Trophy Son Page 17

  Tournament security waved to the guy from the aisle but he wouldn’t move. Security moved into the row to assist him by the arm. The guy stood and yelled, “Play the match!”

  He was big and he was a problem. The security guard backed off until two more of his colleagues showed up.

  My opponent was up at the net with me. He and I and thousands in the stands and millions at home watched the scene play out. A large, maybe drunk, certainly mentally unwell fan brought Wimbledon Centre Court to a halt.

  The three security guards moved in. They didn’t get rough but they put hands on him, asked him to leave with them. Six more guards arrived in the aisles on either side.

  The guy didn’t like being touched. He didn’t hit but he shook them off. The spectators immediately by him cleared out. It was getting violent.

  With one hand he picked up a guard and tossed him forward over a couple rows. The guards from the aisles crashed in.

  Two were on his back, two went low and each grabbed a leg. It was like four dogs fighting a bear in a medieval circus. The man fought hard. The hat and sunglasses flew. The beard twisted and ripped off.

  Holy shit. Dad.

  The loss of disguise seemed to stun him. He stopped putting up a fight and allowed himself to be shoved away, stiff, like a boated marlin staring up from the deck through a lidless eye.

  He was gone. The actual tennis match was a distant event and no one knew the way back, least of all me. The stadium was silent, everyone waiting for a voice to fill the air and explain the spectacle.

  “Anton,” said my opponent. “That was your father?” He knew easily enough. Dad and I had been on the tour a long time. Certainly McEnroe, Carillo, Cahill calling the match from the booth recognized him as well.

  It was a private and grotesque moment. Of course I wanted to hide away, pull the curtain over my face, be anywhere but on display. Eyes were on me, cameras were on me recording micro-expressions to be viewed and reviewed for weeks to come. I was conscious enough not to move, to freeze my face, but some facial muscles are involuntary, especially in the moment of surprise. I bounced a tennis ball off the grass to release energy, unfreeze my joints, make sure I could still move. I said, “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

  The umpire called us back to business. Just like that. There was no injury timeout for mortal humiliation. It was the middle of my service game. I walked back to the baseline giving real thought to defaulting the match, but walking away from the Wimbledon semis would be news as big as Dad rioting in disguise.

  I had moments of decent play when the stages of my recovery were anchored in anger but mostly I wanted off the court and I couldn’t mount a sustained and serious level of play. I dropped three sets in a row. There was no crowd noise at all the entire way. They all felt a measure of my embarrassment. They didn’t want to be there either, as though they felt they were intruding on me despite being paid ticket holders.

  I showered with my forehead pressed to the tile, water aimed at the back of my neck as hot as it would go. I was certain they wouldn’t fine me for skipping the post-match media event.

  In the end I decided to go because that is what is expected, that is what we do. We’re creatures of schedules and routines.

  I sat behind the cloth-covered folding table, a bottle of water and microphone in front of me. The questions came in a flurry, on top of each other, none about tennis, all about Dad.

  Part of me was glad it happened. I could say to them, now do you see? Now do you understand what I’ve been dealing with?

  My mouth had not responded, which made the questions come more furiously, attempts at a rephrase, a new line of inquiry.

  I realized it was a mistake to come. I was wounded, raw. I’d say something that revealed too much, make things worse for myself. The press didn’t feel they were intruding at all. Cameras clicked and dozens of reporters called out their questions like a pen of excited chickens.

  “My dad is not well. Obviously. I’ll get him help.” I stood and walked out.

  CHAPTER

  38

  Within hours of the match I got two phone calls that mattered. The first was Mom.

  “Honey, I’m so sorry. Are you okay? I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Oh, dear God, how could he.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s on a flight back to Philadelphia now.”

  “He needs help, Mom.”

  “I know, it’s terrible what he did. He’ll see that. He’ll feel awful about it.”

  “I hope you’re not asking for sympathy.”

  “Of course not, I’m sorry. No, it’s just that things can get so dark for him. He loves you so much, Anton. He drives himself crazy, he doesn’t know what to do about it. He feels shut out.”

  “Mom, after what you just saw, if you put one bit of this on me, I’m hanging up. For good.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m sorry.”

  “Stop saying that. Stop apologizing.”

  She choked down another apology and there was silence. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “That’s more like it.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. What can I do to help?”

  “Nothing, except stop making excuses for him.”

  “Of course not.”

  “He needs help.”

  “I know. Believe me. I want him to get into a better place.”

  “I don’t want him anywhere near me. You tell him that.”

  “I hope you know how much he loves you, Anton. He’s very intense.”

  I just exhaled. There was a long silence.

  “Your father and I are both former athletes. Neither of us knew what to do for a while after our own sports careers. We had you and Panos and I was able to throw myself into mothering two babies. I could do that twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He threw himself into his finance career but he never loved it.” Incredible. I don’t think she even realized she was still making excuses. She couldn’t help herself. “By the time Panos and you were in kindergarten and in school to three o’clock I was right back to not knowing how to be an individual. Your father threw himself into you.”

  “Are you done?”

  “I just want you to know that he cares.” She was desperate. She wasn’t trying to make sense.

