Trophy Son Read online

  “Atom Bomb.”

  Adam sat in the suite on the sofa next to the PlayStation controls. Gabe was too pissed off to talk with me now. It was a bad loss. “Hey, Adam.” There were big windows with a city view but I didn’t want a lot of light coming in so I closed the curtains to darken the room.

  “Have a seat, my man.”

  I did and unrolled my whole body into the sofa so that my head rested back and I looked up at the ceiling. The night before I had gone out to dinner with a girl on the tour. We had ordered a bottle of wine. Finished it.

  “Tough day out there, Anton.”

  Before dinner we had visited the Museu Picasso. In my years on the tour this was my first visit to a museum. I was in Barcelona and this seemed like a breakthrough moment, a heroic choice to make in my life. I was in Europe on a date with a pretty girl I liked and so we went to a museum and a fancy restaurant the way many human beings might. “Yes. Very tough day.”

  Adam slid a PlayStation control to me. “Let’s have a round,” he said.

  I sat up. I looked back at the sofa pillow that held an imprint in the shape of my head as though trying to lure me back. The wine had dehydrated me. It was a hot day for the match and my hydration never caught up. My face had gone tomato red in the first set. I drank water but could never get it all the way to my veins in time. I felt feverish. I was still feverish next to Adam. Our flight out of Spain wasn’t until the next morning. “Not now, I can’t concentrate. I can barely focus my eyes.”

  “You feel like talking?”

  I did and I didn’t. It depended on what Adam talked about. “Sure.”

  Adam took this word and ran with it. “You seem good to me, Anton. Doing better than in the years I’ve known you. Sometimes. And then sometimes you’re worse.”

  “I guess so.”

  “It used to be just you and tennis, man. The two of you pulling on each other, like this linear thing. Now it’s not linear. It’s three dimensional. Maybe four or five dimensional.”

  Adam could sound stoned even if he wasn’t. I didn’t say anything.

  “And that’s all good, Anton. People need variety, variability. Now your highs are higher and your lows are lower,” he said. “The key is to maximize the high and curb the low.”

  This was the kind of Zen advice I always thought was impractical. “Well, that would be nice.” My headache was getting worse. I could feel the beat of my heart in my temples so I massaged them with the tips of my fingers.

  “You need some water,” said Adam. He handed me a Fiji from a case we kept at room temperature in the suite.

  I said, “Four years ago I’d never have gone out to dinner the night before a match, but if I were still living my life that same way I’d be so miserable I’d have quit the tour altogether. Now at least I’m playing. Not as good as a robot, but it’s what I can do.”

  “I know. Believe me, I’m totally with you.”

  “It’s harder to focus. I can get focused, I just can’t stay focused and intense for the long haul. There’s a lot going on.”

  “I know, Atom Bomb. It causes mental dislocation.”

  “Something like that.” My face was still red and I still felt feverish. It was partly the dehydration and partly the conversation.

  “Your head bothering you?”

  “I need Advil.”

  “That’ll help,” he said.

  Adam stood and walked to his bag hanging from the back of a chair at the suite’s dining room table. I rolled back to look at the ceiling again and rubbed my temples.

  The suite mini-fridge would hum to life every three minutes or so, marking time with sedated frequency. I looked down at the carpet that had a pattern of blue concentric circles which seemed to my dehydrated brain to move like a cinemagraph. Watercolors of beach scenes each available for €200 were spaced across the beige walls.

  Adam returned to stand in front of me with a bottle of pills in each hand. One was Advil. The other was something prescription.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Just an idea, my man. This one is Advil.” He tossed it in my lap.

  “And that one?”

  “This one, my friend, has helped me to curb many a low. One pill, no downside, will right the ship.”

  “What is it?”

  “This one,” he said again, “is cool water over a hot brain.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Adam. What is it?”

  “Valium. Basically, Valium.” He tossed that bottle in my lap too. “Serve one pill with one beer, lay down on the sofa, enjoy.”

