The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  Each of the sisters excelled in Bulgaria, and then each, in turn, joined the WTA Tour, which has about 360 players and runs sixty tournaments in twenty countries. Manuela played on the tour for twelve years (she retired this winter), and was ranked among the top ten in the world for ten years, won nineteen tournaments, and earned $3.5 million in prize money. Katerina joined the tour in 1985 and has also done nicely. Last week, she and Georgi Stoimenov, who now coaches her, were married. Earlier, I had asked Youlia Berberian if Katerina was going to have a fancy wedding. I got the feeling that Youlia considered this a stupid question. She didn’t say anything for a moment, while eyeing me with exasperation. Then she shrugged and said, “She’s a very rich and famous girl, you know. People in Bulgaria will be expecting a fancy wedding.”

  The three Maleevas and their mother were in Paris in late May for the French Open, which is held on the orange clay courts of Stade Roland Garros. Their goals were (a) to win the tournament and (b) to buy dresses to wear to Katerina’s wedding. Regarding (b), Youlia was the most highly motivated, because she lives in Bulgaria, where the shopping is hell. Manuela got married six years ago and lives in Switzerland, where the shopping is not hell, but she thought she’d find something nicer in Paris. Magdalena, who is nineteen and is called Maggie, lives at home in shopping-hell Bulgaria with her parents, but she didn’t seem overly concerned about her wedding outfit. During the time I spent with the Maleevas, Maggie wore either tennis clothes or one outfit of street clothes: a pair of tight burgundy-colored jeans, a long-sleeved burgundy T-shirt, and a pewter peace symbol on a short chain around her neck. Also, she had just dyed her hair a color between burgundy and a young Chardonnay. People tend to think that Maggie will turn out to be the best tennis player of the three sisters, because she has the diligence and finesse that made Manuela and Katerina successful, but she is more athletic and aggressive and plays a more varied game. So far, Maggie has been ranked as high as tenth in the world, and has earned close to a million dollars in prize money. She and I were talking one afternoon in Paris and I asked her what she was going to do with all the money she is winning, and as an afterthought I added that I doubted she would spend it shopping for clothes. She was wearing her burgundy outfit at the time. She said, “Oh, no, no, I love shopping. You can spend lots of money shopping.” I asked her what she’d bought lately, and she grinned and said, “Well, I just got a really, really great pair of combat boots.”

  THEY DON’T LOOK anything alike. Manuela, who is twenty-seven, is pale and slender. Her face is tiny and refined and tragic-looking. Because she is fair and narrow, she looks taller than she is—about five feet eight—and slightly translucent. Her voice is high, sleepy, and shy. Her manner is dignified and tender. On the court, during matches, she used to project an air of enormous sorrow, even when she was up five games and was slugging a winner down the line. People in Japan used to camp out in the lobby of her hotel just to catch a glimpse of her. She has a huge fan club in Japan—she’s probably the only Bulgarian who can make that claim. Some of this Japanese adoration ebbed after she got married. The 1994 French Open was the first in twelve years that she had watched rather than played in. She says she decided to retire because she had come to hate her suitcase. At the tournament, she wore little white shorts, a lacy white blouse, black Ray-Bans, black mules, and pink lipstick, which made her look like a French television star.

  Katerina, who is twenty-five, is meatier-looking than Manuela. She has a square, contemplative face and silky dark hair, which during her career she has worn short and bouncy or long and braided or swept across her forehead and held in a clip; each variation completely transforms her. She has dark eyes and a golden tinge to her complexion. Her gaze is level and so stern that it struck me as something she could use as a weapon on the court. Like all the Maleevas, she speaks English fluently, but her locutions are formal and ornate: “To this, I will have to again say no.” “To that, the answer is personal which is how I will be keeping it.”

  The first time I saw Maggie was in a rainstorm in Lucerne, at the site of the Eurocard Open, a clay tournament that is a French Open warm-up, and I was immediately struck by the interesting color of her hair. She is no bigger than Katerina, but she has a lumbering, pigeon-toed walk that makes her look as if she were a huge person, or as if she had just come a long distance on horseback. On the court, she usually wears a very short white tennis skirt and tight white Lycra bike shorts, which stick out below the skirt. She has hazel eyes and a long chin and a wide mouth. She seems to find herself a curiosity. Describing her nontennis interests, she says, “I’m famous for liking hard rock music. I’m known for liking a band called Nine Inch Nails.”

