What do you look like? Are you tall and gorgeous? Are there any special things you do to stay fit and healthy?

Do people close to you support your decision? Is there anyone you care about who presses you to return, pick up the mantle so to speak? Could you get back in the game if you wanted to? Would you if you could?

I am 5'10" so I am fairly tall, I guess. I never thought of myself as gorgeous. Mostly I think I have intimidated guys in my life. Female athletes do that sometimes. I wasn't, you know, like a cheerleader. But makeup and hair styling just takes too much time. I have a great body due to how much exercise I am used to doing. Obviously I played alot of tennis and worked on strength training so I have been way fit since I was 9. When I started getting noticed for my performance, guys were suddenly in the picture. It was all the jocks who really only date the girls that make them look the coolest. It was my first experience at how phony people could be. I didn't think about it that way back then. Back then I was just getting the attention and so it was really cool, but now that I look back on it, I embarassed by my own enjoyment of it.

My best friend is kinda how all this started. We were friends in high school. She had a much harder life than me. Her parents were not kind to her. I mean, they didn't support her or believe in her or anything. Her dad would tell her how she thought she was better than he was and she wasn't. I only met them once when I went to her home to work on a school assignment together. I couldn't believe how rude they were to her. Nobody could be that rude. That's what I thought until I pulled my little vanishing act. Then I saw just how bad my own flesh and blood could be.

Anyway, Emma is her name. She was very smart in school and she just needed somebody to believe in her. My parents had told me a lot that I should help those who aren't as lucky as me. I didn't realize they meant themselves at the time so I sort of let Emma latch on to me. The truth is that I didn't have a lot of friends in school, it was all practice, practice, practice. I liked it. Tennis is a great sport. But it doesn't leave time for friends. It was nice to have Emma as a friend; somebody who could let me talk girl talk. So we were friends in high school. I didn't see her much after my junior year. I began the path to professional play at 16 and by 18 I was touring nearly full time. But Emma not only graduated, she went to college on a scholarship. That was so cool!!

We lost touch after I left school. I was busy learning how to become a champion. The pressure on me to really build my game began to mount. Tennis pros have a very short life span so if you want to be a champion player, you got to give it your whole heart and soul.

Anyway, I met Emma again in the most unexpected of places. I had (finally!!!) won a championship tournament in an ATP event. It was an upset and so it made the news and the next thing I know there are cameras and endorsement deals being shoved in my face. I say it like its bad now, but when it happened, I was all over it. Then my parents hire a PR guy. That was weird. I was trying to get ready for the next match and he's trying to make me "presentable." So, I play another tournament and lose in the finals. Not bad, I thought, but this PR guy builds a campaign around me winning. So I take second place, pocket a decent size check (yeah...I have an accountant now too), and this guy is acting like the sky is falling. He has to scramble and do all sorts of re-campaigning and grumbling. Seriously, I can't believe this guy. He acts like I did it on purpose. I mean, I'm only playing some of the best players in the world; some of whom were my heroes only a few years earlier.

OK I am getting a little too into all of this. Sorry. So this PR guy decides I need to up my charity profile. So I am one of the top seeds in a grand slam event, the first time ever for me. I'm in New York. Did I mention I am from New Jersey? Doesn't matter. I am feeling really good about things. I feel great physically and mentally. I feel like this is my destiny. I have always felt that I was destined to do great things. I know how conceited that sounds, but I always felt like success was just at the edge of my fingertips and I only needed to reach a little further. Here it is. And I make it to the quarter finals. There is a day break before my next match and the PR guy who is committed to getting me the best endorsement deals the world has ever known decides I need to up my charity profile. He schedules me to visit a homeless shelter for women; to show them that they can be like me. It's really condescending now that I think about it, but its a good cause, so I do it.

That's where I met Emma again. That's where my life changed. I didn't even recognize her. She was living there, hiding from others in a corner, not speaking. I mean a total withdrawn basket case. I am on my way out when I hear her call my name. Later they told me it was the first word she had spoken in months.

How in hell did that happen?! How did she get there? That's all I could think. I know what happened now, but back then, I couldn't believe it. I stood there looking at her with the cameras and the PR guy trying to shove me out of the room. They succeeded, but only for the moment. I couldn't sleep that night and at 2 am I took a cab back there.

Well there's a lot of other details, but bottom line, on the day of my most highest profile event, on the most crucial match of my career, I spend it with a broken woman whose only words to me were "please stay."

If I were the champion everybody thought I was, I would have left and came back. But nobody else was holding the trembling hand of that girl. Suddenly all the other stuff, especially the PR, became nothing. I slept on the floor with her holding my hand and her sobbing the whole night. I woke an hour before the match to a cellphone buzzing in my bag. They had the whole city looking for me and there I was with a friend begging me to stay.

They say its the little decisions.

I know if I had answered the ringing phone I would have been gone. I don't know what that would mean for Emma, maybe nothing. But the point is, I didn't decide to stay and not play the match; I decided to turn the phone off. That was my little decision.

The fallout was horrific. The worst were my parents. But that's another story.

I know very little about Dukes or Earls or Kings. Well, yeah, I know about Kings, I guess.

You ask a lot of very good questions. I don't know how much advice I can give. I liked the spotlight. Fame is easy to get used to. Its very seductive and addictive. In those short few months, I became very attached to being noticed. Of, course it was for all the good things. Once I skipped the match, it was a whole new game. I still had cameras following me. They came right into the shelter with questions and what not. I really thought what I had done I had done to me alone and I could make it up later. How naive. I rocked the sports world. Suddenly I really needed a PR guy and he jumped ship. I was left hanging on my own.

Was I supported? HA!!!!

My coach, my sponsors, my peers, all hated me. I committed a cardinal sin. But none of it was as bad as my parents. They had sacrificed a lot to keep me progressing in. I guess they thought this was payday. They had already put their home up for sale and were getting ready to close on one in Connecticut. They are not Connecticut people. Oh, I almost forgot, this is the best. They (my parents and my PR guy), run this whole campaign about local girl comes back home. Well, New York and New Jersey don't actually see eye to eye on locality, but that's beside the point, I suppose. The campaign brought in tons of attendees from New Jersey, some of which must have sold a child or something to afford tickets. Jon Bon Jovi, who is from Jersey, had front row seats. So not only did I betray my sport, and my parents, and a legendary rock star; I betrayed an entire state. New Jersey is not filled with forgiving people, mind you.

My parents went on public TV and all but disowned me.

Could I return to the sport? I ran away out of fear alone, I don't know if I even dared to try back then. That's been 6 years ago now. Now I have something else to occupy my desires for greatness. The word itself has new meaning to me. It used to mean championships and fame. Now it means something much deeper.