The Best American Sports Writing 2019

by Charles P. Pierce

  The rectangular green jewel box of Centre Court is never far from her mind. The first thing she asks Radek Kebrle, the surgeon who operated on her hand, when he visits her bedside the day after her four-hour surgery, is: Pane Doktore, pojedu na Wimbledon?

  Doctor, will I go to Wimbledon?

  “At the moment, I thought, ‘You are crazy,’” Kebrle says later, almost whispering the word. “Your injury is so difficult. We’re talking about if I will be able to brush my teeth and do all my things and use my hand, and you want to ask . . . of course, I understood the question. And I told her, ‘We’ll do everything to get you there.’”

  But Kebrle doesn’t sugarcoat it. Ten percent, he tells her: that is his estimate of her chances to come back at the elite level. Rehab will be slow and hard, and he will need her full concentration and cooperation.

  She waits until he leaves before she allows herself to cry. And then she grabs the slim lifeline he has cast in her direction and refuses to let go.

  * * *

  Kvitova seems to have emerged from nowhere, fully formed, when she is named WTA Newcomer of the Year in 2010. Mere months later, she upsets Maria Sharapova to win the 2011 Wimbledon championship as her childhood idol, Czech-born icon and fellow lefty Martina Navratilova, applauds from the stands.

  In fact, Kvitova’s early career is less observed than many. Western reporters wrestle with the consonants in her last name—pronounced KFIT-oh-VAH, three syllables, please, not Kah-VIH-toe-vah—and her unlikely, uncommonly quiet backstory.

  It takes more than three hours to get from Prague to Kvitova’s hometown of Fulnek (population 6,000) on the country’s perpetually congested highway system. A castle perches in the hills above a small commercial district that includes a household appliance company where her mother, Pavla, once worked in the purchasing department. Her father, Jiri, a retired teacher, spent his spare time hitting with his sons, Jiri and Libor, and their much younger sister on the town’s clay tennis courts.

  It’s easy to see how her father’s passion and her mother’s composure merged in Kvitova as her parents sit in the kitchen area of a new, two-story clubhouse completed last year, overlooking four clay tennis courts. Petra donated the money to build the clubhouse, and her junior trophies sit atop the cabinet that holds cups and saucers.

  Petra sprouts early and slender and gifted, but her parents don’t have the money or the inclination to send her away to hone her talent. School is the priority, and there are days when she has time to play for only an hour. By age 16, she stands out enough to be spotted by a scout from the regional tennis center in Prostejov, about an hour away.

  Jiri Kvita, a big-framed man with salt-and-pepper hair who shares his daughter’s penchant for self-deprecating humor, does most of the talking through an interpreter while his wife takes in the scene with her steady, brown eyes and adds an occasional detail.

  “It’s hard when your child leaves,” Jiri says. “It wasn’t until she was 16 that she went [to Prostejov] occasionally, and it wasn’t until she was 17 that she stayed.” They insist that she finish her last year of high school via independent study even as she begins to travel. Years later, at the most uncertain point of her post-attack recovery, she taps into an old habit and enrolls in a university course.

  Kvitova thrives in Prostejov, where many prominent Czech players have come of age. The complex includes a stadium with a retractable roof, multiple outdoor courts, a gym, dorms, and a restaurant. It is one of many arms of the Czech tennis industry presided over by Kvitova’s early patron and Czech business manager, Miroslav Cernosek, whose company also owns the Prague tournament.

  At age 21, after uncorking an ace to put away Sharapova at Wimbledon, Kvitova is still unaccustomed to the spotlight, especially when it includes a microphone. Her voice shakes as she speaks on court during the trophy ceremony. At the champions’ ball, pressed to say a few words, she tries to describe her thoughts on match point: “I have a chance now, and you never know if it will be more or no. Okay, you have to do it, and I did it.”

  Katie Spellman, then working in communications for the WTA, watches and listens. She has seen Kvitova interact with the Czech press and knows she loves to banter. Once she becomes Kvitova’s public relations manager in 2012, they work at bridging the language gap. Spellman gives Kvitova a copy of the children’s book The Secret Garden to broaden her vocabulary and shows her transcripts of postmatch interviews by Sharapova and Roger Federer.

