Trophy Son Page 2

  Panos said, “Want to get out of here? Go see a movie?”

  Panos was three years older and a senior at the high school where I would be if I were still in school. He was lucky to be there. When I was in the seventh grade I played a coed softball game for fun. Dad had made it clear I was never to play anything but tennis, but this was just a one-time goofy thing with the girls. I turned my ankle rounding first base. When Dad got the call he drove right to school and went to the middle school athletic director. Dad shouted at the guy and when the guy made the mistake of shouting back, Dad put him in the wall. It turned into a big deal at the time but the school didn’t mess with me or Panos. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll take a quick shower and change.”

  Twelve steps to the second floor. Turn right and it was three steps more to my bedroom door. There were sixty-two and one-third tiles on the floor of the shower stall if you include all the tiles that I approximated were cut either in half or in thirds to fit the space of the stall. I showered for one hundred seconds unless it was right after a match in which case I showered for five hundred seconds. I counted this in my head and I counted a perfect second. I tested myself against a clock almost every day.

  I noticed the smallest shit everywhere I went. A little piece of garbage, a car in a parking lot with headlights on, all the words on all the signs, how many steps it was from anywhere to anywhere else. But if I ever got interrupted, it didn’t matter. I didn’t need to have the count. I didn’t need to see everything around me, I was just observing. Looking for new information.

  It’s funny to think of now. I had all the OCD symptoms but I wasn’t OCD then and I’m not today. I practiced OCD just to fill a void.

  When I look back at these teenage years, it’s one thing to do rote recounting of events and another to penetrate to the contemporaneous emotions. I was a stressed-out, anxious kid and only with the benefit of hindsight can I link the stress to the source.

  I could never make the link then. At the time I just figured I was OCD, and that actually stressed me out too. But the real problem was that I just had no stimulation. At least no stimulation I wanted. No birthday parties, no dates with girls to be nervous and excited about, no new experiences. I ate, slept, played tennis and rested for more tennis. When I rested I didn’t want to think about tennis but had nothing else to think about so I counted and noticed things around me. My brain had to do something and that was all the material it had to work with.

  Panos knew it was better to slip out. Let Dad think Panos was studying and I was resting. He’d hear the car start but by that time it would be too late. We could be down the road and pretend we didn’t hear our cell phones ring.

  These were the oasis moments of my teenage years and worthwhile even if Dad was pissed when we got home. Panos and I jogged to the car with stomach muscles clenched and barely breathing. Panos drove a Porsche 911 that cost Dad less than my tennis travel each year so it was a way to balance things out between the kids. We laughed when we got on the street, turned the radio way up and I looked at the front lawns of other people’s lives.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Dad landscaped the perimeter of our tennis court with dense, twelve-foot-high hedges so that we couldn’t see the neighbors or even our own house when playing. There was a path of flagstones leading from our house through two acres of lawn down a slope to the court. Forty-three flagstones. I would step past the double overhead hedges to the court that held back the outside world so that I felt like I was boarding a ship at sea.

  “Forehands down the line,” he said and he angled the ball machine toward my deuce court. On this particular day I was nine years old. Still early in my training with Dad, still figuring out my limits. It was more than ninety degrees in August. Dad liked to train at the hottest time of day to condition me for adversity.

  The machine pumped balls to me in three-second intervals. I hit fifty while he would retrieve them and dump them back in the machine to maintain a never-ending inventory of practice balls.

  “Cross court,” he yelled, and I adjusted to pull my forehands across my body for fifty more balls.

  We did backhands down the line, then cross court, then he changed the setting on the machine so that it would oscillate like a fan and move me around.

  I could feel the direct sun going through layers of skin like I was being microwaved, but worse and closer was the heat radiating up from our baked hard court. I had drenched my clothes with sweat, my temples were pounding and my feet inside my sneakers were the hottest of all. I could feel the unnatural temperature. “Water break,” I said, my voice high, far from pubescent.

  “No water break. This is a match.”

  “I drink water during matches.”

  “You want to be ready for a match, you train for more than a match.”

  “I need water.”

  “Fifty more, then water.”

  The pounding in my temples was no longer a beat but a constant hum and I felt a surge of energy as my anger grew. Boys at that age are ill-equipped to manage anger so it usually gets energetic and confused and crosses into rage.

  I started hitting my hardest shots. I wasn’t thinking about form or footwork or keeping the ball in the court at all. I just wanted power and I directed the balls at the machine, and at Dad. Balls were reaching him on the fly like comets and he had to skip out of the way.

  “Watch it, Anton.”

  I started hitting my normal forehands again. The machine drummed away while he collected balls along the back fence with his back to me. With no calculation of consequence I cranked a forehand toward the back fence and Dad. With the experience of hundreds of thousands of hits, my mind could instinctively compute the flight path of a ball and I sensed danger. This screaming line drive made right for the back of his head like a sniper shot. I stood frozen in terrified amazement and listened for the hollow pop of tennis ball on hard skull. The impact knocked his head forward. He turned to me with a disbelieving face.

