As her fifteen-month suspension lifts, Maria Sharapova sits down with Jonathan Van Meter to discuss what happened and what comes next.
I would not have taken Maria Sharapova for a tea person. But here we are, standing in her kitchen parsing the finer points of grated ginger and stainless-steel infusers. I don’t even drink tea, but we both have rotten colds, so Sharapova has conjured the most delicious hot beverage I’ve ever tasted in a teapot made entirely of glass. The elixir is electric greenish-yellow—the color of a tennis ball—and one of the only splashes of color in the pristine white-and-gray Minimalist house that Sharapova spent three years building in Manhattan Beach, California.
You would never know a tennis player lives here. “Nowhere will you find a clue,” she says, laughing. But you will find other clues—about its occupant’s interest in modern art, architecture, and good design. There are large paintings by Joe Goode and Chris Gwaltney; a floor lamp topped with a white-feather shade that, when lit, looks like a giant peony; and a framed black-and-white photograph of a very young Marilyn Monroe. A glass wall runs the length of the kitchen and living room, with sliding doors opening to a pool that laps right up against the side of the house. “This was as close as they could get it,” she says.
Sharapova trains at the Manhattan Country Club, about ten minutes from here, and we were supposed to go there yesterday—a Monday, her day off—to hit some tennis balls and have a boozy lunch (her idea) but . . . well, tea instead. I must admit, I was surprised when she suggested the plan. Playing one’s sport and drinking are not the sort of things world-class athletes do with journalists, but Sharapova, who failed a drug test in January 2016 and was banned from competitive tennis for fifteen months (more on that in a minute), has had some time on her hands. “This past year, my intake of alcohol was so much more than ever in my life,” she says. “But it was because I actually had a social life!”
When she emailed a couple days earlier, apologizing profusely for having to postpone (she is not a canceler, this Maria Sharapova), I told her I was doing just fine, watching the Australian Open and eating French fries in my hotel room. She wrote back: “French fries and the Four Seasons, yes please! Being sick and watching tennis, not so much.” It was a reminder that Sharapova has a peculiar relationship to the sport she has been at or near the top of since winning Wimbledon at seventeen—and that made her the highest-paid female athlete in the world for eleven years in a row.
Curled up on an enormous modern gray sofa wearing no makeup, hair pulled back in a loose knot, Sharapova comes across not as the ferociously competitive Russian tennis player that she is but more as a California girl who does a lot of yoga. Tall and pretty, she really knows her way around a big sweater, a pair of leggings, and simple jewelry. And if she seems to inhabit the world in a different way than most players, it is probably because tennis is not her religion. “I think I’d go crazy if I was only a tennis player,” she says, a teacup balanced on her knee. “Seriously.”
A writer once described Sharapova as being both haughty and self-deprecating, but I would put quotes around “haughty,” as that part of her feels like an ironic performance: She’s mostly kidding when she drops a droll one-liner during her press conferences—like the time she packed a room with reporters last March to announce that she had failed that drug test. “I know many of you thought that I would be retiring today,” she said and then paused for effect. “If I was ever going to announce my retirement, it would probably not be in a downtown Los Angeles hotel with this fairly ugly carpet.”
On that afternoon last March, Sharapova calmly laid out the facts: At the Australian Open in January 2016 she tested positive for a drug called meldonium. Manufactured in Latvia, it is not approved by the FDA but is in common use in Russia and Eastern Europe to treat heart conditions by increasing blood flow. Sharapova, who had been taking the over-the-counter drug for ten years, explained that her doctor recommended it because she had a magnesium deficiency and irregular EKGs, in addition to a history of diabetes in her family. Turns out, scores of Eastern European and Russian athletes were also taking the drug on the chance that it might improve recovery and endurance, a benefit of which experts say there’s scant evidence. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) had been monitoring the drug for several months in 2015 and then banned it, effective January 1, 2016, because of “evidence of its use by athletes with the intention of enhancing performance.” Maria did not get the memo (she says she failed to open an email link from the International Tennis Federation) and was suspended from the sport by the ITF for two years. After an appeal, the suspension was reduced to fifteen months, ending April 25, just in time for her to play a warm-up tournament in Stuttgart, Germany, and then the French Open, which starts on May 22.
Finding herself at the center of the first high-profile doping scandal in tennis, Sharapova took responsibility and admitted that she used the drug. But trying to get out ahead of the scandal seemed to work against her; the condemnation was swift, opprobrium raining down on her via Twitter, while the sports press rushed pieces online with headlines like “The tennis world turns their back on Sharapova.” Current and former players called for her head, some suggesting that she should be banned for life. Jennifer Capriati said she should be stripped of her 35 titles. Other attacks were startlingly personal. Dominika Cibulková said in an interview, “She’s a totally unlikable person, arrogant, conceited, and cold.” Andy Murray’s former coach Brad Gilbert, among others, was galled by the stupidity: “Still stunned that nobody on Shazza team checked new list from WADA, players are responsible but this is big-time oversight on team as well.” Martina Navratilova may have been the only one in the tennis world who gave her the benefit of the doubt: “Seems 2 me to be an honest mistake.” But it was Chris Evert, on ESPN, who speculated as to why Sharapova had become both a punching bag and pariah overnight, explaining that she has no friends on the tour: She “has always isolated herself from the rest of the tennis world . . . so it’s hard.”
