Trophy Son Page 3

  It was a nice picture of me. I was looking right into the camera, my smile didn’t look forced. It looked as though I might be happy and unafraid. More than that, it was just me in the photo. Not me and Dad. A person who saw this photo and read this article might think, Here’s this impressive kid, doing it, making it happen.

  I’d never thought of myself that way. Not really. I was always just doing what I was supposed to do, what I was told, which was always made very clear to me. I’d always thought of myself as carrying out instructions as though I were an appendage to someone else’s body.

  This article made me feel like an independent force. There was no mention of Dad anywhere.

  “Thank you,” I said to Ned.

  “You really smoked them at that tournament.”

  “I hope I can keep it up. That was the best I can play.” A lot of the kids I played were almost two years older but the toughest match came against a kid who was only six months older. Ben Archer. I already knew I’d be seeing a lot more of Ben Archer.

  “You’ll get better and better,” said Ned. “You’re on the earliest part of the curve. It isn’t even steep yet.” Ned smiled. “Let’s start with some calculus.”

  The only subject I liked was literature. I hated calculus but I liked my time with Ned. He was kind and treated me like a whole person, and it was something else to do.

  Two weeks later I was at another satellite tournament in North Carolina. These are played at tennis centers, pretty small venues, not like the big stadiums you see on TV for the majors. From watching professional matches as a kid, I always had thought there’d be something of scale, something big, but there wasn’t. It was flat and sprawling. Aluminum bleachers by the courts, no buildings higher than two stories, nothing as big as a high school gym. The spectators usually had a professional connection to tennis or a family connection to a player or they just lived in the neighborhood down the street and thought it would make a fun afternoon to watch some decent tennis live. In North Carolina the tournaments offered sweet tea in an oversized thermos, a nice touch.

  Security wasn’t a big deal at these things so players and spectators wandered the grounds intermingled. There were never paparazzi of any kind. My brush with the reporter at the last tournament had been my first ever.

  Dad walked with me to the court entrance for my first-round match. It was sixty-five degrees, sunny, slight breeze, and the calm of the day matched the calm of the people milling around us. Everything felt pleasant.

  The match schedule was published in advance. Two reporters with cameras were by the court entrance and stepped forward as Dad and I approached. They waved, smiled and raised cameras to take a few shots.

  Dad went nuts, chopping at cameras with his hands and yelling, “Get the fuck out of here.”

  Everyone was surprised by the suddenness and the sickness of his actions. I was surprised only by the suddenness. He must have harbored pent-up rage over the USTA Magazine article that he’d been given a chance to stop and didn’t.

  Dad had a long wingspan and when he swung his arms like that he seemed even bigger, like an angry bear. As soon as the reporters came to their senses, they ran like hell. There were a couple of volunteer ushers nearby but no security and the whole thing was finished in five seconds. Once the reporters ran, the people near us watched Dad and me walk on the court like nothing happened.

  Dad stopped two steps into the court. He wasn’t supposed to come on with me. “Focus, Anton. This is another test.”

  “Okay.”

  “Play great.”

  “I will.”

  I walked to the chair at the side of the court by the net and sat down. Alone. For the next couple hours I’d be in a bubble. That’s where real tennis happens. All alone in a bubble.

  That’s the thing about tennis. There’s no teammate to talk over strategy. There’s no opponent near enough for a verbal exchange. I’m not even allowed to talk to a coach. It’s isolation. In baseball a hitter’s alone at the plate, a pitcher’s alone on the mound. In basketball a player is alone on the free-throw line. But those are only moments. A moment later, the baseball players are back in the dugout slapping asses and spitting tobacco. The basketball player starts running the floor again with nine other guys. Even a boxer gets to rub foreheads and talk trash. My isolation is complete. Only swimming’s isolation can compare to that of tennis.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Liz Betterton had asked me to a school dance. I would have been a sophomore at the time if I had stayed in school. I remembered her vividly from my eighth-grade year. She was one of the girls who developed early. Athletic curves and a full chest, long blonde hair sort of feathered the way Farrah Fawcett wore hers in the 1970s. She looked like someone’s sexy older sister but was our age.

  I had gone straight from the courts of a tournament match to a celebration dinner with Dad at the Wayne Hotel, a fancy boutique hotel near our home. White tablecloths, waiters dressed in white jackets and ties, which is rare for suburban Main Line. It was a small dining room with soft electrical lighting and candles and it was understood that for diners already seated it was not rude to pause conversation and observe new arrivals because that was worthy reconnaissance. Liz was there with her family.

  She seemed to piece together who I was, the odd tennis prodigy who dropped out of school. She waved and I waved back, then we both got shy, though her shyness may have been only for effect.

  Two days later she invited me to the dance and I went tuxedo shopping with Mom who was almost as excited as I was.

  For every boy in my grade throughout middle school, Liz Betterton was an unattainable, celebrity crush. We’d all have hung posters of her in our lockers and on bedroom walls if posters of her existed. As it was we clicked, open-mouthed, at photos on her Facebook page.

