Marina Yudanov could resist no longer. She left comfort behind in pursuit of what might have been. She is the tennis world number 556.
Yudanov was national champion as a teenager but then turned her back on tennis
That was when she threw herself into the cut-throat world of a hustling lower-level tennis pro, in search of what might have been. "Had we played three minutes longer, I would have missed that plane and been in limbo in Tokyo airport."Yudanov was once a teenage national champion, but a promising junior career flamed out as the pressures of academia, adolescence and sporting excellence bore down on her.
"I had got myself somewhere with a good salary, but every single day I just wanted to get out on court and compete," she adds. Yudanov began with 20,000 euros of family savings, approximately £18,000, to help her cover the costs of travel, accommodation and equipment as she started out. "You check and see if the prize money and the points on offer and if your ranking is going to be good enough to get you in.
"It's a different story if your room-mate is out of the tournament. Her flight home might be days away, and so she is matchless at an all-inclusive resort hotel with fit foreign boys she'll probably never see again. Who can blame her for wanting to see them now? "After I realised that it was just we were the last match of the day on court and they were waiting for us to finish so that they could tidy up and pack away the court.""At one event in Egypt we were playing on clay courts and they were probably the worst maintained I have ever experienced. It was twist-your-ankle dangerous and we were still playing matches on them in 40C heat.
"We were playing in 10-15C. It was really chilly, but I didn't put much stock by it. I lost first in one tournament, then another, and as I was frantically practising for the third - feeling so powerless, like such a failure - I got so angry with it all that I threw my racquet into the fence. "So it had taken me two weeks, and I'd only figured this out because I threw my racquet so that it broke. Obviously, the pros and their teams know all of this. I didn't. And there are 50 of these things that you have to work out for yourself, on your own experience, on your own money."
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