Before there were the Williams sisters, there were the Maleevas—Manuela, Katerina, and Magdelena (Maggie)—from a place that in its own way was as difficult to transcend as the Los Angeles ghetto, Compton.
The Maleevas are Bulgarian; the typical American high school student probably couldn’t find it on the world map without the help of a GPS unit. The youngest of that trio, Maggie, announced yesterday that she had played the last Grand Slam of her career.
Lisa Dillman of the Los Angeles Times, Neil Harman of London’s The Times, and I sat down with her in the Octagon skybox at the U.S. Open yesterday afternoon.
Maggie is 30 now, and married for just over a year to Lubo Nokov, who helped hasten her retirement. As she charmingly put it:
In fact, when Lubo subsequently asked her why she practiced tennis so much, Maggie found herself confronting new issues. “To me, tennis was the most important thing in the world. But being with someone who didn’t think tennis was very important at all made me think how much stress, effort, practice, travel went into it—and for what reason?”
Routine stuff, you probably think, and rightly so. The themes in love are well-known. But it’s worth stopping for a moment to appreciate what the Maleevas accomplished in their understated way, as strangers in almost every place they played.
They put up a slew of firsts having to do with being siblings, the most impressive of which was their concurrent ranking in the Top 15 in 1992. Manuela (now married with children and living in Switzerland) was the most successful among them, but the sisters collected a total of 39 titles, and each had at least one win over Martina Navratilova, leading that iconic player to remark, “Well, at least I never lost to the mother.”
This was not entirely in jest. The matriarch, Youlia Maleeva, was a 9-time national champ of Bulgaria. More importantly, through the sheer force of her will combined with the talent of her daughters, she essentially invented tennis in Bulgaria. For unlike neighbors like the Czech Republic, Croatia, or even Romania, Bulgaria had absolutely no—as in zero, nada, zippo—tradition in tennis.
Today, thanks partly to the Maleevas, Sesil Karatantcheva is a bright young star on the tour, and the court time at the Maleevas' new indoor club is fully booked during the prime hours right through the winter.
This is one extraordinary family, even though none of them made that Grand Slam breakthrough that would have put them on the general public’s radar in places like Paris, New York, or Melbourne.
Maggie feels that the tour today is different from when she started playing pro tournaments (at age 14 in 1989) in two significant ways:
The East Europeans are a very strong presence in the game, Maggie said, partly because parents in that part of the world have more authority—and are more authoritative. “I know I didn’t have a choice about playing tennis or not,” she said, with disarming frankness. “Now I am happy that I did not.”
We got to talking about Venus and Serena Williams, who Maggie thought were simply in a separate category from the other girls and not bound by the same rules and laws. Ultimately, Lisa popped the million-dollar question on that front: Does it ever get easier to play a sister?
“It’s terrible,” Maggie answered. “Terrible, terrible. I really feel for the Williams sisters.”
She then told the story of how she had gone to Switzerland, where Manuela now lives with her husband and children, about 10 days before the Open, to practice with Manuela. They hit, then played points and made-up games that proved to be so much fun they found themselves laughing out loud a few times.
But at one point, Maggie asked, quite seriously: “Why couldn’t we ever play like this when we were on the tour?”
If anyone can answer that question, shoot Venus or Serena a quick e-mail or text message. I’m sure they would love to know. Maggie went on:
It was touching of Maggie to single out her agent, Phil DiPicciotto, blithely saying: “I used to write him letters all the time, about how I was feeling, especially when I was struggling. Really, I wasn’t even sure who he was or what he did for me. I just felt I could talk to him.”
That Maleeva and DiPicciotto stayed a team speaks volumes about both. But it isn’t as if Maggie has no regrets, or disappointments.
"It’s sad. I spent most of my life with people I saw more of than my own family," she said. "But when I leave the game I won’t be in touch with any of them."