Trophy Son Page 18

  “Hello,” said Alan. He was so curt it was hard for an accent to work its way into the syllables but I detected British.

  He shook hands with two pumps for each me and Gabe, then sat, so then we all sat too. I still hadn’t said a word.

  Chi Chi said, “Thanks again for coming,” which was a silly thing to say. It wasn’t a favor. I had to come. “We all know the unfortunate reason we’re here and Alan and I have come all the way to New York so we can handle this situation in a way that is best for the ITF, best for you, best for the game of tennis, best for the fans of the game of tennis. Now, I have to tell you, this is a highly political issue within the ITF leadership, but over the last week we’ve worked out some ideas for moving forward. Alan will take us through the basics.” Gabe and I were scared, Alan seemed angry. Chi Chi turned to Alan with a lunatic smile.

  Alan started, “By way of background,” he had the tone of reading text he hated, “in 1993 the ITF and ATP began the Joint Anti-Doping Programme. In 2006 the ITF took control of the programme for the men’s tour and in 2007 for the women’s tour as well. The ITF handles all drug testing at ITF-sponsored events, including the Grand Slam events, as well as all ATP-sanctioned events.” He paused. “The ITF is the governing body for drug testing.” This sounded very much like a threat.

  “So you just deal with us,” said Chi Chi, putting on a positive spin.

  Alan ignored him and continued in official speak, “On July thirty-first of this year, at the BB&T Atlanta Open, the ITF conducted a routine post-match drug test of Anton Stratis. The testing detected banned substances.” He paused and shuffled a new paper to the top of his stack. “Mr. Stratis, the test detected three banned substances. First, diuretics, a banned substance commonly used to help the body lose fluids and mask the presence of other drugs. Second, beta-2 agonists, a banned substance commonly used to relax smooth muscle around the lungs, enabling greater lung capacity and higher performance. Third, anabolic steroids, a banned substance commonly used to build muscle and speed physical recovery.”

  I wished Bobby was there so he could also receive the failing grade personally. Our enormous room and enormous table were all quiet for a moment, then Chi Chi laughed. Through his laughter he said, “It really was a spectacular failure, Anton. I mean big-time.” He shook his head. “So here we are. Our head clinician, Dr. Miller, ventured a guess that the diuretic in your program failed. It showed up present in your test but didn’t mask anything.”

  I nearly thanked him for the gratuitous analysis.

  Gabe said, “If we appeal?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Chi Chi, keeping the floor from Alan. “I’ve looked at this from a lot of angles. I pushed for a Therapeutic Use Exemption but there was no support for me on that. Back-dating an application for a TUE from you would be tricky, and there has been no apparent injury or media coverage of an injury to support the claim. Plus if it ever got out which substances came up in the test, that wouldn’t line up either.” He raised his hands. “The point is, I’m trying to help you.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” said Gabe.

  “Gabe, you’re dead to rights,” said Chi Chi. “There’s no appeal. That would be just a big media circus, and nobody wants that.”

  Gabe nodded.

  Chi Chi said, “But there’s good news in all of that, if you listen to exactly what I just said. Nobody wants a big media circus!” He looked from Gabe, now to me. “You’re the number one fucking player in the world!” He sounded like Raul Julia. “That’s the point of leverage I’ve been working on your behalf.”

  Alan looked frustrated and I realized Chi Chi was a rogue operator trying to handle this in a way that made lawyers squirm. He wanted my test gone as much as I did. Not because he liked me personally. He liked that I sold tickets and TV rights and tennis needed a clean image to keep growing revenue.

  I still hadn’t heard my sentence issued and I didn’t feel ready to speak. Gabe said, “Where did that leverage get us?”

  “Well, again, this is highly political,” said Chi Chi. “We don’t want our number one player out on a drug ban. But we can’t just do nothing either. That won’t fly. The ITF leadership is clear that they won’t hand out a pass on this. So where does that leave us? How do we satisfy both?”