  “Water break,” I said, ignoring the calamity. I walked to the net post where we kept the cooler. I’d had a few sips before he took his first steps toward me. I knew it would be bad so I drank what I could before he reached me.

  He grabbed the water from my hand and threw it over the hedges in a motion that was spasmodic with anger. He kept his voice weirdly even as though if he could control his voice he could control me. “Get back on the baseline.”

  “I need a break. I’m getting tired and playing sloppy. I don’t want to practice sloppy.”

  “Get back on the baseline.” This time with an even voice but through gritted teeth.

  “Two minutes break,” I said.

  He turned from me ninety degrees for a moment and when he turned back his face had reddened and contorted into a berserk version of my father with fury and force, the kind of power that gives humans the desperate and inhuman strength to lift a car or break a wall. In a voice like a passing express train he yelled, “Get back on the baseline.”

  So I did. In a typical practice a player might hit a thousand balls. In ninety-plus degrees, that’s a good practice. Before the yell, I’d hit five hundred. I hit five hundred more after the yell and the length of my baseline was a puddle of my own sweat. I lay down my racket and started to take off my shirt which had long ago absorbed the maximum of sweat.

  “Put your shirt back on.”

  “Dad, it weighs ten pounds.”

  “Put it on. You’re match training. You don’t play topless tournaments.”

  “I don’t play tournaments like this either. I’d change shirts. At least let me put on a dry shirt.”

  Reasonable. But he’d already issued a command and that mattered more than reason. He wouldn’t change commands on my suggestion. “Keep that shirt on.” The ball machine pumped balls down my backhand side.

  “Jesus,” I said under my breath and I stood, enjoying a few moments not shuffling my feet into position and ripping ground strokes. Four more balls passed. Twelve sec
onds.

  “You’re wasting my time and yours,” he said. “You have three more balls to get that shirt back on and play.”

  “Dad.” Futile protest.

  “One,” he said. Three seconds later, “Two.”

  “Dad.”

  “Three,” and he started walking to my side of the court in the same deliberate and resolute way he’d done earlier.

  I fanned the shirt out and started my arms through. It was hard to pull over me because it was so wet. I saw the facial tics as his inner berserker wrestled into control. I got my head through the collar right as he squared up in front of me. That just gave him something to grab on to.

  At that age I weighed about ninety pounds, just more than a third of Dad. He took two fists full of shirt and jerked me off the ground above his head and walked me back against the court fence and leaned into me, making the fence bow out, keeping eye contact the whole way.

  From my earliest years he wouldn’t tolerate slacking off, complaints, and certainly not talking back. No kid stuff whatsoever. My fits of youth were broken as he would break a racehorse. When I felt my own rage, he wouldn’t allow the expression of it.

  “You keep that goddamn shirt on and play. I am sick and tired of you not listening. I swear to God, Anton, if you waste one more second of my time out here I will smack you.” All the while he pushed me deeper into the fence and I felt the diamond shapes of the wire digging into my skin.

  “Okay,” I managed, terrified. For the first time scared of a real beating.

  He put me down and we played on. Five hundred more balls which was of course too much, too long to be out there, but I realized later that he felt some guilt at having been so physical with me and wanted to put time between that moment and when he next spoke to me.

  At the end of the five hundred balls he said, “Okay, come on up, let’s get some water.”

  We met halfway at the net where I drank water fast, so my stomach hurt. He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled my little body into his mass. “You’re one hell of a player,” he said. We were both sweaty messes. “One hell of a player.” He kissed the top of my head. Then he knelt down in front of me and held my face in both his hands. “You have a great attitude and you’re working hard and I’m going to be there with you the whole way. You’re going to be one of the truly great players and I love you very much.”

  Our training got more and more that way. Beat me, love me. Like Ike Turner.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Dad had been both my trainer and coach from the beginning. He had done the same for Panos who was slightly smaller and less physical than I was. Panos grew to be 6'1", two inches shorter than I would be, but he was quick and could have been a great player. The problem was that Dad made what he thought were mistakes in the way that he disciplined Panos and he wouldn’t make those mistakes with me. He had been inconsistent with Panos, let him have too many glimpses of life not under Dad’s thumb. He made sure early on with me.

  Mom and Dad always let me read. They encouraged it. If I couldn’t go anywhere physically, I could at least take a journey with a book. When I read a book I liked, I would then read everything else by that author so my reading came in phases defined by the writer. I had a Hemingway phase, Faulkner, John Irving, Nelson DeMille. When I was fourteen, I was in the middle of my Dickens phase.

  I loved Dickens. Unfairness, unhappiness, suffering, heroes and villains, glimmers of hope at love and of a way out. David Copperfield was the best and the best of that was the opening line, the idea of being the hero of your own life. I thought so much back then about whether or not I would be the hero of my own life. Now I understand how turned around my interpretation of that line was. Back then I took it as a mandate to succeed, win tournaments, be the best. But being the number one tennis player doesn’t make me the hero of my own life. It makes me the hero of someone else’s life. Maybe Dad’s.

