Trophy Son Read online

  A weaker player had squeaked by to face me in the second round and I beat him in straight sets: two and two. People around the tournament were starting to talk about me. I was an eighteen-year-old up-and-comer. Maybe the future of American tennis. And next up for me at the Miami Open, the world number one. The meat-grinder. Ilya Kovalchuk. 6'1" Russian, lean body, all muscle and bone who moved around the court fast and easy like a design for perpetual motion that never has friction with surfaces. He had a rugged, handsome face and always ruffled hair like a youthful lumberjack, only he had experience. He had been a top-five player in the world for twelve years.

  The first thing I noticed when taking the court against Ilya was that there were fifty times more cameras than I’d ever played in front of before. Flashes popped and shutters clicked like a swarm of locusts. There were the big TV kind of cameras pumping the match out to homes around the world. I saw John McEnroe. He looked right at me so I waved. Even in repose he always had this intense furrow in his brow like he was going to serve one up the middle on you. He just nodded back to me and the nod seemed to say, “You’re an American. Don’t disappoint me.”

  I took my chair courtside and I wasn’t rattled at all. I wanted to get out there and crank my serve up, blow everyone’s hair back. I had inhuman, synthetic strength running through me, new muscles I hadn’t experienced before, and I was still very impressed with myself.

  Against the world number one I had nothing to lose. I took the court and played big and aggressive. I went for my serves, my forehands, even my backhands and they were all landing. I played up by the baseline, dictating points, pushing Ilya back into the fans.

  He was feeling around for my weak spots. He’d never played me before, probably hadn’t seen much of a scouting report on me so he had to find my weaknesses in real time. He was a more seasoned, smarter match player than I was but his smarts wouldn’t matter if he couldn’t impose his will.

  I kept pounding the ball, ripping low percentage service returns that went in anyway.

  He was such a pro. I got a few raised eyebrows from him but he didn’t rattle. He was used to lower ranked players going for broke against him. That can win some games but it’s hard for those low percentages to survive a whole match. He wanted to keep fighting, keep probing me, wait for the match to settle in.

  I took the first set.

  At the changeover, he looked up at his player box to his coach. I knew he was thinking, “Who is this kid?” It was the same reaction as my first-round opponent. He wasn’t having an off day and I wasn’t having a fluke. I was a big, strong, fast player with lots of weapons and I was pushing him around, controlling the match. It wouldn’t be enough for him to step it up. He needed something from me. He needed me to take my foot off the gas. This match would be determined by me, not him, and I could see he knew that. It was the first glimmer of concern in his expression.

  I started the second set the same way I started the first. The drugs had a beautiful effect on me. I had no soreness and was stronger but that was only half of it. It was also psychological.

  My body was an endless well. I could keep scooping out buckets of water and never run dry. That gave me the confidence to go pick a fight because I knew I couldn’t be hurt, couldn’t get tired, couldn’t lose my breath even for a moment no matter how hard I ran. Picking a fight, metaphorically, on the tennis court is a powerful thing. Most fights never actually happen. It’s just that one person shows a greater willingness to fight and so then he’s the winner.

  I broke his serve then held mine to go up 3–0 in the second set. It’s a best of three sets match so I was three games from beating this guy. McEnroe might smile, even hug me. This was my match to lose.

  And it was that subtle shift in how to think about the moment that changed the match. After all my great play, I had something to lose now. I let him back in. Instead of going for everything, I gave myself a few more inches from the line, bigger margin, better percentages, but he got to my shots just a little bit more easily and rather than just managing to get my shots back, he got them back with purpose, with a plan. Now I was the one lunging, reacting to missiles coming in at angles. He won the second and third sets. Match to the world number one.

  I felt great anyway. No win had ever made me feel better than this loss had. For a set and a half I had controlled play with the best player in the world. I had all the pieces, I needed only to put them together and keep them together, then I would dominate the tour.

  Dad had seen everything I had felt. He entered me in hard court and clay court tournaments around Europe for the summer. It was time to travel, be a real pro.

  * * *

  Every aspect of the tour required conditioning. I needed to condition myself to life in hotels, to living out of a suitcase for months at a time, to surroundings that slid past me like an Epcot trip around the world.

  Looking back these years later, I wish I had done more to experience life then. All those cities, people. I never once went to a museum, a show, an urban park. Weeks at a time in Paris every year and all I ever did was make nonstop trips between the courts and the hotel room where I ate, slept, played PlayStation and read books. The irony was that the farther I got from home as my travel world expanded, the more my professional shell constricted.

  My time in foreign cities was spent in an impenetrable bubble, like travelling in the Popemobile, only the bubble wasn’t so much to prevent threats to my security but threats to my focus. All of this reinforced my one-dimensional self. It was an opportunity blown.

  I would still count paces down hallways to the elevator, stripes in a carpet pattern, the number of French fries on a plate next to my cheeseburger. I’d sit to lunch with Adam and after a period of silence he’d say, “How many, Anton,” and I’d laugh then say, “Thirty-four. Thirty-four French fries.”