  Gabe and I looked at each other. I had the feeling he was right that we might get a sweet deal.

  “A six-month suspension,” said Chi Chi. He looked back and forth at us both trying to gauge a reaction. Gabe and I stayed stone faced. “But we won’t call it a suspension. There’s no need to label it. As a practical matter, you will not play for six months. Release a statement about some injury, make something up that takes six months to heal. Take some time off.” He smiled his biggest yet. “So you do six months. Call it a vacation, call it a suspension. What’s in a name?”

  Gabe and I looked at each other. I was thrilled. I knew Gabe was too. This was the best outcome he had hoped for but he was savvy enough not to look thrilled in front of them. “Six months is a long time,” he said.

  Chi Chi looked annoyed for the first time. “Gabe, this is a gift and you know it.” His comments were all directed to Gabe. “You know we have to come down with some punishment. I’m saving your athlete’s neck here. It’s six months, and that overlaps December which is a month out anyway, so you’re really looking at five. You can keep training, quietly, off the radar. Anton keeps his reputation, all that nice money coming in on the side. And tennis avoids a black eye.”

  “Well,” said Gabe.

  Chi Chi pointed a finger at Gabe. I could see he had plenty of fire behind the smile. He had been sent here to sew this up, make sure we cooperated. “You need to work with me on this, Gabe. It’s the best deal you’ll get. Take it now, as is, or I promise your life and Anton’s life will turn to shit.”

  Gabe looked at me and nodded. I nodded back then said to Chi Chi, “Alright.” My one and only word of the meeting.

  The group’s focus returned to Alan who said, “This is a verbal understanding between the parties. For a period of six months, commencing today, Anton Stratis agrees that he will not enter any ITF- or ATP-sanctioned event, nor will he play tennis in public in any way that demonstrates he is at full physical health during the six-month period. Should you apply for entry to any event your application will be rejected. The ITF reserves the right to publish the drug test results in the future if it feels in its own judgment that Anton Stratis has not fulfilled this agreement in good faith.”

  Chi Chi was smiling again. “Call it a wrist injury. Show up to play again in six months, wear a brace, put a little mascara on it. Enjoy some vacation, then boom, boom, boom, you’re back in.”

  CHAPTER

  40

  I couldn’t sleep well. One thing I’d always been able to do with excellence and consistency was sleep, but that skill had left me literally overnight. I became like an upset octogenarian who complains he can never get more than a few hours snooze at a time.

  My youthful battles with OCD had shifted to hours of staring at the ceiling in a dark room, wandering mind, hallucinating eyes, trying warm milk, trying warm milk with bourbon, getting up to pee six times and returning to bed each time with a new configuration and body contortions, like running on a treadmill that moved me back farther from sleep the faster I tried to run toward it. By the middle of the night I was the most alert and crazed I’d be in a twenty-four-hour period.

  The daytime would be shot. I’d muddle through a workout with Gabe then take a nap which would certainly condemn me to another night of hell.

  It started exactly when my sentence began. My absence. I could call it neither a vacation nor a suspension, so when the team needed to make reference to that six-month period, we’d taken to calling it my absence.

  Parts of the absence were okay. My body was healing, proving that the damage I’d done wasn’t yet permanent. My back didn’t seize, my knees didn’t ache. I could stretch my muscles, move w
ithout pain.

  Though as my body came back to me, new mental battles began. This was my first taste of what the end would be like. It was only a faux ending. I knew I’d play again and needed to train, but it was six months to relax with no match pressure. I had days in a row away from the court and the gym. Ninety-six hours sometimes.

  Professional athletes are handed a schedule with greater detail than that for a head of state. I didn’t need to decide what to eat and how much, when to go to the gym, for how long and what to do there, when to go to the tennis court and which battery of drills, how many more calories for fuel, how much free time, when to go to bed, when to wake back up and do it again.