  Being the hero of my own life is about something else, something internal. It’s about who has their hands on the steering wheel that’s inside me. It needed to be me and it never was then, and I didn’t understand that until much later.

  At fourteen I equated heroism with winning at tennis. I was determined and successful.

  Dad wanted to manage me the way Richard Williams managed Venus and Serena. He wanted to develop me in secret, apart from the tennis tour, then I would be this enigma who one day sprang onto the circuit and kicked everyone’s ass.

  But men develop differently than women. Female prodigies can dominate the pros as early as fifteen. Men take several more years to mature physically and I think mentally too. There was no way to keep me in secret that long. I needed to improve by playing matches with good players. That meant playing satellite tournaments. I started to win. A lot. I got noticed.

  I was not yet fifteen and won a competitive sixteen-and-under tournament in Florida. I was playing great then, and I was happy. Not because of my tennis results but because of the life of travel. Travel was new to me and new stuff made me happy. I hadn’t learned to hate hotels yet. The palm trees, flat terrain and big skies of Florida still felt exotic and were a pleasant benefit of my hard work.

  Dad and I would sit in first class where I’d look through magazine pages of impossibly blue waters, white sand and tan legs. Pictures of healthy indulgences that were restorative and deserved. Achievement and reward. Those places were never our destination but I loved those magazines and studied them.

  “Anton!”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m with USTA Magazine.”

  “Hi.” I was walking off the court after the quick ceremony at the net for my tournament win. Dad saw us from the bleachers but the reporter got to me first.

  “May I ask you some questions?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What will you do after winning a match like this?”

  “Take a shower. Eat something.” My answer was so moronic I realized it may even have sounded flip. “I think Dad and I are flying home to Philadelphia tonight.” This sounded more sophisticated.

  The reporter held up a recording device. “Which pro do you admire most, past or present?”

  I thought Agassi, Rafter, McEnroe, Federer. My game wasn’t much like any of theirs, I just liked them. My game was more like Marat Safin. Tall guy, big serve, moved well, ugly but good two-handed backhand. I was trying to pick one of my favorites when Dad stepped up to us and said, “Anton’s not like anyone else. He’s a unique talent.”

  The reporter said, “You must be Mr. Stratis. Congratulations on your son’s win today.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m with USTA Magazine. I’m hoping to ask a few questions for an article we’d like to run on Anton.”

  Dad wanted to say no. Every blood vessel in his body was pumping no but the interview was already somewhat under way which meant he’d have to cut it off right in the guy’s face and that could result in bad publicity. All he wanted was no publicity for me.

  I had not been expected to go far in this tournament, let alone win it, so Dad was in as great a mood as I’d ever seen him and this carried the moment. “Sure,” he said. “Five minutes.”

  Back then, in conversations I always stood with my head tipped down a bit and I’d look ahead at the other person the way people look over reading glasses that are perched on the bridge of their nose.

  It wasn’t that I was shy. It was that I was handsome and I’d never gotten anything but scorn from Dad for being handsome. It’s one thing not to emphasize positive feedback on looks. It’s another to actively de-emphasize it.

  Dad knew attention to looks diluted attention to tennis. Not just the potential distraction of girls, but he didn’t want me to have anything of personal value other than skill on the court. He’d prefer me ugly. Obedient and focused like a dog.

  The next month my tutor came over to the house—a retired history teacher from the Philadelphia public school system. He was old and smelled old. He talked slo
w and was boring as hell, and even then I knew this was a deliberate choice by Dad to head off any interest in academics that might have developed. But he was a nice, gentle guy and I liked him. His name was Ned. Boring.

  I was so ready to love academics that Ned’s dryness didn’t matter much. We’d share reading lists and talk about books and the characters in them. All in all, we would have a nice time together.

  Mom would check in on the lessons sometimes. She wanted to be there and be a part of it but didn’t know how. I could see her look of uncertainty when she’d open the door a quarter of the way to ask in a bright voice how we were doing, then her awkward expression during the expectant silence after our answer of just fine, then she’d step back and close the door like releasing a tent flap she’d been peeking through.

  Ned was an avid tennis fan, though he admitted he was never much of a player himself. When we’d get together he’d ask about my last matches and my training and what I thought about the top pros. He’d come watch any of my matches that were local. He liked to follow my embryonic tennis career in a way that I appreciated.

  “Good morning, Anton.” We sat across from each other in the dining room at a long rectangular table for twelve and we’d huddle in one corner by the sideboard table with the silver service tray on top.

  “Hi, Ned.” I’d guess he was about seventy. His name was Mr. Billings but he insisted I call him Ned. I think he hated being called Mr. Billings all those years of teaching.

  “I was excited to see this.” He pulled a copy of USTA Magazine from his leather messenger bag then slid it across the table to me. It was opened to the article on me and there was a picture of my face that took a third of one page. “Congratulations.”

  I hadn’t seen it. We didn’t subscribe to USTA Magazine, or if we did, Dad didn’t let me see it. I was sure Dad wouldn’t want me to see this. I leaned over it. The words were all blurry because my eyes were focused on the photo.