  “It doesn’t screw me? No hangover or side effect?”

  “It’ll help you rest, that’s all. You need to rest.”

  I shrugged which he took to mean get me a beer. I took the pill and drank the beer without putting any questions to myself.

  We turned on the PlayStation for a while until I didn’t want to play anymore. I wanted only to sit back and lower my eyelids by half. Cool water over a hot brain. He was right.

  CHAPTER

  26

  I paused in front of my parents’ front door. Still my front door, really, since I had only hotel rooms to call my own other than this house.

  I knew Dad was home. I knew he’d be pissed. I braced myself, opened the door and walked into the living room where he was seated with his back to me, reading a newspaper.

  “Hey, pal.”

  “Hey, Dad.”

  He glanced up to me and smiled, then lowered the newspaper. He slowly stood up, the way a person does unconsciously and he turned to face me square. He looked in my eyes, then a few inches higher at my Mohawk haircut. My head was shaved bald on the sides with a three-inch-thick band of hair down the middle, dyed blond. My hair was jet black so I thought making it blond would be an interesting change. “What have you done, Anton?”

  “I got a haircut.”

  “For the love of God, son.”

  I was ready to defend a punch or shove but he didn’t even step toward me. He stepped backward and couldn’t seem to catch his breath. “Anton,” he said.

  “I wanted something different.”

  “Oh, Anton,” he said again. I detected no anger. Disappointment, maybe. Sadness. He kept his eyes on me but felt around behind him for a piece of furniture to support himself. His hand found the sofa and he guided himself in.

  “Dad, it’s a haircut, it’s nothing. Less than a pierced ear.” The idea for the Mohawk had come to me in the barber’s chair, seemingly out of thin air, but with only a few minutes’ hindsight I knew it had come from something real that had been lurking.

  “Anton,” he said. “I think, maybe,” he searched for the words then whispered what he came up with, “I am failing you.”

  Now my eyes stayed on Dad and in the same unconscious motion he’d had a moment before, my body found the chair behind me. “What are you talking about, Dad?”

  “You’re so unhappy.”

  I had told him I was unhappy a thousand times. We had fought about my unhappiness, physically and verbally, through the years but he never grasped or accepted it. What finally reached him was a Mohawk haircut, a minor act of self-mutilation. “Yes,” I said.

  He began a silent cry. Wet eyes spilling to tears that blurred his view of me. “Anton, I have always been hard on you, of course I know that. Harder than on Panos. But you have a gift.” He said the word gift louder, like he was calling to it upstairs.

  I said nothing. I’d never seen this from my father before. He was a stranger to me.

  His body language changed to defensiveness. A man on trial and he gathered his strength. “I had it different from you. I didn’t grow up with millions of dollars and a secure future, options I could just choose from. I had to go get it.” He said this with force, trying to relive a moment of conquest. “I had fire in my belly because it’s human nature to put fire in the belly when it needs to be there. But what about when it doesn’t need to be there? What about you? Your mother and I talked since she was preg
nant with Panos about how we would give you kids an edge, some fire. Despite all the comforts and advantages you’d have, how would we make you value effort and goals?”

  He was giving me a parenting confessional. Was it an apology? I still said nothing.

  “We wanted to give you the fire in the belly that we had growing up. And then you had this gift too. It was obvious early on.” He raised his hands to say, come on, anyone could see this gift and would have acted on it. “Did we do everything right? No way, of course not. I know that.” He nodded. “We tried our best.” He fell silent.

  “So you don’t like the Mohawk.”

  He smiled. “No, son.”

  “Alright,” I said.

  “Hell, screw the Mohawk, whatever.” His smile grew. It was forced, but it got big enough to show teeth. “I’m just worried about you, Anton.”

  I decided then to abandon the Mohawk. It would take a few weeks but I’d let it grow in. I knew the media would say I’d gotten brash, cocky. They’d say I wanted attention and if I couldn’t get it by winning tournaments then I’d get it another way.

