Once satisfied that neither Vogue nor I had a hidden agenda, Dell explained that top-flight players were reluctant to talk to reporters and risk breaking their concentration during a tournament. But he had persuaded Gaby to make herself available for two days preceding the Italian Open. That proved, he said, how much the feature in Vogue mattered to her. What’s more, it demonstrated her expansiveness, her willingness to experiment on court and off. With the encouragement of her new coach, Carlos Kirmayr, she had become a new woman.
And speaking of new women, he passed along a tip about a new product. Gabriela’s signature line of perfumes, already a success in Europe, would be released in the States at the time of the U.S. Open. As he proceeded to suggest questions I should ask Sabatini, I interrupted to remind him of the reality of the situation. Vogue didn’t like the photographs and was lukewarm about the project. If we hoped to turn things around, Gaby, Carlos, and I had to hit the ground running in Rome. Since she refused to be interviewed during the tournament, I couldn’t waste time that weekend chasing her.
Dell assured me everything had been arranged.
***
The overnight flight to Rome provided an opportunity to review press clips about Gabriela Sabatini. As described by sportswriters, she had started off as another in an endless line of precocious teenage sensations, the heirs apparent to Chris Evert. Like so many before her, she came from a family of modest athletic accomplishment—her father had been a first-division basketball player in Argentina, her older brother a promising junior tennis player—and they had introduced her to the game as a child and encouraged her to excel.
She was said to be especially close to her father, Osvaldo, who had resigned as a General Motors executive and assumed a role early on as her manager and constant companion on the circuit. Her mother, Beatriz, and brother, Osvaldo junior, often came along, too.
Gaby did well in the beginning. At fourteen, she was the youngest player ever to win a match at the U.S. Open. By the time she was fifteen, she was the youngest semifinalist at the French Open. Fame and money flowed as smoothly as her passing shots. Long-legged and lovely, she had a face framed by tresses as iridescent as a raven’s wing; she possessed a movie star’s glamour, a ballerina’s grace, and an Olympic athlete’s grandeur. (In 1988 she was a silver medalist in Seoul.) Young boys adored her, older men sent mash notes, advertisers offered millions. She endorsed Sergio Tacchini tennis wear, Prince racquets, Longine watches, Fuji film, Seat automobiles, and Avis rental cars. Gleaming with perspiration, she inspired poet Clive James to pen an adulatory verse entitled “Bring Me the Sweat of Gabriela Sabatini.”
Her rocket-burst arrival at the pinnacle of the sport seemed tantalizingly close, but when she failed to grasp the last rung of the ladder and win a Grand Slam event, flaws and fissures began to appear in her enameled image. She lost to Steffi Graf eleven times in a row. Monica Seles leaped ahead of her. Then thirteen-year-old Jennifer Capriati stole the hearts of spectators and sponsors. Wedded to a fatiguing baseline style, yet too weak to last three sets against the top women, Sabatini shucked one coach, a man whom her father resented, and hired another, a former Spanish Davis Cup competitor, Angel Gimenez, who put her through a punishing physical fitness program that featured lots of weight lifting. Soon she was much stronger—and much heavier and slower. Broad-shouldered and muscle-bound, she swaggered around the court looking, in the words of Teddy Tinling, like John Wayne—but a John Wayne who couldn’t shoot straight and couldn’t kill off the enemy.
Overworked by her coach and overprotected by her parents, Sabatini started to lose matches she should have won and to look moody and forlorn in the process. Always inclined to be laconic, she became more and more withdrawn. She had so few friends on the tour, she considered quitting and living on the millions she had won. But with almost no interests outside tennis, she had little alternative except to thud along in the same groove, playing a self-defeating style which Dick Dell described as “robotized.”
In some quarters there was suspicion that Gabriela’s one-dimensional game mirrored her mind. Having dropped out of junior high at thirteen, she had never had a tutor or taken lessons in anything more complicated than hitting backhands. When she was slow to learn English, her isolation increased, and so did the gossip about her brainlessness. Dell himself remarked that if a new coach could make her smarter, she’d improve by 15 or 20 percent. A childhood friend told Sports Illustrated, “Gaby has tennis elbow in the personality.”
By the summer of 1990, Sabatini seemed fated to join that constellation of tennis dwarf stars who are no sooner visible than they burn out, leaving behind a fading remnant of their brilliance. The sad story sank to its nadir at Wimbledon, when an ex-boyfriend sold a scurrilous article to a London tabloid, recounting his affair with Gaby and describing her as waddling like “a fat duck.”
Some cynics claimed the story was wildly inaccurate. Drawing on no greater evidence than their own imaginations, they claimed Gabriela must be gay. Others maintained that the right man could put a smile on her face.
Whether they believed she needed a man or a woman, people assumed that the answer to Sabatini’s problems lay outside herself. Yet in the end it was her own decision to change coaches. Dropping Angel Gimenez—“It was like going from living every day with him, to nothing. Like a divorce,” she told Tennis magazine—she hooked up with Carlos Kirmayr, a forty-year-old Brazilian so mellow and laid-back, he made a beach full of Californians look uptight.
Once a competitor on the men’s tour, Kirmayr had won more with his wits than with his limited physical gifts. He knew the game well, had trained a couple of world-class players, and ran seven tennis schools. Though this might make him sound like a workaholic, Carlos was a carefree spirit in a sport remarkable for its murderous tunnel vision. He never took himself too seriously. In his spare time he had performed with a rock group called the Fleabags.
To shore up Gaby’s shattered confidence, Carlos told her to stop planting herself at the baseline, stop turning every point into a battle of attrition. He urged her to attack, take risks and rush the net. She was tall, had great range and soft hands—the perfect combination for a serve and volleyer.
Halting her heavy metal workouts in the gym, Kirmayr preached speed and quickness. As he ran her through a regimen of jumps, lateral lunges, and sprints, Sabatini lost weight and gained agility. Her movement on court became more explosive, and so did her shots.
At the same time, she was conferring with Dr. James Loehr, a sports psychologist who encouraged her to show her emotions during matches and express them in writing afterward. As Loehr saw it, her problem wasn’t simply to raise her level of play, but rather to recapture the childlike capacity to enjoy playing, to approach tennis as fun instead of as tedious labor, to view the tour as an opportunity, not a prison. He compiled an inspirational videotape of Gabriela belting winning shots to the background accompaniment of her favorite pop tune, the theme from Top Gun.
Along with Dick Dell, Carlos pushed Gaby to pursue outside interests. As Dell put it, “Tennis may be totally satisfying when you’re winning, but when you lose, you have to have something else to fall back on.” Finally Carlos advised her to stop playing doubles with Steffi Graf, who dominated Sabatini by sheer force of personality.
When Gabriela went on to win the U.S. Open, beating Graf for the title, the topic of every article switched from anxious tut-tutting about her arrested development to raves about her comeback. The girl who had been considered washed up, a sad, inhibited, uneducated, and easily manipulated adolescent, was suddenly presented as a woman in touch with her feelings, in charge of her life, and on the way to bigger and better things.
***
As we circled for our descent into Rome, bumping down through a canopy of clouds, rain rattled against the plane’s fuselage and splashed over the runway. The pilot said it was fifty degrees.
The taxi ride into town ran past familiar landmarks, but none looked quite right. On this cold, dreary May morning, Rome had the haunted appearance of a house abandoned. Famous piazzas were deserted, and tables and chairs were stacked haphazardly at outdoor