  All three of the Maleeva sisters were taught to play by Youlia, so their games have certain similarities—trim ground strokes, neat footwork. Otherwise, because of their different bodies and temperaments and talents, each has her own style. Manuela, for instance, learned to play in the era of Chris Evert, when nearly all women players were baseliners, with methodical, unvarying ground strokes and two-handed backhands and the patience to wait for their opponents’ mistakes. Katerina is also a baseliner, but her strokes are especially flat and her swing is taut and compact, and she is very fast on her feet. By the time Maggie, who is eight years younger than Manuela, started playing, baselining was no longer enough to win points, so she learned to move around the court more, to switch between one- and two-handed backhands, to use more topspin, and to dominate points. The three always hated to play one another in tournaments. Nevertheless, there have been fifteen occasions when one Maleeva played another on the tour: Manuela has beaten Katerina eight times, Katerina has beaten Manuela once, Manuela has beaten Maggie twice, Katerina has beaten Maggie four times. In 1993, all three reached the fourth round of the French Open and the U.S. Open—a first in the annals of sibling athletics. That year, the three Maleevas were ranked within four places of one another among the top twenty women in the world.

  In some instances, the sisters have teamed up to use their tennis success commercially; all three are represented by the same agent at Advantage International, and all three have had deals with Babolat tennis strings and Isostar high-performance drinks. Katerina and Maggie were also celebrity spokespersons for Balkan, the official airline of Bulgaria.

  Occasionally, the number of Maleevas and their longevity and their persistence near the top of the tennis world has unnerved other players. Theories about them abound. One rumor has it that the girls were under strict orders from Youlia never to have a younger sister beat an older one. Ruxandra Dragomir, a Romanian player, who drew Maggie in the first round of the French Open, told me after their match that she thought Maggie had had a bit of an unfair advantage over her. I asked her what it was, and she shrugged and said, “Well, you know, the sisters. She has all those sisters all over the place.” Pam Shriver, in a book she wrote several years ago, said that the Maleevas always moped when they played, whether they won or lost, and that Manuela and Katerina (Maggie was not yet on the tour) were known among the other players as Boo and Hoo. There have been other pairs of siblings in tennis, such as Chris and Jeanne Evert, John and Patrick McEnroe, and Luke and Murphy Jensen, but before the Maleevas there had never been a family in which all the children were tennis players, there had never been three same-sex tennis-playing siblings, there had never been three tennis-playing Bulgarians, there had never been three tennis-playing Bulgarian sisters, and there had never been three tennis-playing siblings—Bulgarian or female or not—ranked so close together and so high up in the sport. It occurred to me when I met the Maleevas that I had never before met people with so many signifying adjectives you could attach to their names.

  I WANTED TO have a dinner with all three of the Maleeva sisters. “Let me know if you can do that,” Youlia said to me. “I personally would like to accomplish that sometime. If you get that done, that will be an almost incredible thing.” At the moment, Manuela was on her way to Paris from Switzerland with her husband
, François Fragnière; Maggie had just arrived from Lucerne, where she had played in the Eurocard Open; Katerina was flying to Paris from Bulgaria, where she had been resting after playing in a tournament in Hamburg; and George Maleev, their father, who is an electronics professor, was at his job in Sofia, teaching school. Nobody knew anybody else’s schedule. “You know the way we are,” Youlia said. “We can try to have dinner the night after the first round, but I can’t guarantee who will be here. The minute—God forbid, God forbid, I won’t even say it, God forbid—someone loses, we are gone as fast as we can. We go.”