  By the time Kvitova wins Wimbledon again in 2014, she is able to speak with far more fluidity and nuance. She now routinely laces answers with idiomatic English. “What is the key to playing well on clay?” she repeats in response to a question this spring. “Tough to say. If I know the key, I would already use it.”

  She wears her fame more easily now as she walks through public spaces, unmistakable at six feet tall, with stylishly tousled blond hair that she pulls back into a thick braid when she plays and a pale, blue-eyed gaze that can be almost disconcertingly direct.

  Her father asks the reporters who have come to Fulnek to let the world know that he and his wife are “not haughty, greater-than-thou types.” He is the one who cannot contain his tears when Petra wins Wimbledon for the first time, his face working with failed effort, while Pavla smiles serenely at her daughter.

  His face crumples briefly with a different emotion at the memory of the morning they learned Petra had been attacked. “Horrible,” he says hoarsely. “When we say, ‘Happy Birthday—I wish you a lot of luck and a lot of health,’ it’s no longer a cliché for us.”

  Her family’s small-town humility remains at Kvitova’s core. As the coffee break at the InterContinental winds down, she offers to pay (and is rebuffed), then won’t leave the table until the check is signed, not wanting to strand the interviewer by herself.

  Following the attack, Kvitova’s fellow WTA players—who voted her winner of the circuit’s sportsmanship award for grace on and off the court six out of the past seven years—fill Twitter with paeans and blow up her phone with supportive messages. When world number-one Simona Halep breaks through to win in June at Roland Garros after falling short in three previous major finals, she reveals that Kvitova had sent her private notes of encouragement: “She said it’s gonna come. I just have to keep working.”

  The goodwill that envelops Kvitova makes the events of 18 months ago even more unfathomable.

  * * *

  Alone in the backseat of a hired car on that December morning, facing a tedious, 145-mile ride to a specialized hospital north of Prague where Kebrle, one of the foremost hand surgeons in the country, is expecting her, Kvitova doesn’t dwell on “why me?” There is only “what now?”

  Her wounds have been disinfected and swaddled in a cooling wrap at a local hospital in Prostejov. She and her brother Jiri have gone back to the flat where she was attacked to gather a few personal items and the Christmas gifts she bought for her family. When they close the door, she is resolved never to return.

  Kvitova’s mind tunnels into a place where she is in control. She has obligations. She has already contacted Cernosek, whom she was supposed to join at a charity event that day. He arranges for the car she is in now and the security guard who will be posted by her room after the surgery. There are other people who need to know. She is a celebrity, and the news will leak fast. One-handed, she hits contacts on her phone, taps out texts, and records voice messages. A part of her is in shreds, but her mind is clear.

  She reaches Marijn Bal, her agent at IMG, at 4:59 a.m. ET and tells him, through tears, that she is not going to be able to play in the Australian Open next month. Bal thinks she is referring to a previously diagnosed stress fracture in her right foot. It’s okay, he says, let’s get healthy. No, she says, something just happened.

  She confers with Bal in Florida, Spellman in Toronto, and Czech tennis press officer Karel Tejkal in Prague. She tells them what she wants. They will post statements she helps shape, saying she is “shaken” but determined.
She wants to speak to the media as soon as she’s released so she can spend the holiday in peace with her family. Her fitness trainer, David Vydra, will meet her at the hospital, along with her good friend, doubles specialist Lucie Hradecka. She tells everyone else to stay home, that she will be fine.

  “I’ve seen Petra cope with nerves that would put anyone else in a dark room trembling in a corner,” Spellman says. “She was so nervous before the 2014 [Wimbledon] final with Genie Bouchard, and then she won in two sets, and everyone saw what she did with those nerves.

  “I guess when you’re a champion, and you’re able to cope with all those emotions on the court and stick to your processes—that’s a big part of what players are taught to do—she was able to apply that. She was the protagonist, and everyone else followed her lead.”

