Trophy Son by Douglas Brunt
once again for Megyn
PART I
I know I was born and I know that I’ll die
The in between is mine
—EDDIE VEDDER
CHAPTER
1
In the end, man shapes the world, but the world gets the first crack at us. We’re not much more than a puddle before we’re two years old, and then more years to develop so we can survive on our own. Until then we take in more impressions than we give.
A tennis racket lurks in my earliest memories like a sick relative who had come to live with us. When I look at my baby pictures, there it is, resting in my crib in the place of a rattle or chew toy. I’ve talked to some players who say they know exactly the moment when their lives took the hard turn into professional tennis. It’s when they first left home to live full time in a tennis academy or when they first put a coach on payroll or when they first took prize money and officially dropped amateur status.
I had no sensation of milestones and the power to value a moment was never granted to me. My parents had the plan for my life from the moment my mother tested positive with me. Looking back now, I’d say the hard turn for me was when I left school after the eighth grade to play tennis full time and study some with a travelling tutor.
At the time it didn’t feel like a hard turn at all. I’d been told for several years that I’d be leaving school after the eighth grade so it had the reassurance of a promise kept. It was no different from waking up on any other day.
In the average day then, I’d spend seven hours on the court in our backyard in Radnor, Pennsylvania, with my dad blasting tennis balls at me from a machine. The rest of the day we’d talk tennis strategy, watch game film and train with weights.
In the winter we’d leave behind the Main Line suburbs and go rent a place in Florida with a tennis court so we could do the same year-round. Dad was a retired hedge fund manager who made enough millions to retire and focus on my game. Before that, he was on the 1984 US Olympic swimming team. No medals. He was accustomed to winning at everything but no medals in 1984.
By the time I was fourteen, I was good enough to beat the crap out of a decent college player so every few weeks we’d travel to a college where nobody knew me but that Dad had scouted out.
Once we drove down to the courts at the University of Pennsylvania. Dad said, “Get ready to fight, Anton.” We’re Greek. Dad loved being Greek. Ancient warrior-athletes.
For the tenth time, he told me how to approach the court, taunt the players on the college team, bait them into a match, bait them into putting money on the line. He said to me on this trip as he did on every trip, “A friendly game will ruin you. Play with adversity, with animosity. No friendly games.”
I realized this also meant no friends, at least not anywhere near tennis. Tennis is about only hate and suffering.
What Dad saw in me that he didn’t see in my brother Panos was that I could handle the hate. I could suffer. I could take the hate, give some back then take some more. With my brother, the fight would fall out of him. After a while, he’d flip Dad the bird and walk off the court. When Dad saw his absolute mental dominance over my brother was slipping, his efforts turned abusive and physical. I was on my brother’s side but I’m a people pleaser on some level and I wanted a different result and knew how to get it. I stayed on the court.
I took the punishment and by twelve I had used it to become an elite junior player. By fourteen, I was on the Penn campus to humiliate a Division I college player.
Late February is early in the tennis season. It was warm on a Sunday, and the first warm days make you notice for the first time in months that the branches are naked. I would look at the trees and try to imagine them with their leaves back on. Dad knew the team did informal hitting at 2pm and would be on the outdoor courts. I carried my biggest and most ridiculous-looking tennis bag and wore a pristine, white tennis outfit.
Dad said, “Don’t be a little cocky. Be massively cocky. Humble and confident seems real. You need to blow so hard they don’t believe a word you’re saying. And you need to piss them off. Make them crave a match to take you down.”
We parked far from the courts. Dad put five one-hundred-dollar bills in my pocket, then we split up. He walked to a place where he could watch the play without being seen, partly to watch the match and partly to be there to save me if a fight broke out. Dad was 6'4". His swimming weight was two hundred pounds, but at this time he was two-forty and mostly muscle. He loved asserting his bigness. He had black hair, olive skin and looked old-country Greek, tough and dangerous.
I saw a couple college kids hitting on the courts and four others sitting on a bench nearby in sweat clothes with racket bags. They looked like nice guys. I would have preferred to say hi, talk with them, hear what school and a normal life can be like, laugh about something. But Dad had taught me that this kind of average life was wasteful, slothful, damaging to a life of excellence. These boys were a breed to be pitied, observed only, like species in a zoo. Do not touch the glass, do not feed the animals.
Anyway, I had a job to do here. Dad had given me a few opening lines.
There were eight guys, all dressed in similar sweat clothes. Some were hitting, most were lounging on courtside benches like actors backstage after the play. I sat down as loud as I could on the bench next to them and said, “Hi, kids.”