  Youlia and I were sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Sofitel, in Paris, where many of the players in the Open were staying; a corner of the lobby had been cordoned off as a players’ lounge. Youlia was sitting on a black leather couch, eating fancy cookies from a platter on the coffee table. She was wearing a big green T-shirt, paisley leggings, Christian Dior eyeglasses with complicated frames, and tennis shoes. Her feet are very small, and she has lean calves and little ankles. She is forty-nine years old. As a young woman, she was a nine-time Bulgarian women’s singles tennis champion. From the knees down, that is still what she looks like. From the knees up, she looks a little more like somebody’s mother. Her hair is chestnutcolored and fluffy. She has beautiful pinkish skin; an aquiline nose; a rubbery, downturned mouth; and huge dimples, which crease her face even when she isn’t smiling. Her voice is a porous, trilling soprano; it is round and light and girlish, which Youlia is not. After you meet Youlia, the phrase that leaps to your mind is “human dynamo.” She is someone who seems very good at getting things done. She says that she is a very tough coach, and that her philosophy is “Winning is everything.” I did not directly observe Youlia working with her daughters, but I believe I experienced some of her technique. That afternoon, for instance, I asked her how she happened to start playing tennis as a young woman in Bulgaria.

  “Are you familiar with the Ottoman Empire?” she said.

  I told her I was hoping that her answer would be somewhat more contemporary.

  “I need to explain this to you,” she said firmly. She settled back on the couch. “When you understand the Ottoman Empire, and the situation between the Turks and the Armenians, then we will get to the tennis.” She began with Alexander the Great’s conquest of western Asia Minor, the Battle of Manzikert, and an account of Suleiman II; I found myself listening and taking notes in spite of myself. Players and their entourages were wandering in and out of the lounge. Someone came in and made an announcement about transportation to Roland Garros. Youlia ignored all this and went on. She was somewhere around the 1718 Treaty of Passarowitz when Maggie, who had been jogging with Katerina’s fiancé, came in.

  “Mom, did my box from Reebok come yet?” Maggie asked. Youlia looked up and nodded. “Anything interesting?” Maggie asked. “I mean, what am I wearing tomorrow?” She poked around on the cookie platter. Youlia answered her in Bulgarian, which sounded like air rushing past an open window. Then she waved Maggie away and got back to the Ottoman Empire.

  At some point, she segued into her own history, including her Armenian heritage, which enabled her parents to emigrate to the United States in 1965 as part of Bulgaria’s recognition of the Armenian genocide of 1915. Her parents have lived in the United States ever since. In 1965, Youlia was already a star tennis player in Bulgaria and was engaged to George, who was not allowed to emigrate, because he is not Armenian. She went to the United States briefly, then returned to Bulgaria and married George, and continued competing. Because the tennis courts were a nice place to bring babies, after Manuela and Katerina were born she just took them along to the courts.

  In 1979, when Manuela was twelve and was just a few months away from being the national women’s champion in Bulgaria, Youlia decided to apply for visas to take her to an American tournament. “I heard about this famous Orange Bowl in Miami, so I went for a visa, for which I had to faint and cry and beg and weep and plead, which is what I had to do for the next seven years,” she told me. “My God, I can’t tell you how much I hate the Communists for that humiliation—my God! But we got the visas and went to this famous Orange Bowl and Manuela played, and in the semifinals she had to play Chris Evert’s sister, there, in Florida, which was their kingdom, and Manuela was such a brave girl, God, she was so brave”—now Youlia was in tears—“playing in her homemade dress, and she only had three racquets, while the other kids had ten and their shiny bright clothes, and the chair umpire made this bad call and she was robbed, and she was such a brave little girl. She took it very hard. She cried and cried. She cried at every point. This is when it is hard to be a mother and a coach. But I was so, so strong. I was such a strong person then. I would sit on the side of the court and talk to Manuela the whole time during the match. I would say, ‘Manuela, why are you crying? Hit the ball down the line, please. Stop crying, thank you. Use some topspin on your backhand now. Please stop crying. Thank you.’ ”

  Just then, a woman working for the tournament came over and said she knew of a store in Paris where she thought Youlia might find a good dress for Katerina’s wedding. Youlia dabbed her face dry and thanked her. Then she leaned over to me and said, “You know, I need to find something nice but not too, too nice. I don’t want to look like the Queen of England and be too, you understand, too ‘up,’ because there will be so many relatives and people from the countryside, and I don’t want to make some kind of appearance, but I want something nice.” She got teary again. She took her glasses off and started drying them on her T-shirt. Then she looked at them and said, “These glasses, you know, I love them, but I didn’t even know they were Christian Dior until a friend of mine told me. I just thought they were nice. I don’t know anything about Christian Dior! I just said to her, ‘Well, I love them so much because they feel so nice!’ ”

  Youlia said that the name Maleeva was now practically a trademark in Bulgaria. Then she said, “You know, if we were American we would be huge.”

