Page 6 of Carrie Soto Is Back

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 melessinstead 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.

When school let out, I used to watch all the other students greet their mothers at pickup. My classmates told their moms about their days, bristled at the squeezes their moms gave them by the car, wiped their mothers’ kisses off their cheeks.

I could have watched them for hours. What else did they do with their moms after school? Did they go out for ice cream? Did they go shopping together for those pretty pencil cases some of them had? Where were they all getting those hair bows?

As they drove away, I would dutifully begin my walk two blocks over, to meet my father on the public tennis courts.

I grew up on the court. The public courts after school, the country club courts during the summers and on weekends. I grew up in tennis skirts and ponytails. I grew up sitting in the shade by the sidelines, waiting while my father finished a lesson.

He loomed over the net. His serves were always fluid, his groundstrokes smooth. His opponent, or whomever he was teaching, always looked so chaotic in comparison. My father was unfailingly in control of the court.

In hindsight, I can see that he must have been tense and lonely most days of my young life. He was a widowed single father in a country that was not his home, with no one else to rely on. It seems obvious to me now that my dad was likely stretched so tight he could nearly have snapped.

But if his days were hard, his nights restless, he grew very good at hiding it from me. The time I got to spend with him felt like a gift that other kids didn’t get. Unlike them, my time hadpurpose;my father and I were working toward something ofmeaning.Iwas going to be the best.

Every day after school, when my father was finally done with his paid lessons, he would turn and look at me. “Vamos,” he would say. “Los fundamentos.” At which point, I would pick up my racket and join him at the baseline.

“Game, set, match: Why do we say this?” my father would ask me.

“Because each time you play, it is a game. You must win the most games to win the set. And then you must win the most sets to win the match,” I’d recite.

“In a game, the first point is…”

“Fifteen. Then 30. Then 40. Then you win. But you have to win by two.”

“When the score is 40–all, what do we call that?”

“Deuce. And if you’re at deuce and win a point, that brings you to either advantage-in or advantage-out, depending on whether you’re serving or not.”

“So how do you win?”

“If you are serving at ad-in, you have to win the next point to win the game. You have to win six games to win the set, but, again, you have to win by two. You can’t just win a set 6–5.”

“And a match?”

“Women play three sets, men often play five.”

“And love? What does it mean?”

“It means nothing.”

“Well, it means zero.”

“Right, you have no points. Love means nothing.”

Having gotten all the answers right, I would get a pat on the shoulder. And then we would practice.

There are many coaches out there who innovate, but that was never my father’s style. He believed in the beauty and simplicity of doing something the way it has always been done but better than anyone else has ever done it. “If I had been as committed to proper form as you will be,hijita,” he would say, “I would still be playing professional tennis.” That was one of the only times he told me something that I suspected wasn’t true. I knew even then that not many people ever played tennis professionally past age thirty.

“Bueno, papá,” I would say as we began our drills.

My entire childhood was drills. Drill after drill after drill. Serves, groundstrokes, footwork, volleys. Serves, groundstrokes, footwork,volleys. Again and again. All summer long, after school, every weekend. My dad and I. Always together. Our little team of two. Proud coach and star student.

I loved that each element of the game had awrongway and arightway to execute it. There was always something concrete to strive for.

“De nuevo,” my dad would say, as I tried for the fiftieth time that day to perfect my flat serve. “I want both arms coming up at the same speed at the same time.”

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