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 Always inclined to be laconic, she became more and more withdrawn.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 cafés like jetsam tossed up by high tide.
The Cavalieri Hilton, official hotel of the Italian Open, stood atop Monte Mario swathed in mist. In the lobby, fidgety players checked the practice court schedule and the availability of courtesy cars. At the reception desk, the concierge was keeping bouquets of flowers for Monica Seles and Martina Navratilova. Sabatini had already checked in.
From my room I dialed Carlos Kirmayr, as I had been instructed to do by Dick Dell. There was no answer. When I phoned the main desk to leave a message, the operator put me on hold, and I got my first inkling that much as the hotel might resemble a standard Stateside Hilton, it had its share of local eccentricities. Instead of Muzak, I heard Joe Cocker wailing “You Can Leave Your Hat On.”
For the rest of the day I phoned Carlos, listened to more choruses from Joe Cocker, and kept my hat on as the realization dawned that I was wasting my precious forty-eight hours. I dialed Gabriela’s room, but there was no answer there either.
That evening I want down to the lobby, and while double-checking whether my messages had been delivered, I spotted Sabatini emerging from and elevator. The Women’s Tennis Association media guide lists her as five feet eight and a hundred thirty pounds, but she looked much larger in a pair of tight jeans and a dark leather jacket with wide shoulders that called to mind Joan Crawford in football pads. Her face was fine-boned and chisel-featured, with glossy lips and teeth that shone unnaturally bright against her tan.
When I introduced myself, she smiled and inclined her head as if she couldn’t decide whether I was someone she knew or just another giddy fan.
“Vogue magazine. The profile,” I repeated. “We need to spend some time together.”
She nodded dreamily, said, “Oh, yes,” but drifted away, still smiling. Carlos Kirmayr took her place. He was smiling, too. A short, compact fellow with a freckled complexion and sun-streaked hair, he wore a blue denim jacket from the Hard Rock Café in Tokyo. The lobe of his left ear was pierced, but there was no earring. He said he and Gaby had practiced today at an indoor facility. The trip from Buenos Aires had taken eighteen hours, door to door, and a good workout was, in his opinion, the best way to recover from jet lag. This was as close as he came to explaining why he hadn’t responded to my messages.
We strolled over to where Gaby waited with her parents. Mr. Sabatini was a seigniorial gent with white hair, a white mustache, and a firm policy of saying nothing to the press. Mrs. Sabatini was more extroverted, but there was little opportunity to speak to her before Carlos announced that they were off for a family dinner. Gaby and he would see me tomorrow at the practice courts. Panicky at the thought of losing them, I suggested we have breakfast together. He said no, they’d meet at noon.
Next morning when I came downstairs at ten-thirty, Kirmayr and Sabatini were headed toward the door carrying equipment bags. I hurried over to ask whether there had been a change of plans.
“Yeah,”