  Twenty minutes after Kvitova arrives, Kebrle surveys the damage in the operating room. The knife has done its worst on her left index finger, which is slashed to the bone and hanging loose at the last knuckle. Seven flexor tendons, which give the hand its prehensile grasping ability, are severed in her fingers and thumb, their ends separated like snapped rubber bands. The ulnar digital nerves of her thumb and index finger will have to be repaired. There is no guarantee that she will ever regain feeling there.

  Kebrle takes his time with the multiple incisions and uses suturing material that will dissolve. He inserts a pin in the finger that was nearly amputated. Because Kebrle treats other tennis players for various hand and wrist ailments, he is hyperaware of where they develop blisters and calluses and where scar tissue will be most problematic. He tries not to leave any more than he has to.

  He does not sleep well that night.

  “I knew who I am treating, I knew her needs, and I knew she is in a very big danger of not coming back,” says the shaggy-haired Kebrle, a 20-year veteran in his field with a kindly face and a frank manner. “I said I was afraid of my own ass because at the end if she does not come back, everybody will connect me: I was the one who finished the career of Petra Kvitova.

  “The trouble with this injury is you have to treat it, and then you have to mobilize it from day two, day three. You have to try to move the tendon, but you cannot pull on it, so it doesn’t rupture. And the wound—it wants to have rest for healing, but you must mobilize it. So it’s a kind of slalom in between.”

  On the second day after her surgery, Kvitova places her right fingertips on her left fingers and gently, incrementally, begins to press.

  * * *

  The physical aspect of rehabilitation comes easily to Kvitova, even when it’s painful. She amasses a collection of splints, some to extend her damaged fingers, others to help them bend. She has a ravenous desire to hold a racket again, even if she can’t fully feel it, even though she will have to start out by hitting foam balls, like a kid in a beginner’s class.

  Intermittent flashbacks and anxiety are more problematic. She works with a mental coach who urges her to channel her mind toward the small accomplishments of each day and week, to steer her mind’s eye toward cheerful images of her nieces and nephew.

  But there are some situations she has to confront by herself. Three weeks after surgery, she walks into an empty shower stall at the Sparta Prague club after working out on a stationary bike, hyperaware of her surroundings. “I didn’t think too much about the past,” she says with remembered enthusiasm. “I was very happy about that.” It will be a couple of months before she’s willing to rent her own flat in Prague.

  It isn’t the reboot Kvitova once envisioned for the 2017 season, when she’d intended to rebuild momentum and mount a campaign for another major.

  Kvitova’s serve, powerful forehand, variety, and timing are among the best in tennis, but her high-risk game requires an intensity that she has sometimes struggled to maintain in the seasons following her second Wimbledon title. Her nickname of “P3tra,” referring to her tendency to play three-set matches, encapsulates her ability to dig herself out of competitive trouble she would rather avoid.

  She changes coaches early in the 2016 season and splits up with her fiancé, pro hockey player Radek Meidl, the latest in a string of high-profile companions including fellow tennis players Adam Pavlasek and Radek Stepanek. Weeks before the attack, she makes another shift, hiring former ATP pro Jiri Vanek and telling him, “I want to be number one, I want to win one more Grand Slam, I want to do it, I feel it inside,” Vanek recalls. He is impressed by her ambition, but then a stress fracture sidelines her. The violent knife attack catapults them into crisis before they’ve had a single formal practice together.

  “I couldn’t stay by myself,” Kvitova says. Her voice wobbles slightly. “I needed help, to be honest. I am independent, and suddenly I couldn’t do anything.”

  Kvitova is afraid to go out alone. She can’t drive with her hand immobilized, and she doesn’t want to hire a bodyguard. “I’m a private, quiet person,” she says. “It would be terrible to ask someone to go with me to the dinner and stay three tables away.” Instead, her coaches become her de facto security detail. She moves in with Vanek and his family in Prague. Her coach and fitness trainer take turns ferrying her to Kebrle’s office.