  “Mom, at this point I don’t want to hear about the reasons. I don’t want to understand it, don’t want to figure out how to deal with it. All that’s left anymore is to eliminate it.”

  “Anton.”

  “Get him some help. If he comes to another match, ever, I’ll get a restraining order and I swear to God, I’ll have him thrown in jail.”

  * * *

  Two hours later my phone rang again. “Anton, of course I saw. I’m sorry,” said Ana.

  I was in my hotel in London. I’d tried a movie, food, a book, wine, writing my first-ever journal entry. Everything made me unhappy so after fluttering around the room like an indecisive twit, I was sitting in a dark room imagining I had sunk to the bottom of the ocean for rest. I had booked a flight to Florida for the next day. “Thanks.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I hadn’t heard her voice in nine months. The last time I saw her was the other great shit-show of recent memory, but that didn’t matter. Her voice felt good. “Maybe a little.”

  “Your dad’s an obsessive jerk. You’ve known that.”

  “True.”

  “How do you feel?”

  Ugh. “Alone. I talked to my mom. Sort of. There’s no talking to her really.”

  “She protects him?”

  “It’s mind-boggling.”

  We sat with the phone connecting us for a while, silent, but I was less alone. “Your dad’s also a malignant narcissist,” she said. “I looked it up.”

  “Mmm,” I said. “About that. Ana, I was out of line.”

  “We don’t need to get into it. Just making a bad joke.”

  There hadn’t been
any news about Ana and Caleb in months. The last I saw was a photo of them splashing through knee-deep water in St. Barts months ago. Still engaged, still no wedding. “Thanks for letting me off the hook.”

  “I created a bad situation. Let’s leave it there.”

  “Done,” I said. “How’s Caleb?” Was that leaving it there? Same guy but different topic, sort of.

  “Good, overcommitted. Two films in postproduction, shooting one that’s running over and needs to delay the start of the next.”

  “No time for weddings.” Couldn’t help that.

  “Probably a good thing. The engagement happened in a rush.”

  I didn’t ask directly about second thoughts she might be having. That might have blown up in my face. Or made me sound desperate. And I didn’t want to extinguish the glimmer of hope I felt in hearing the doubt in her voice. My masochism again, because I felt we were supposed to be together so I viewed all events as a path to that end, like a lost driver on vaguely familiar roads who thinks each next turn is the one that will put him back on track. On the bright side, Dad was almost entirely out of my mind. “Good to take your time. Be sure about it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He has great hair.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “A little short though.”

  “I’m five-four. Don’t be a short-ist.”

  “How’s your writing?”

  “It’s going well, thanks. Anton, I called to talk to you about you, your dad.”

  “This is better, trust me. It’s helping.” She didn’t answer right away. Either disbelief or disappointment. “I need to get to the same place you are with parents. Talk on the phone a few times a year. I’m probably there already as of today.”

  “What I saw today was scary. He has a lot of rage.”

  “He’s a frustrated old man. I punched him, a couple weeks ago. Knocked him out.”

  “What was the fight about?”

  “We were at a wedding. Panos got married. Dad was more obnoxious than usual, either drunk or hungover when I saw him and he picked a fight. Except I’ve been thinking since that maybe I wanted it, brought it on in a way. Maybe I picked it too.”

  “I know you, Anton. Pretty well, I think. You choose distance from him over fights with him. But you’re strong and stand up for yourself so if he comes after you then there’s going to be a fight. You’re a good person and I know what you did was okay, and probably sent him the right message.”

  “The message was to sneak into Wimbledon to start a riot during my match?”

  “Your dad needs more time than most to hear the message.”

  I took a deep breath, sunk into the couch, felt good, warm in my chest. “I miss you.” What the hell. Nothing to lose.

  “I miss you too.” Not mere reciprocity. She thought about that before she said it.

  “I’d like to see you.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Damn!

  “I can’t see you without telling Caleb. That would be,” it hung for a moment, “not right.”

  “I understand.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you,” she said. For what? Patience? She thanked me for something. A masochist would take that as a good sign.

  “Thanks for the call, Ana.”

  CHAPTER

  39

  Ana didn’t get back to me. I had made the stakes pretty high so I shouldn’t have expected her to. They didn’t break off the engagement but there was still not a wedding announcement, so the length of the engagement was becoming newsworthy.

  The next twelve months I played hurt a lot. Nothing major, nothing for the newspapers, just nagging stuff. Sore knees, sore shoulder, sore wrist, temperamental lower back. Sometimes my lower back would seize and cripple me, then Bobby would get some cortisone shots in me to knock back the pain and inflammation and get me back on the court. I was into the second half of my twenties and I noticed recovery was taking a little longer, even with the help from drugs.

  I’d skip a tournament to get two weeks off here and there, enough time to rest but not enough to heal. By the third or fourth match back after a two-week break, I’d have the same pains, same cortisone shots. Like a car that’s overheating and needs to fully reset before it can run right again, but I didn’t have the time to reset my body. I had to play. I needed tournament points to keep my ranking. If a player doesn’t enter enough tournaments in the year, skipping has the same effect as a first-round loss.