Sharapova admits that she doesn’t know a lot of players personally. “I spend as little time in the locker room as I can get away with,” she says, “because I’ve set up another life. I have family, I have friends. And the less time I spend there, the more energy I have for them. I’m respected for what I do on the court, and that’s much more meaningful to me than someone saying that I’m a nice girl in a locker room.” It’s the kind of quote that reminds you why Sharapova, who likes to “describe things as they are,” is never going to win Miss Congeniality.
“She’s a very private person—as private as you can get in the position she’s in,” says one of her best friends, Sophie Goldschmidt, a British woman twelve years her senior who works in sports marketing. They met when Sharapova was fourteen and Goldschmidt was with the Women’s Tennis Association. “People don’t often get to see the full Maria: a complex, worldly, well-rounded person who is fun and loyal and has a lot to say.”
I would not normally report whom I failed to get on the phone while working on a story, but in this case, it seems worth highlighting that Chris Evert, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Mary Carillo, and Pam Shriver all declined to talk to me about Sharapova. Paul Annacone, who has coached both Pete Sampras and Roger Federer, was, on the other hand, happy to chat. “Maria does keep to herself, as do a lot of other tennis players,” he says, bringing up the fact that Sampras was famously standoffish. “She’s merely trying to do as well as she can within the structure that makes her work best.” It’s a bit of a double standard: No one begrudged Sampras the structure that made him work best. And I’m fairly certain no one ever described him as “cold.”
Let’s face it: As doping scandals go, Maria’s is minor league. She’s no Barry Bonds. Whether or not you choose to believe Sharapova about why she was taking the drug—one that she knew by one of its many trade names, Mildronate—it was perfectly aboveboard to use it until it was banned. Indeed, the whole thing sort of boils down to a missed message. The ITF sent out emails that included a link to the updated list of banned substances, which both Maria and her longtime agent, Max Eisenbud, admit they failed to read thoroughly. “I had been taking it for ten years,” she says, “and for about seven of those years I had gotten a written certificate from a WADA-accredited lab that all the substances I was taking were totally fine for me to take. I just became completely comfortable that they were fine. That’s the mistake I made: being too comfortable.”
For his part, Annacone feels Sharapova was treated fairly. “A rule was broken. I don’t know exactly the chronology of events in her personal situation, but I do know a bit about the rule, and it seems like the biggest mistake was that she didn’t put this substance on her report. It wasn’t tracked. You’re supposed to let people know what you’re taking.” (For the record, the Court of Arbitration for Sport [CAS] ruled that Sharapova did not hide her intake of meldonium and that the ITF and WADA had inadequately notified athletes of the change.)
Looking back now, Sharapova says the real punishment “was the trial process,” those agonizing months of defending herself in court. That is all behind her now, but I suspect she will have to endure a more insidious penance. When I ask her if she thinks a cloud of suspicion might linger around her for the rest of her tennis career, she is at first defensive. “I think if I was trying to hide something, I don’t think I would come out to the world and say I was taking a drug for ten years. If I was really trying to take the easy way out, that’s not a very smart thing to do.” She stops herself and then lets out a heavy sigh of weary resignation. “But the answer to your question is, absolutely.”
A week after our talk in California, Sharapova calls me late one night. She has just gotten back from a trip to Cologne and Moscow, where she had attended to the business of Sugarpova, her candy company. Sugarpova has suddenly taken off, partly because she’s been much more hands-on this year—one of the many silver linings to the dark storm cloud that was 2016. “The tennis circuit defines your schedule,” she says. “And for a control freak, it felt so liberating to take things into my own hands.”
She took the time to travel to places she’d never been, like Barcelona and Croatia. “I got to explore London,” she says. “I knew Wimbledon. I didn’t know London.” A serial monogamist, she also dated more than one guy at the same time. “I didn’t even know what the hell that was!” she says, laughing. “I was like, This is really new! And I kind of like it!” From books like The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, she’s turned to memoirs written by women, like Love Warrior, by Glennon Doyle Melton, and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle. “Both very strong, tough, emotional books,” she says. She squeezed in summer courses on strategic brand management and leadership at Harvard Business School, and followed those up with a few short, intense internships at the NBA, a London ad agency, and Nike. “I love being in motion,” she says. “I like to work.” Oh, and she somehow found time to write her own memoir (with Rich Cohen); it comes out in September, just after the U.S. Open.
