Carrie Soto Is Back(31)

“Look, I’ve been in this part of my career for years now. Competing against people half my age, practically. Some of these women you’re going to face are twenty years younger than us. They have brand-new knees—fresh from the factory. Brand-new everything, not a stress fracture on them.”

“That is not helping—”

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

“You’re not—”

“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.”

“Were you always so good at self-pity?”

Bowe laughs. “Why do you think I drank so much?”

I turn from him and let a tennis ball roll away from me, just watching it drift farther and farther into the court.

I say, “Listen, I can’t get better unless you get better. I need to play somebody good, and I need it now. So quit it with the crying and try to play the game.”

Bowe looks away. “I don’t know. It might be better to get someone else. Somebody on the WTA.”

I sigh. “It’s not that simple.” I look at the net, rattling in the breeze, and then back at him. “Nobody on the WTA will play me.”

Bowe’s eyes go wide. “Are you serious?”

“Bowe, I’ve heard it enough times; I don’t need it from you too. Nobody likes me––I get it.”

Bowe catches my gaze. “I always liked you.”

I roll my eyes. “Being attracted to me and liking me are two different things.”

Bowe looks at me a moment longer. “Huh,” he says. “Wow.”

“What?”

“I…you’re right.”

“You didn’t already know that?” I shake my head. “You’re almost forty. How emotionally stunted can you be?”

Bowe looks at me and frowns. But he has the grace to refrain from pointing out that I am throwing stones from my glass house.

“Why are you coming back?” Bowe says. “Why put yourself through this?”

I shrug. “I just can’t…” I tell him. “I just can’t let her have it.”

Bowe nods.

“Why are you doing it?” I ask. “Why not quit?”

“I don’t know,” Bowe says, sighing. “Maybe I should.”

“But you haven’t. So it must be for some reason.”

“I suppose it must,” he says. He stands up and wipes the dirt off himself. He reaches his hand out to pull me up, but I stand up on my own.

“Let’s go again,” he says. “Two out of three. I’m not gonna win any tournaments playing how I played this morning. And quite frankly, neither are you.”

“You sure you’re ready to play me again?” I ask him as I walk toward the baseline. “Can you suffer the indignity of losing to a woman twice in one day?”

“I told you, Carrie,” Bowe says. “You’re not as charming as you think you are.”

“Okay,” I say, shrugging. “But I don’t think I’m very charming at all.”





Just Because Soto Can Doesn’t Mean She Should


    By John Fowler


    Op-Ed, Sports Section


    California Post


Much has been made of Carrie Soto’s comeback. In her interview with SportsPages last week, Carrie seems to think she has a great chance of winning in Melbourne at the top of next year. “A lot of people think I’m crazy. But I’ve done exceptional things in my career. Remember that.” As if she would ever let us forget.

Soto is just one more in a string of desperate celebrities who cannot live without a spotlight. One would hope by now she would have moved on to starting a family or running her foundation. But no. She’s back on the court.

Over the course of my lifetime, I have watched many of the sports I love become commodified into celebrity-industrial-complex machines, churning out champions who turn out to be no role models at all. Tonya Harding and Pete Rose come to mind. And I write this as the nation waits with bated breath to find out what kind of man O. J. Simpson truly is.

It seems the best we can hope for from our legends is that they merely become self-obsessed image-conscious shills for soft drinks, sneakers, and watches.

And who is surprised? 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.

Soon, Carrie Soto is sure to show us just exactly what five years of retirement does to a tennis player’s body. But I’m more interested in what those five years have done to her brain.

It appears she is today even worse than she was back then: even more self-absorbed and wickedly ambitious.

If it makes for a good show, then who am I to stand in the way of the spectacle? But I can tell you this: When the players set this kind of example in a gentleman’s sport, no one wins.