  Now I was dating her, kissing her, going places with her, talking on the phone for an hour at a time. Dad didn’t like this. I knew because he pulled me aside and said exactly, “I don’t like this, Anton. You’re distracted.”

  This was the one area where Mom dug in and protected me. She would say, “Let them be, Dear,” and she’d put her hands on her hips and look right at him. It was a look that said I’ve never fought you but on this I will and I’ll find the strength to win. Dad liked his perfect record. He didn’t want to set a precedent of losing a battle to Mom so he never engaged. He notionally allowed the relationship but set little skirmishes to interfere with me and Liz. He’d schedule practice sessions for late on a Saturday or enter me in a tournament to overlap a concert or event Liz and I had planned to attend.

  His interference united Liz and me as rebels against the Empire. He took our romance and made it more adventurous, dangerous, Shakespearean.

  It was still my first year with a driver’s license. Panos let me borrow his car to pick up Liz and take her out. I pulled up in front of her house and the front door opened and she jogged out wearing a miniskirt and cowboy boots. She had a tiny purse on a spaghetti strap that crossed her chest, parting her breasts. The miniskirt flapped with her strides like a matador’s red capote.

  It was part of our routine never to go to the front door of either’s house. It wasn’t a social call. We were the rebels escaping parental clutches. There may as well have been a ladder down from a second-floor bedroom window.

  She ducked, coming through the passenger door headfirst to kiss me and said, “Hi, Lover.”

  That was the best. Calling me Lover. I felt like a grown man. This gorgeous woman sat next to me and I put the car in drive.

  “Panos did some shopping for us,” I said.

  “That sounds lovely.”

  Lovely, she said. I was living out a movie plot. I had no other social life to dilute this, so everything felt like a movie plot. “There’s a picnic basket in the trunk he put together.” It was an eighty-degree day in late June, warm breezes and birds chirping still felt new.

  “Some wine, I hope.”

  “Of course.”


  “Good. All I want to do right now is stretch out against your long body and sip wine. Your dad won’t come looking for you, will he?”

  “No, no way.”

  “What if he did, and found you with me and a bottle of wine?”

  She liked to imagine these confrontations, talk them through. I liked it too. It heightened the risk and in the role play we could insert ourselves as the heroic defenders of youth and romance and make ourselves more attractive to each other.

  We drove to the Willows which is a beautiful park in Wayne that used to be a private estate. It’s full of rolling grassy hills, old trees, ponds and also many geese so the trick is to find an area with no goose crap.

  I found a spot for our blanket then devastated the wine cork, finally having to push the half-shredded thing back down into the bottle so we could drink, and I was feeling amateurish and undeserving of the name Lover.

  She drank the wine and kissed my neck, then pushed me down and sat on my stomach. My hands instinctively went inside her miniskirt and grabbed the flesh of her ass with no panty to buffer my palms.

  “I hope he does come. Asshole.”

  “Who?”

  “Your dad.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m not really hoping for that.” I squeezed her ass. I had big hands and had a firm hold on her like a suction cup. She allowed it and seemed to like it.

  “You’re such a good athlete, baby. The way your body moves when you’re out there. It’s like you can do anything, like you’re magic. And then your dad browbeats you and runs you down. Makes it ugly.”

  It was nice to have someone express outrage on my behalf. It calmed my own outrage even though it was also a validation. “Well, that’s his way,” I said, surprising myself, even as I uttered the words, that I made any defense of him.

  “Then it’s an awful way.” She leaned forward and kissed me then said, “Roll over. I’m going to massage you.”

  We were in a remote part of the park. One other couple was a hundred yards away playing with their baby. I obeyed. We hadn’t had sex of any kind in our four months together. We’d played around in underwear before, but that was it. She worked her fingers over my shoulders and lower back while I pointed my erection to the side so it had a place to go though it still raged against the weight of me on top of it.

  Then Liz said these magical words to me and my erection. “Roll over again.”

  She lay down beside me and pulled a corner of the blanket up over our legs and hips. I had loose athletic shorts on which were easily shifted to let me out. She took me in her right hand.

  Of course I had taken myself in my own hand before and done just fine, but there was something about the first touch of another. The first in my life. Her grasp of me sent a pulse through my body that arched my back and pointed my toes and was better than any orgasm I’d had prior to that time.

  She kissed my ear and stroked my erection while I alternately stared at the sky and clenched my eyes shut.

  In less than a minute I had come. She wiped me and herself with the blanket then poured us more wine while I lay back feeling that my time on Earth had been good.

  We lay together, certain we were more wise than our adult tormentors, confident in the righteousness of our rebellion, smug about it, even.

  My feelings for her were more powerful having overcome the adversity and isolation of my home. She was also my only escape, my only window into the real world, and the only competition that had ever tested Dad. “I love you,” I said. I thought I did. No question I needed her and loved the thought of her.

  She squeezed my neck and kissed me.

  CHAPTER

  6

  I started losing. Bad, first-round losses that I couldn’t explain. I didn’t think the losing had anything to do with Liz. I didn’t think it then and don’t now. From today’s perspective I’d say I was confused, unhappy and mentally spent when I’d step on the court so I had no mental toughness left for the match. I was emotionally exhausted. But at that time I had no understanding of what was happening to me. I had no answer for the question of why I was losing.

