win something, you have to be willing to die to get to the ball, Huntley. And you’re not willing to do that. So you’re not gonna win any match that matters.”

This moment—my father and me here in the hall, waiting to go out—feels just like it used to. I’m back at war, after years of not knowing how to live during peacetime. This is the only place where I make sense to myself.

“She can trash-talk however she wants, but let me say this: I’m grateful for every single woman who stood here before me. You don’t see me going around asking who the Original 9 are, do you? No, because I know what I owe them. What about Althea Gibson and Alice Marble and Helen Wills? Suzanne Lenglen? Maria Bueno? I know whose shoulders I’m standing on. If Cortez doesn’t, that’s on her.”

And here’s the thing about arena sports—it’s not just about how good you are at the game. It’s about how good you are at feeling the crowd when they are with you and ignoring the crowd when they aren’t.

Back in the eighties, I was great when the crowd was with me. But I was also great when they weren’t. I did not need their love or their approval. I just needed the goddamn trophy.

My older self knows that you must stop—in the middle of the chaos—to take in the world around you. To breathe in deeply, smell the sunscreen and the rubber of the ball, let the breeze blow across your neck, feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. In this respect, I love the way the world has aged me.

When did I lose that? The delight of success? When did winning become something I needed in order to survive? Something I did not enjoy having, so much as panic without?

“I’m telling you, hija, the greatest match of your career is ahead of you.” It is such a kind thing for him to say—exactly the sort of thing a father like him would tell a daughter like me. Full of heart and love and belief, and maybe a little bit untrue.

I wonder how it feels to be able to love tennis without it threatening to forget you with every passing match.

It’s not about profit. It’s about the look on Gwen’s face if she has to tell me they’re officially pulling out. It’s walking onto the court at Wimbledon while the news of my being dropped is hitting the papers. It’s about sitting at a table in a restaurant and everyone around me knowing the result of my hubris. It is about being cut down to size, just as some people have long wanted me to be. I’d hate to give them the satisfaction.

Other women in tennis—blond women with big boobs and long legs—often get modeling contracts at age seventeen. They show up on the cover of men’s magazines within a year or so of hitting the court for the first time. But not thicker women, like me. Or dark-skinned women like Carla Perez or Suze Carter. Not women who are British Chinese, like Nicki, or downright scary in their intensity like her either. Not the women who aren’t skinny and white and smiling. And yet, no matter what type of woman you are, we all still have one thing in common: Once we are deemed too old, it doesn’t matter who we used to be.