Mostly because of her voice, which is entirely free of an accent, it is easy to forget that Sharapova is Russian, an only child born in Siberia who found herself living in sunny Florida at the age of seven, hitting tennis balls all day long. I had been curious about something when we were in California, and here was my chance to ask. Does the subject of Russia’s interference in our presidential election ever come up with her parents, Yuri and Yelena, over dinner? “Not at all; we never discuss politics,” she says. “I carry such a big part of my country in my soul. When I host people at home, I think of my grandmother’s afternoon tea. I remember being around books—Tolstoy, Pushkin, my mother reciting poetry. That’s the piece of Russia that I have in me.”
The other piece of Russia she clearly has in her is the athletic drive. When people talk about what makes Sharapova such a formidable competitor, they always point first to her “mental toughness,” by which they mean that she plays every point as if it were match point. When I ask Sharapova if it was this quality that helped her get through her year in the barrel, she says, “There’s no doubt that that resiliency that I built from scratch, it helps you, but it doesn’t mean you’re not vulnerable.”
Back in L.A., we talked about her comeback. She did not want to dwell on it too much, saying in her inimitable way, “Why do I need to sit in January and think about April? I’ve got this week to get through; I’ve got shit on my agenda!” Is she at all apprehensive about how the fans will react to her return? “I received really nice receptions when I walked out to play my exhibition matches in Las Vegas and Puerto Rico,” she says. Indeed, when she played Monica Puig in December, she was showered with love from the 12,000 people in the stadium in San Juan. Her sponsors have taken notice. All of them—including Nike, Head, Porsche, Evian, NetJets—suspended her contracts after that press conference in March. Today, all but one, TAG Heuer, are back on board. The sport of tennis is thrilled to have her coming back, and why wouldn’t it be? It desperately needs stars, and Sharapova is a one-woman ratings bonanza. As commentator Brad Gilbert says, “Look, she was incredibly popular with tennis fans all over the world before this happened, and people like her who know how to win have a way of figuring things out and making things . . . better.”
It is not hard to imagine that one of the things motivating Sharapova is the chance, at long last, to again beat Serena Williams, who just won her twenty-third Grand Slam title in Australia and whom Sharapova has lost to eighteen times in a row. When I ask Sharapova about Williams, she is cautious. “We’re not celebrated as two women with completely different backgrounds who have created incredible opportunities for ourselves and our families. Instead we are ranked against each other for our differences, our game, our earnings. I think the concept of lists and the amount that players make is bollocks.” Her description of Serena could just as easily be about herself. “It would be so easy when you’ve gone through injuries and setbacks to just let it all go. But to have that desire still?” Sharapova says. “The amount of respect that I have for her as an athlete is enormous.”
The days when Sharapova and Williams were sniping at each other in the press over the other’s choices in men (they both dated Grigor Dimitrov) are over—and thank God, as that was beneath them. As everyone now knows, Williams just got engaged to Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, but Sharapova, though clearly dating, has been pretty much single since she and Dimitrov broke up. It did not end well. But one night a couple of months ago she ran into him in New York City. They hadn’t seen each other since the summer of 2015. “We closed down a restaurant after talking for five hours,” she says. “He was such an important part of my life, and he’s a very delicate, complicated person. It was so nice to just be normal human beings.”
We get to talking about the idea of finding a soul mate. “Is it possible?” she says. “Maybe I’m just too difficult of a human being. I really want to have children. But I’m very focused on my job, and honestly, that’s a big reason why a lot of my relationships have not worked for me. I can’t live with the feeling that I’ve sacrificed one thing for the other. I hate the word balance. What is balance? Because if it’s fifty-fifty, that means you’re only giving 50 percent to both things.”
Perhaps the sweetest surprise of her difficult year has been finding out that people are rooting for her. “Ever since all this happened, I’ve had so many strangers actually come up to me. Like chefs coming out of the kitchen, or pilots come out of the cockpit to say something. It is so heartening. I’ve had tunnel vision about my career, and I don’t think I ever realized the effect I’ve had on people. That has blown my mind.”
One night last September, just as the U.S. Open was winding down, Sharapova and her father boarded a flight to New York City. “And we weren’t flying to play the U.S. Open,” she says. “We were flying to go into court.” It was her final hearing in front of the CAS. “Someone came up to me at the airport,” she says, “and then someone came up to me on the plane, and then a car service picks us up and the driver looks at me in the mirror and says, ‘Hey! Can you let me know when you’re coming back? I can’t handle watching the U.S. Open and you’re not in it!’ And my dad’s like, ‘Thanks, sir!’ He turned to me and just quietly gave me a thumbs-up.”
With three of the four Grand Slams (the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open) in May, July, and August, Sharapova’s return from exile will be one of the most highly anticipated comebacks in modern tennis—and the biggest story in the game this summer. “I have expectations of myself because I know what I’m capable of. Will I have those standards? Of course. Will I have to be patient?” She rolls her eyes. “It’s not my greatest strength.”
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