  For most people, a kid losing some sporting events is the regular hard knocks that is a healthy part of growing up. But my whole world was so small. The only thing of value was winning at tennis and losing was Armageddon. Losing was real trauma for me.

  And then there was Dad. He was more invested in tennis than I was. A loss to an inferior player would not be tolerated. If putting a physical beating on me would have helped, he’d have done it. With pleasure.

  In Atlanta I lost first round to a player I should have toyed with. We drove back to the hotel in total silence. Eerie silence. We almost always stayed in a Marriott and these were the same damn hotel anywhere in the country, just as much as the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder is the same burger anywhere. Between the hotel and the courts in any town there is nothing but sameness, but I’ve been to Atlanta many times in my career and it was a town especially devoid of personality. Everything with charm was burned to the ground during the Civil War, then everything was paved and rebuilt in a hurry. What I remembered of Atlanta was that it was hot and that I always had to squint my eyes from the sun reflecting off all the glass and new construction.

  Dad was so angry, I could see him listening to his own thoughts, the screaming in his head. All his motions were fast and abrupt as though he wanted to smash whatever he touched. I could see the anger in his muscles. He jammed the key in the hotel door, he slammed his bag into a chair. He turned to face me and with open hands and his arms like engine pistons he rammed the butt of both palms into my chest and launched me horizontal back over the bed and my body crumpled in a tangle at the headboard.

  I had an upside-down view of him. He stared down at me. I lay in a pile with legs overhead but afraid to move at all. His face was twisted and he wanted to continue to beat me.

  I still observed the little things and I noticed he seemed to be running the calculation in his head of how much a beating would set back my training. He had enough calm to run this calculation and it saved me. “I don’t like you seeing this girl, Liz. Not until you get a handle on yourself.” He walked out of the hotel room and left me there. We had no flight booked because we hadn’t anticipated losing so early. Dad came back five hours later with dinner, acting nice and talking about how to get my game back on track. He hugged me, told me he loved me. He told me Liz seemed nice enough but he was worried about me.

  I kept losing, the entire season. I’d start a match knowing I was the better player, that I should win, even expecting to win. Anyone watching the match would see my game was far more explosive, that I was strong from both sides on the ground, moved well, volleyed well, huge serve. If they watched a few minutes, they’d guess I’d win in straight sets, easy.

  But somewhere early in the match I’d start to slip. I’d make some bad errors, force some dumb shots, get tight. I could feel it drift over me like a fog through the city, choking me. It got so I expected it to come. The way each day the fog rolls toward the Golden Gate then consumes it, I would look for it to come for me. I waited for it. Relented to it. Once it came, I wanted only for the match to end quickly. I’d force more shots, make more errors, accelerate my downfall. I knew I didn’t have the mental strength to recover, to reverse the slide.

  I came to dread matches, like a person afraid to sleep because he knows a nightmare is waiting.

  Dad saw all this happening but didn’t know how to stop it and that scared him. He hated to go outside for help. He never intended to do it but he was scared enough that he started a search for a full-time coach for me. Dad was so uncertain of himself at this point that he didn’t trust himself to conduct the interviews. He just took the coach most highly recommended for a junior player and paid him exactly what he asked to come work with us in Pennsylvania.

  His name was Gabe Sanchez. He wore shorts no matter what the temperature. When he walked his calves would flex into a ball the size of a chil
d’s head. His thighs were proportionally large. He was only 5'9" and I don’t think any pants were cut in a way to fit his legs.

  He was in his late forties then and had been the number one–ranked player in Argentina about twenty-five years earlier, had some Davis Cup wins. He never had big weapons in his game but had a reputation as a tenacious, grind-it-out player who never beat himself, ran down balls, made his opponent hit winners and wore down the other player both physically and mentally.

  He was the exact opposite kind of player from me, but I realized this made some sense. What I had couldn’t be taught. What I needed, he could teach me.

  He loved my serve. He would say that if he had my serve as a twenty-year-old, he would have won the French Open.

  I liked Gabe right away. He believed in working hard but also had a Latin love of life. He always smiled and I loved his accent. In all the years I’ve known Gabe he either started or ended a conversation by saying, “Arriba, arriba.” It was something he’d committed to doing as a player and a coach. Just words, a phrase to say, and it became a discipline. Players could create positive energy out of habits and positive energy is a required ingredient for winning. So I would say “Arriba” back and I think it helped.

  Some parents feel their position of unconditional love permits unfettered abuse. They can rationalize self-forgiveness for harsh treatment because parenting is an obligation and only the parent can do certain things. That’s how Dad saw it.

  Gabe was the hired coach and I knew he’d be tough and would never abuse. It was a great change for me.

  Gabe and I would hit balls for two hours in the morning while Dad watched. Then Gabe and I would have lunch together and talk tennis while Dad left us alone, then we’d hit for two more hours.

  After a week of workouts, Mom, Dad, Gabe and I sat for a meeting in the living room while Panos pretended to do homework in the next room.

  Gabe said, “We have an unhappy player.”