  I wondered how many of my injuries were the result of the regular wear and tear of an eleven-month season on a 6'3" frame, and how many were the result of my steroid program commanding an unnatural level of performance from my body.

  I remembered deaths of old NFL players like Lyle Alzado, some of the Pittsburgh Steelers from the 70s, all the WWF professional wrestlers from the 80s dying off. I had to believe the medicine was a little better now, a little cleaner.

  Most of the American guys a few years older than me who played when I was first coming up were all long gone. Rufus Parker hadn’t played a professional tournament in two years and was running a tennis camp for teens in San Diego. In tennis, a player can go from kid to veteran in the span of what might be an internship for most industries. And a player can go from a veteran to gone and forgotten in the same span of time.

  Bobby made small adjustments to my steroid program. Always tweaking, optimizing, keeping me at the maximum. We’d committed to that for a few more years, as long as I could stay at the top of the game. Money was coming to me from places I’d never imagined before.

  Of course the prize money was good and the sports apparel endorsements were great, and that I expected. But my agent also got money deals for me on fragrances, watches, private airlines, clothing labels, cars. I never did much for any of these deals. I just allowed my agent to tell people they could use my name, and they paid me. What my agent called “passive income.” It was more than my prize money.

  There was a lot invested in staying on top of the game. My body was reminding me all the time that my run at number one would be finite and that my run in the game at all wouldn’t be much longer than the time at number one. I didn’t feel a slow decline coming on. I felt a collapse, like the snapping of a rope bridge over a canyon.

  I also increased the amount of alcohol I drank during my two-week mini-breaks. I dated no one seriously. Tennis was a sentence and I needed to serve my time first and until then I’d make do with the company I could find.

  I was in my New York apartment drinking beer with Adam on a mini-break when Gabe called my phone. I muted the TV and tried to sound sober. “Hey, Gabe.”

  “Anton, we have a problem.”

  Gabe was never dramatic. He didn’t talk that way so I stood up as a reflex, which reminded me how drunk I was. “What’s up?”

  Adam looked over since the TV was muted.

  Gabe said, “You got flagged. BB&T Atlanta Open. The test came back positive.”

  “Bullshit. That’s not possible.” I sounded drunk since I was starting to panic and forgetting to try to sound sober. “Gabe, I don’t flag these, ever.” My brain was scrambling. In calm moments, I’ve wanted out of tennis plenty of times, but now this felt like a death sentence. First humiliation, then death, and I was having a physical reaction to the news. My heart was pounding more blood into my skull than the veins there could handle and I was out of breath. “Could there be a mix-up? Did they make a mistake?”

  “No, it’s no mistake, it’s too far down the path. I spoke to the lawyer for the ITF. They’ve checked and rechecked.”

  “How the fuck did this happen?” I was still standing, walking now, and Adam stood too.

  “I don’t know. Maybe they started using a different agent in the test, maybe Bobby tried something new he shouldn’t have.”

  “Fucking Bobby.”

  “Let’s pick this up when we get together in person.”

  That was code
for shut-the-hell-up-about-your-steroid-program while talking on the phone, just in case, and I was sober enough to get it. “Fine.”

  “There’s a bit of good news,” he said.

  It took me a moment but I circled the room back to the sofa, sat, and said, “What?”

  “Well, the thing is, you’re the number one player in the world.”

  “So what?”

  “That gives you some leverage, even in a situation like this.”

  “What do I do?”

  “You won’t have to do anything, other than say yes to what I expect will be a pretty sweet deal. Under the circumstances.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “He wouldn’t say, but we have a meeting. Tomorrow. In New York.”

  * * *

  We met at Keens Steakhouse in Midtown at 11:30am the next day. The lunch crowd hadn’t come yet so there were only a few waiters getting ready and a hostess in front. The restaurant was dark with low ceilings and stretched far back like a cave.

  The hostess was expecting us and took us in a different direction, up a flight of stairs then turned right and opened a set of heavy double doors.

  “Your party is here. Welcome to the Theodore Roosevelt Room.”

  Two men stood at the far side of a huge, round table that could seat twenty-five. One was tanned with black hair and a trim tailored, bright-blue suit with a purple tie. He said, “Anton, Gabe, thank you for coming. Come in, come in.” He had a Spanish accent. He came around the table to shake our hands and lead us to two seats at the table, leaving one seat of space between us and them.

  “Of course,” said Gabe.

  “My apologies,” said the man. “I didn’t know this table would be so absurd for our purposes today, but I wanted a private room and this surely will be private.”

  There were old tobacco pipes and animal heads hung around the walls. I stayed standing and speechless. I was nervous. I was a convict waiting for my sentencing to be read.

  “My name is Chi Chi Ruiz. I serve as the Executive Vice President of the International Tennis Federation. My office is in the London headquarters.” He had a smile full of very white teeth, he was happy, relaxed, like we were all here for a social lunch. He put a hand on the shoulder of the man in a charcoal suit next to him. “This is Alan Eberhart with Couchman Harrington Associates, the law firm that we keep on retainer. It’s necessary that Alan be here today,” he said by way of apology.