  In the early years I didn’t socialize much at all with other players. Lots of guys on tour would get together in each other’s rooms to play poker, watch movies, play video games. I was socially timid and it didn’t help that I was a few years younger than everyone. I just read a lot of books which was something I had in common with absolutely no one else.

  I entered a clay court tournament in Spain that was a tune-up for the French Open. I loved to go to the restaurants and hear the foreign language around me, imagine I was Hemingway who would order Spanish wine, drink, smoke, fight and womanize. I was obviously American.

  I went to a centuries-old café full of people that bookend the stages of raising a family. The young, hip and independent, and then the very-much-older whose kids were grown and gone so they were independent again and could sit in cafés like Picasso.

  The waiter was thin and in his fifties. He came over, humble, almost apologetic for his native tongue and took my order. He wore a starched black shirt, black tie with a white apron over top. Not a student looking for extra income, but a professional waiter, a lover of wine and cigarettes, maybe from a long line of waiters. I loved Spain because it felt old and I wanted to go to the old cafés. This restaurant was older than the city of Atlanta, maybe older than the sport of tennis. I felt better perspective on life in places like that. That was about the extent of my social life on the road.

  I was the third match on a stadium court and I went to the players’ lounge knowing I had anywhere between two and five hours to wait so I brought a book. White Noise by DeLillo.

  Rufus Parker was an American player ranked below me and we were friendly because all American players get to know each other a bit. “You reading a book?” he said.

  He sounded like this all must be a practical joke I was playing on him. “Yes. Got a few hours to kill.”

  “Jeez. Big brain on Anton. Maybe we should get you a tweed coat and a long, skinny brown cigarette, professor.”

  Because I’m reading a book? “Rufus, if I knew this would disturb you so much, I would have carried a book out to the court before all our matches.”

  He laughed. “It is a little di
sturbing, though. I’ve been on the tour six years. I haven’t read a book in nine. And that was only the first few chapters of Harry Potter.”

  I was seventy-five percent sure he was messing with me. “Serious?”

  “Serious.”

  He was. I laid the book down and stared at him. “No books at all?”

  “You’re the freak, not me,” he said. He looked around. There were seven other players in the lounge. “Let’s take a poll,” he said. He stood and called across the room. “Raise your hand if you read a book in the last year. An actual book, magazines don’t count.” Seven blank faces directed at Rufus. “In the last two years?” Blank faces. “In the last five years?” Several smiles, no raised hands.

  I knew most of the players personally but not all. I said, “Does everyone here speak English, understand the question?”

  Rufus laughed and someone across the room yelled, “Blow me, Anton.”

  My first thought was, Those poor saps, but I later wondered if there was some benefit to that kind of wiring for this kind of life. If the real goal was happiness, I seemed to be doing worse than most.

  Gabe was great in helping me adjust to international play. We’d walk the courts together before tournaments started, while the grounds were empty. He’d walk me to the stadium court and measure the height of the net, walk off the distance from the net to the baseline, examine the right angles of the tape. Everything to show that a court is just a court, no matter where in the world, no matter if they speak French, Spanish or German around you. He’d belabor the obvious until it was funny and relaxing, like Gene Hackman taking his bumpkin Indiana basketball team to a fancy stadium for the first time.

  I had craved newness and this was new. My body still seemed new as well. My strength excited me and my training had become a more pleasant escape. When frustrations and phobias began to swell, I could go to the gym, let the sweat pour, work my muscles with fury, have the physical me drive out the emotional me, grind myself down and burn out the pain. Cauterize my soul.

  Endorphins wear off though and the pains in my mind would come back around and I’d train more, and so would go the cycle to keep things at bay, though never cured. The only cure for loneliness is company. I thought maybe a girl might help but what eighteen-year-old girl could drop her school plans to travel the tennis tour so that we could be together more than just December. I still felt so burned by Liz, even years later, that I had no confidence, and that avenue felt closed to me.

  My relationship with my shrink, Dr. Ford, was a joke, and he and I both knew it. We did phone consultations biweekly which were useless. Even when we were in the same town we did the session by phone, which pronounced our relationship a joke officially. I never told him about taking steroids. He knew though, and asked me about it, which means he must have been speaking directly to Dad. Probably fucking illegal to do that. I never checked.

  Anyway, I was playing well. My best match to that point was still the loss to Ilya at the Miami Open, but I was playing very well that summer leading up to the US Open in August.

  CHAPTER

  18

  “The hell you are, Anton. You are not going.”

  I’d never shopped for clothes for myself before in my life, but that morning I’d gone to Macy’s alone. I had no idea what might look good. Much less what a woman would think looks good, but a cute female sales clerk picked out a shirt, pants and shoes for me. Put the whole thing together. It’s amazing how nice clothes that fit and aren’t for the gym can make you feel different. I was standing in them. “I’m going, Dad. I already told everyone I’m going.”

  “You are not. Not by a long shot.”

  “Wrong,” I said.

  “Don’t you realize what this means? What this will do?”

  “What, exactly, Dad?”

  “It’s like spotting three games to your opponent. At the US Open. The US Goddamn Open, which happens in four goddamn days.”

