When Svetlana Kuznetsova had to leave her dog, Dolce, at home in Russia this spring when she left for a tournament in California, she cried.
She cried in the airport. She cried on the plane. And she cried again in her hotel room, a place that can be lonely for Kuznetsova, a former United States Open champion who spends as many as eight months of every year on the road.
“I cried and cried, for three days I cried,” she told me last week.
Kuznetsova, a two-time Grand Slam champion, went on to detail for me a dark side of professional tennis virtually invisible to the average fan.