  It’s not that I had no say. I took advice from Gabe and Bobby, but I had all the say. It was a system and the good thing about systems was they took out variability because you never had to decide anything. The bad thing was when the system went away. I had to wake up in the morning and decide everything. I had no ability to structure my own day. I was lucky to feed myself on the days I didn’t train.

  At night I would lie in bed and think about what kind of future this would be for me. I’d think about Joe Montana. How did he relearn to structure his time without a coach blowing whistles at him, giving him a playbook and workout regimen, a locker room complete with teammates and a community that wouldn’t and couldn’t leave him?

  So that would keep me awake and I’d try the trick to empty my head for sleep by saying, “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” over and over again and I thought, how fucking ironic. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.

  At 2am Eastern Standard Time, I called her phone, not knowing where on the planet she was. “You awake?”

  “Hey, yes,” said Ana. “You okay?”

  She already knew about my steroid use so I told her all about my suspension-vacation-absence. “I have a greater understanding of assisted living. Why shuffleboard and bingo are so popular.”

  “Bored?”

  “Something a few degrees beyond that.” Want to come visit Florida, I thought, then said, “Where are you?”

  “Toronto.” Still engaged, still no wedding.

  Different country, same time zone though. “I woke you?”

  “I was getting up in six hours anyway.”

  “What’s going on in Toronto?”

  “Film festival. I had a role in a picture that we entered here. A few press appearances to do here and there, otherwise just goofing around.”

  Please ask me, please ask me. “Sounds like a good time. Toronto’s a fun town.”

  Then it came. “Would you like to come up? Check it out?” She even sounded a little nervous. The good kind, like she was worried I’d say no. “Put all your free time to something useful.”

  “Right. Take in some culture.” I felt sleep might come after this call. “I’ll look at flights. Dinner tomorrow night?”

  * * *

  I had a car meet me at the Toronto airport to drive directly to The Forth, a restaurant on the east end of the city, to meet Ana, and I texted her that I had landed and was on the way. It was the first time in my life I’d flown alone. It was a nice feeling. Like I was skipping class, getting away with something.

  Toronto’s a cosmopolitan city and The Forth was a fancy place. I picked it because it had authentic Canadian food. Whatever that means.

  The hostess took me right to the table so I could wait for Ana there. I wasn’t big on fancy restaurants but the people in them tend to leave you alone. I sipped a gin and tonic until Ana arrived. It occurred to me that the last time I dropped in on a woman I cared so much about, things did not go well.

  She trailed the hostess, weaving to our table, to me. There was no football punter attached to her backside. As she approached, waves of diners stopped moving and stared, like a rolling blackout across a city, until the entire restaurant was frozen, watching her walk to the table where I stood and kissed her lips, something I’d decided to do during the gin and tonic. Let them write about it in the blogs.

  Ana kissed me back as though this was how we greeted each other. Dinner was off to a good start.

  Ana saw my gin and tonic, decided it looked good and ordered one for herself. I liked when a date copied my drink order. It signaled she trusted me, felt safe in my hands.

  “You look good,” she said. “Some time away from the tennis tour seems to agree with you.”

  I’d gained five pounds and probably did look healthier. “There’s plenty of room for agreement,” I said, “with some adjustment.”

  “You wouldn’t be bored for long. You can’t really move on now because you’re going to play again. When it’s time to really move on, you will.”

  I raised my glass in a toast to that remark and drank. “How’s the festival?”

  “It’s been fun, a lot of friends are here. Some good pictures and ours is getting some good reviews. Might pick up an award.”

  “Congratulations. Have you had a chance to see some of the other pictures?”

  “Yes, most of them.”

  “Which are the good ones?”

  She leaned back and laughed, sipped her drink then returned it to the table. “Don’t small-talk me, Anton. You flew to Toronto. Out with it.”

  She was dynamite. “You invited me to Toronto.”

  “All the more reason that it’s your turn.”