  The muscular, animated Vydra, a former pro triathlete, chokes up when he talks about that time. “The first question was, will she ever play tennis again?” he says through an interpreter. “I said I am 100 percent sure that she will. She trusted me, so she then put all into it, that she would return.” He tells her he spoke from authority, having survived a brain aneurysm: “I know even if you are totally dead and you are feeling like you can’t do this, if you have a strong head, you can force yourself to get up and to do it.”

  After three months, Kvitova is allowed to pick up a racket. Her grip closes around its familiar contours over the next few weeks in a gradual handshake, reacquainting itself.

  A French hand specialist, Dominique Thomas, treats her twice at his clinic in Grenoble with aggressive electro-stimulation therapy. It accelerates her healing, and as Kvitova’s optimism grows, she is diligent to a fault. She overworks the hand, and it swells up again. Kebrle is concerned about the index finger. If it remains inflexible because of scar tissue, he might have to perform another surgery that will set her back weeks.

  One day, she hears the finger click and finds she can bend it. Kebrle tells her the worst of the adhesions has freed up at last, confirming that holding the racket is actually the best therapy of all. “Once she started playing tennis, you could see it from week to week, that her function has increased, and it started to work as a normal hand,” he says.

  Her progress is kept strictly under wraps as she trains in the Canary Islands and Monaco. She sends video clips of practice to her doctors and her agents, and one day, she sends a photo with a caption noting a small off-court victory: “I’m holding a wine glass.”

  “All the way through, she was saying, ‘This is gonna be a challenge, but I love challenges,’” Spellman says. “Maybe nothing else would have given her that motivation—if it had just been an injury. It gave her the inner strength to want to prove she could do it.”

  By mid-April 2017, Kvitova decides she will try to play at Roland Garros, a month before the doctors initially thought was possible. Her public comeback begins in the interview room in Paris, a session she rehearses with Spellman, trying to anticipate the questions reporters will ask, strategizing what to do if she cries. The lights over the dais make her sweat, but she doesn’t wilt or break down. “I felt like the tennis was taken away from me, and it wasn’t my decision,” she says. “Suddenly I couldn’t do what I love. I see a little bit from the different angle. So I’m happy that I’m here.”

  Tennis people are welcoming and kind, but they are also unsure how to react, casting covert glances at her hand. She understands why. “I saw people very happy to see me back,” she says. “Then I felt sometimes they were curious how my hand was, but they didn’t ask. Uncomfortable. But I think I will be the same as they were.”

  Only
Boris Becker, on site as a Eurosport television analyst, asks her about it directly. Kvitova does a credible impersonation of his voice: “Petra, show me your hand.” She turns it over to display her palm. He exhales and says, “Okay.” She walks onto center court with her fingernails painted bright red and wins her first match. She loses in the next round, but she has cleared the most important hurdle.

  Kvitova defies the odds again the next month, knitting together a week’s worth of matches on grass to win the Birmingham title in late June. She doesn’t even look surprised when she beats Ashleigh Barty in the final, though she will later say she was awash in disbelief. She turns to Vanek and Vydra in the stands after receiving the trophy and says, in Czech, “Is this normal?” It’s an inside joke in her camp, an acknowledgment that they are on uncharted ground.

  She loses in the second round at Wimbledon but feels encouraged when she reaches the U.S. Open quarterfinals and plays Venus Williams toe-to-toe through three sets.

  In December 2017, a year after the attack, a Czech publication includes Kvitova and her surgeon in an annual “Czechs of the Year” photo spread. She is resplendent in a red dress; he is gallantly kissing the left hand he repaired. The image reflects a story moving toward a happy ending, but there’s still one critical piece missing.

  * * *

  Based on Kvitova’s description, police quickly release a sketch of a suspect in his thirties. A few confirmed details make their way into Czech media reports. Kvitova’s name was not on the exterior buzzer panel of the five-story building, whose modest appearance betrayed no hint of a millionaire tennis player in residence. The intruder gained access by posing as a utility worker. She was attacked in her bathroom. He made off with a few hundred dollars.