  “How does having a night out with friends give away three games?”

  “A night out? Do I really have to answer that?”

  “I’m not going to drink.”

  “You’re damn right you’re not because you’re going to stay right here.” He waved his arm around the Manhattan hotel room that was like every other hotel room I’d stayed in almost every night for the last five months. “Who are these friends, anyway?”

  “Rufus. Some other people.” I didn’t know who all, other than Rufus, but he said it was going to be a cool New York crowd. He grew up in Garden City and knew lots of New York people. “I’m supposed to meet Rufus downstairs in ten minutes.”

  “Rufus,” he said. “Rufus would love to have you spot him three games.”

  “That’s not what’s happening.”

  “Deliberate or not, it’s what will happen.”

  “I said I won’t drink and I won’t be out late.”

  “No.”

  I was in fight mode and I was tournament conditioned. Dad hadn’t been my opponent before but I tried not to think about it that way. I needed to win the match. “I’m going.”

  “I said no.”

  I squared my shoulders. I was about his height by then and I drew myself up, eye to eye. “Are you physically going to stop me? Wrestle me? Maybe dislocate my shoulder four days before the Open? If so, you better get ready because in two minutes I’m walking out that door to the elevator and going out.”

  “Anton, this is a bad idea. Terrible.”

  Movement. He’d gone from denying to advising. I didn’t respond but walked to the bathroom and looked in the mirror to fix my shirt and hair. I realized I’d never done that before. My reflection looked so different, groomed with a button-down, collared shirt made by Rag & Bone. Who was this kid in the mirror?

  I walked back out past Dad who hadn’t moved other than to pivot his feet so he could follow my path like a camera.

  I opened the door and tried not to pause but couldn’t stop my reflexes, like the flinch when you know a punch is on the way. “Not a drop of alcohol, Anton,” he said.

  I closed the door and hit the down button for the elevator.

  Rufus was waiting in the lobby of the hotel wearing a suit and no tie. The suit was crisp with some shimmery material and fitted to him exactly. He looked like the actors that walk the Oscars red carpet. You would never call Rufus handsome but he wasn’t bad looking in any remarkable way either. He was tall, lanky and a little goofy looking. Just what anyone named Rufus ought to look like.

  “I was waiting for the text message that you weren’t coming,” he said.

  I made a fake laugh. Getting out of the apartment was the biggest win of my career so far and I was still coming down from it. “Where are we going?”

  “A place in the Meatpacking District.” He jerked his thumb like a hitchhiker but in the direction of the hotel bar. “We’re not in a rush. Want to get a drink here first?”

  I’d been delaying the decision whether to drink or not and didn’t expect to need the answer so soon. I decided then that I’d drink but not this close to Dad. “I’m ready to get out of this hotel. Let’s get one there.”

  Rufus stepped out of the hotel, raised a hand to hail a taxi and one pulled right up as though he had it on a string. I thought that made him look cool.

  We dropped out of the August heat into the back of the air-conditioned taxi and drove south. “Who’s going to be there tonight?” I said.

  “My high school buddies. You’ll like them.”

  I realized I didn’t know much about Rufus. “You went to a regular high school?”

  “Yeah, Garden City publics. I missed a lot of junior and senior years, but had tutors, got through. Graduated.”

  “That’s great.”

  “The three guys you’ll meet tonight just graduated college in the spring. Through everything, since the eighth grade, it’s been the four of us. They’re my posse.”

  He had a posse. I’d have liked a posse. “They travel with you?”

/>   “Just local stuff. Anything you can ride a train to.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  He nodded. He knew. He said, “Hey man, I’m good but you’re the super star. The bigger the star, the bigger the sacrifice.” He looked at me and realized how unhelpful that was. “Anyway, you’ll like these guys, Anton. And they’ll like you. You can have some fun on the tour.”

  The cab pulled in front of a restaurant named Bagatelle. There were some muscley guys in suits working the door and it seemed like the kind of place where people hoped the paparazzi would show so they dressed up the front of the place with a line of actual velvet ropes. Inside at the hostess station was a six-foot-tall skinny beauty who either faked or had an Italian accent. From behind her at a large booth table with banquet seating against the back wall, three guys stood up and called to Rufus and yelled things like Raise the Roof. Two good-looking girls sat with them and waved.

  “We’re with them.”

  We walked to the table where everyone hugged Rufus and looked me up and down. The tables were black, the floors were black and white. The clothes people wore were black. There was almost no color in the room except for red roses by the hostess. After they had all hugged and slapped and messed up each other’s hair, Rufus put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me in front of him. “This is my buddy, Anton Stratis.”

  They all looked so happy and together and the girls were so pretty that I felt lonely.

  The biggest friend came around the corner of the table to shake my hand. “Of course we know Anton. You took a set off the badass Russian. That was beautiful.” He stopped short of messing my hair but he was drunk and while we kept our handshake going he held my shoulder with his other hand and shook my whole body.

  I’ve never thought of myself as needing or seeking praise, but we all naturally like people who like us. What better thing could I have in common with someone than the fact that we’re both rooting for Anton Stratis. “Nice to meet you,” I said.