  By now, it was quite late, and I said I would have to get going. I mumbled something about how I had planned to go for a run, but supposed it was a little late. Youlia turned and fixed her gaze on me; it said a million things, but all she said was “Oh. Hmm. It isn’t too late. Go do your run.” She stood up and left. I went upstairs to my room, turned on the television, lay down on my bed, tried not to think about Youlia, got up after about thirty seconds, turned off the television, put on my running clothes, and went out for an hour, racing around and around the hotel. The next morning, I bumped into Youlia on the elevator. I started to say something about the tournament, but she interrupted me. “I have only one question,” she said. “Now I will ask. After you left last night, did you go out and do your run?”

  A TALL SWISS KID with radish-colored cheeks had been sitting next to me eating cold frankfurters out of a plastic box as Maggie started playing her third-round match in Lucerne, at the Eurocard Open, the week before the French Open. The weather was lousy. The matches had been interrupted several times by wild rainstorms, and the doubles competition had been canceled so that all the courts could be used to complete the singles draw. The grandstand was mostly empty. Youlia was sitting alone at the far end of the court, so she could follow the game without moving her eyes back and forth, which happens to give her a headache. Manuela, who lives about two hours from Lucerne, had come to town to watch Maggie. She sat alone, hugging her knees, across the court from Youlia. They rarely sit together. This is because Youlia gets nervous watching her daughters play, and her nervousness makes Manuela nervous. Everyone has been getting nervous lately when Katerina plays, because she has had a tough year on the tour and has sagged in the rankings. If you ask Manuela about it, her face crumples like tissue, and she says, “I know all about this. The pressure, the pressure, the pressure. It’s very, very, very tough. It’s mental. It’s in the head. It’s not in the hand.”

  Beating a Maleeva has always paid a big dividend. Because the Maleevas are highly ranked, any player who
beats one of them earns a lot of points on the tennis-ranking computer, which rewards victories in proportion to the size of the tournament as well as according to the ranking of the defeated player. On the other hand, the Maleevas have never been quite as fear-inspiring as some other top-ranked players, like Steffi Graf. In fact, the Maleevas believe that most of their opponents play the best games of their lives against them. The family phrase for this phenomenon is “out of her mind,” as in “The girl who beat Katerina usually can hardly hit the ball, but against Katerina she was playing out of her mind.” In the third round in Lucerne, Maggie was facing an out-of-her-mind situation. She was the second seed in the tournament. The first seed was Lindsay Davenport, a gigantic, scowling high school student from California, with big legs and big arms and big shoulders, who had just bounded into the top ten. All the players in the tournament seemed a little afraid of her. They seemed less afraid of Maggie. In her second round, Maggie had struggled against a tiny Israeli girl named Anna Smashnova, who was unseeded in the tournament and is ranked eighty-seven places below Maggie. Youlia was sitting next to Smashnova’s coach during the match, and she turned her chair so she could glare at him between points. After Maggie finally won, 3–6, 6–1, 6–1, Youlia muttered to me, “I watched that little girl play yesterday and she hit nothing but moon balls. She couldn’t hit anything flat. Then she plays Maggie and boom, boom, bang! Everything is flat. She played out of her mind.”

  In this third round, Maggie was playing Lisa Raymond, a peppy Floridian with a pointy face, a streaky blond ponytail, and four earrings in one ear. At the time, Raymond was ranked fifty-ninth in the world. She has a solid serve, a topspinning backhand, a good slice, and a bouncy stride on the court. As the first set began, Maggie was hitting a lot of her passing shots out, and a few of her overheads were wild and wide; then she steadied herself and began serving well and playing as many volleys as she could off her backhand, which she hits hard and sharply down the line. In contrast to Katerina and Manuela, who rarely move off the baseline, Maggie dashed around the court and came to the net several times. Still, most of the games went to deuce and were decided on errors—Maggie’s, usually. Raymond eventually won the first set, seven games to five.