  They’d be wrong, naturally. It was the opposite. The Mohawk was a costume, not me but a presentation of me, a way for an actor to play me on the court while the real me could hide away.

  It was a bad choice, though. Agassi had one, so it wasn’t the first. James Blake shaved his head bald, though that was in support of his dad getting chemo treatment. But the Mohawk wasn’t me. It was one of the many things I tried on that didn’t fit. Even if I wanted to hide, the presentation of me had to fit with me.

  I played one tournament with the Mohawk, then I moved on from that haircut more quickly than the media did. There were plenty of articles with photos. I hoped Ana didn’t see any of it.

  Ben Archer won that tournament. Same haircut he always had, wearing conservative tennis whites. Same steady demeanor and steady game, but with that win he was ranked above me for the first time. I was at twenty-three and he moved up to fourteen.

  He was a marvel to me. He seemed so damned normal.

  The thing about the Mohawk, though, was that it provoked a piece of Dad that was almost normal too. I didn’t see the light or now agree with anything he’d done, but it was the first time I had witnessed something human from him.

  CHAPTER

  27

  I rented a three-bedroom house in Palm Beach Gardens. It was in one of the gated communities that have only two or three architectural plans for the couple hundred houses in the development and most are lived in only during the few months of winter or are rented out year-round to people who come golfing for a week at a time. It was alarmingly un-homey, but big enough for friends to come visit. Miami was known to be the steroid capitol of the world at that time but my choice of home had nothing to do with that fact. Bobby took care of all that. I didn’t know and it was better for me that way.

  Manhattan would have been fun. Panos was there. He was a financial advisor at J.P. Morgan, managing rich people’s money. Managing a small amount of Dad’s money and all of my money now that I was a millionaire by myself. He also managed investments for a few tour players he’d met through me and so had started a nice business for himself. But a decent place in Manhattan was a fortune, plus tennis courts were harder to come by. I’d average about forty nights a year in whichever home I picked and I wanted a place where the weather was nice in December. Anyway, most players on the tour lived in the stretch of Florida between Orlando and Miami, so Palm Beach Gardens put me right in the middle.

  Dad allowed it. He had backed way off me since the Mohawk, treating me like a rescue dog. He always understood action-reaction but had assumed my reactions to him always resulted in better tennis. Now he saw there were unknowable, unseen reactions that could show up in disturbing ways and that made him feel uncertain and guilty. He was fearful of causing more damage so if I wanted something enough now I could get it.

  Gabe took a condo on a golf course in Palm Beach Gardens nearby. We trained on the same schedule as ever, but the air had gone out of both of us. He didn’t talk about the top three players in the world anymore and how we’d catch them, or how the draw looked for getting to the second week in the major tournaments. It was more about day-to-day survival, how we’d manage just to keep it going. Keeping it going had become the routine, and we’d both lost sight of where to.

  I floated through the tennis season relying on my serve and my steroids to win enough. No leg work. I knew Dad was upset, thought I was wasting good years, and he was right.

  “Anton, let’s go to beach. For valk and for svim.”

  I never dated the American players. Almost exclusively Eastern Europeans. Russians in particular because those girls all had childhoods that were way more fucked up than my own. I was semi-conscious of the fear I had of dating an American, that I would be the one judged to be more screwed up, to be pitied. That she would have a background of friendships, going to concerts, birthday parties, favorite songs that reminded her of first dates, first kisses, rather than my experience which was nothing at all except an eight-month fraud at the hands of Liz, and then skipped right to sexual instruction from a girl with far more knowledge than I had. “Sure, for an hour maybe. I have a practice session at one o’clock.”

  So no Americans. I was intimidated. Dr. Minkoff helped me to see that. Anyway, Eastern Europe seems to turn out only girls who are 5'11" with a great ass. “Good, I practice at vun also.”

  I stood from the bed naked and took an energy bar from a box on the bedside table. Athletes in training eat constantly. I always had food with me and never went more than a single waking hour without eating something. I opened a second energy bar while still standing by the bed.

