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The high toss followed by a hyperbolic swing of the racket, almost dismissive of the ball. The extension of the right, working leg, reaching à la hauteur. Some of Maria’s best serves in the middle 2000s are unbelievable when seen in slow motion. One other body moves like hers, and it is that of the actual ballerina Sara Mearns, who shares with Maria a fissive mix of rigor and bounce. She moved on clay, she said later, jokingly, like “a cow on ice.” But on grass she was a dancer, a ballerina. She was trained by Nick Bollettieri at the IMG Academy on mostly hard courts, to hone her technique absent variables. Maria Sharapova was, for a brief lambent time between 20, when she was 17 and 18 and 19, the best female tennis player on grass. Will you ever get over it, the way the green lies shining against the dark? Maria did not. Around the age of 6, having first picked up a secondhand racket on the clay courts in Sochi, off the Black Sea, you arrive in Bradenton, Florida, home of Tropicana Products and IMG’s Bollettieri tennis academy. Say you’re a tennis-playing child from an oil town in Siberia where there are no courts, and no oranges, and in photographs of home it’s always snowing or sleeting or for another reason it’s gray. A community baseball field, a high school football field. To be in the backseat of a car, the cyanotype night on some minor highway, and pass at a distance of one or two hundred yards a rectangle of total green under pooled white lights is to see North American heaven. Our latest Exclusive is a new story by Sarah Nicole Prickett, co-funded by Longreads Members and co-published in conjunction with Racquet magazine’s third issue. Sarah Nicole Prickett | Racquet and Longreads | April 2017 | 17 minutes (4,278 words)