  So it was time to lay it out there. “Look, I … You know I’ve cared for you, I think I’ve loved you, for a long time. With your schedule and my schedule, we’d see each other a few weeks a year, even if you were a roadie with me between your pictures, which is a bad idea, that’s the best we’d do. So I’ve always convinced myself that it’s a bad idea, that we’d take something that could be good and we’d ruin it by forcing impossible circumstances.”

  I waited a moment, giving her a chance to say something, but she watched me.

  “I also had a bad experience with a girl when I was young and maybe that makes me a little tentative.”

  “How bad?”

  “Bad, humiliating. Another guy.” That was all I would say about Liz until we were old and gray. “But now I don’t want to wait anymore. I might play two more years, three at the most. I’d be free of tennis then, but I don’t want to be a slave to it even that long. I love you and I want that part of my life to start. It gets down to what I said already. I don’t want to wait anymore.”

  “I’m engaged.”

  She had tears in her eyes. This was either very good or very bad and it was unfair to us both to leave it unresolved. “Ana, I’m going to get up, walk to the bathroom. I’ll linger there a few minutes. When I get back, if you’re gone, you should know that you’ll always have a special place in my heart and I wish you well. I’m happy I’ve had the chance to know you. If, when I get back, you’re still here, I’ll know there’s a chance for us.”

  I stood. Seemed like a good plan but my legs were unsteady. I walked to the bathroom with my arms forward and to the sides for balance as though holding ski poles. I didn’t look back.

  In the bathroom I bent over the sink and splashed my face, then gripping the sides of the sink and still bent forward I looked up at my reflection, so close I could see the capillaries in the whites of my eyes. I asked what kind of a life are you going to have, Anton? There are butterfly effects that lead to sliding doors, massive determinations in our lives due to faraway forces. We can’t live our lives paying attention to these forces because they are tiny or even unknown, and they’re constant. But this was the tempest, right here, right now.

  I closed my eyes, counted to one hundred eighty, frozen over the sink while the bathroom attendant stared and wondered if he needed to call the manager. At one-eighty I stood straight, fixed my hair, took a deep breath. “Please be there.”

  The men’s room was down a short corridor from the dining room. I could see the exact tile in the floor where I’d have my first view of our table. I started to regret what I’d done. Why did I put that pressure on her? It was unnatural.


  I got to the tile, stopped, didn’t look. Salvation or execution? Not the healthiest way to look at things, but that’s how it felt at the time. I looked over. Two half-full gin and tonics, tiny flower arrangement, candle, flatware, salt, pepper. No Ana. She was gone. Of course she was.

  I stood there like a fool, watching the empty chairs, hoping the view would change. I felt sick and couldn’t possibly eat. Maybe I could put some cash on the table for the drinks and the time and sneak out.

  A hand came around my waist from behind, then another and a body pressed close against me. Ana whispered, “I’m right here.”

  I turned, not understanding, still too deep in the other emotions. I looked her in the eye. “You’re still here,” I repeated her.

  She laughed. “Yes.”

  I hugged her into me. “Thank God.”

  CHAPTER

  41

  My first tournament back was Houston and Ana travelled with me. She wasn’t with me in the way that new and infatuated couples can’t be apart. She was with me in the way that couples of many years develop an instinct for when their partner needs support.

  Houston is a smaller tournament, which I preferred for my return. It was played on clay, which I did not prefer.

  Ana had slipped out of bed so I could sleep and she was drinking coffee, reading the paper in the next room of our hotel suite. I opened my eyes and unfolded my arm across the bed where she had been. It was 9am and I’d slept for ten hours.

  I slid my legs off the side. “Good morning.”

  Ana stepped into the frame of the bedroom doorway wearing an open robe held apart by her breasts and showed blue panties for a bit of color. “You sleep as well as a nine-month-old.”

  “Only when things are right.”

  She knew I didn’t drink coffee so she carried a bottle of water to me. She straddled my hips, pushing me back on the bed and leaned over me so we were both inside her robe, her warm skin on mine. “After your match today, I’m going to have sex with you.”