  She grabbed my penis with one hand and pulled me back into bed. “I need bite also.”

  It was unclear, but turned out she meant the energy bar. She took a bite, then pulled me over top of her and wrapped her legs tight around me and fed a bite to me. We both chewed while she lowered her hand to direct me inside her. She squeezed her legs in a rhythm to pace our sex. In a moment she reached to the table for another bar to feed us as we sweated and pumped and abused our bodies like animals. It was great morning sex.

  “Now ve svim, Anton,” she said after.

  “Sure,” I said. I didn’t dislike her at all, but I didn’t know her well enough to like her very much. We had sex as much as we had conversation, which was easy since half the relationship required no thought. It was just biological.

  I dated a few tennis players like her, a few models hoping to be actresses. The consistent threads between them were that they all had unconventional backgrounds and that I never got to know them much. It was a release and it was some company. It was a way to float, the way I was doing things on the court too.

  An elite athlete must have a willingness to suffer. There’s the endurance training through thresholds of physical pain. There’s also the mental and emotional sacrifice to narrow the world. A willingness to suffer is either born in us or beaten in early. I believe mine was beaten in. Either way, I was losing my willingness.

  CHAPTER

  28

  Another bad loss. My opponent had cracked a top-five world ranking but that was six years ago. He was ranked thirty-seven at the time of our match. He was twenty-nine years old so he had some tennis left in him, but still, I should be on my way up and he should be on his way out.

  I was playing the Memphis Open. It was second round so the field hadn’t narrowed down much. There were still lots of matches and a few guys coming and going in the locker room. I had my big tennis bag with extra rackets and my energy drink. I dropped it in front of my locker and sat down leaning forward with my forearms on my knees, thinking about the flight out of Memphis for the next tournament and how could I stop losing.

  Jim Crane had beaten me. He skipped into the locker room behind me and dropped his bag but didn’t sit. He jogged in place the way runners do when held at a stoplight. It was a ridiculous sight o
nly twelve feet from me in a locker room that was otherwise sluggish and where eye contact was avoided.

  Jim did a three-sixty still jogging in place. There were Jim, me and four other players in the room. “Hey, Christos,” Jim said to a Spanish player on the tour. “Your match is tomorrow, right? Want to go hit some balls? There are a few things I want to work on.”

  No one looked up at Jim. Not even Christos. Everyone knew the message Jim was sending. Anton was no opponent today, he didn’t push me, I ain’t breathing heavy. What a dick. “Not today,” said Christos.

  “Alright, man. Anyone else? Otherwise I gotta go for a run. I gotta get someone to bring a pair of running shoes down here.”

  I wanted to break my racket over his face. I’d never seen such overt dick-ness. The match had actually gone three sets but he’d whooped me 6–1 in the third. I knew right when I was going to lose. It was early in the third set and I was facing break point when mentally I crossed over and predicted my own loss. I felt it coming. Once I knew that, I wanted it right away. Kill me quickly. He recognized it in me. So he killed me a little and I killed me a lot and it was over fast.

  No one answered Jim so he said, “Alright.” He took his phone from his bag. “I’m going to find some running shoes.” He put the phone to his ear and jogged out.

  I was too embarrassed to look up from my sneakers. Too embarrassed to unlace them, get undressed and get into the shower. Too embarrassed to move. Nobody spoke.

  I wanted the room to clear. I stayed motionless, like Rodin’s depressed and embarrassed Thinker. I wanted everyone gone before I moved, I wanted the whole exchange wiped away from memory, then I wanted to find Jim Crane and beat the crap out of him.

  A hand rested on my shoulder. “You should take it as a compliment, Anton.”

  I was still bent forward and I looked up like a swimmer breathing to see Mark Woodbridge standing beside me. I’d never played Mark before, he was too old for that, but he was American and I knew him. He was a coach now and had been a doubles specialist and won some doubles Grand Slams. He was probably only late fifties but was weathered from too much sun and booze so that his skin was dry and lifeless like a brown leaf in winter.