Trophy Son(2)

They looked at me and smiled. Later I grew to be 6'3" and strong but then I was 5'10" and a rail with the flat, invisible muscles that active, early teens have. They didn’t say anything.

The grass lawns around the courts were thin and wilted, just starting to come back to life. A squirrel back on his haunches looked up at us from his nut which he held with both arms like a mixing bowl of brownie batter. Remnants of leaves from the fall, rotted to small pieces by the long winter, blew in wisps at the bases of trees and in small piles and soon would return to dust.

I pointed at one of the guys hitting balls on the court. “What a joke that guy is.”

They stopped talking with each other and looked at me.

I said, “I must be in the wrong place. Is this U Penn? I thought this was U Penn.”

“It’s U Penn,” one of them said.

“Well, who the hell are you guys? Where’s the tennis team?” I said.

They looked at each other. “We’re the tennis team.”

I did my best to look shocked, shocked. “Bullshit.” I pointed to the court again. “You can’t tell me that guy plays on a tennis team. Maybe an elementary school team.”

One of them said, “He plays number two singles.”

They found me insulting but also funny. Another of them laughed and said, “Nice tennis whites. Beat it, you little punk.”

I said, “If this is the quality of tennis at U Penn, then you can beat this,” and I stroked the handle of my tennis racket. That was improvised and I felt good about it. “Obviously I can’t get a decent match around here. Where’s Nadal when you need him. Andy Murray.”

One said, “I think there’s a middle school down the street. Go look for a match there.”

I said, “Middle school. That’s funny. Listen, if you don’t want to play me just for the instructional benefit to you, then play me for money.”

“How much money?”

I said, “Five hundred.” I pulled out the five bills from my pocket. This is the hard part. You can sound as ridiculous as you like, but money makes it real.

They were stunned. Nobody took the bet yet. I said, “Is this U Penn or U Pussy?” Dad scripted this stuff and he thought this last line was a gem. It worked. There had already been too much shit-talking and ego involved for it not to work.

The guys on the court had walked over by then to listen. “Who wants to play the kid?”

“I’ll play him,” said the number two singles player who had been hitting.

“Where’s your five hundred bucks?” I said.

Together they had two-fifty so we all waited while one kid ran to the ATM. The courts were a small oasis in Penn’s urban campus and a deli with an ATM was only a thousand feet away. I started hitting rallies with the number two singles player whose name was Jim. I said, “You’re okay, Jim. You look a little better from out here on the court than you did from the bench. You have a heavy ball.”

It was a clear day, sunny, no breeze. It was about fifty degrees out which is great tennis weather once you get moving. A commercial jet flew overhead, low enough that the sound echoed across the sky so you couldn’t sense where the noise was from.

“You’re damn right, squirt,” he said.

I wasn’t hitting my best stuff yet. I’d just get loose for a while before we played the match.

My hand-eye coordination has always been great. Great baseball hitters can write a number on a baseball with Magic Marker and when it comes at them at ninety miles per hour they can read the number. I’ve never tried that but I bet I can do it. Things move to me slower and I get there faster. Take that gift and work it out on a tennis court for seven hours a day and you get me. When the match started I knew I’d shift my game to the next gear and put a beating on Jim that he’d be dying to tell his friends about in a few years every time he’d see me on national television.

I just wished I didn’t need to be such a jerk about it. I didn’t know it then but I resented Dad for making me do this with people. I wasn’t able to name it as resentment, but that’s what it was. Dad never let anyone come to like me. I was trapped in his boot camp, developing an edge that no other fourteen-year-old could match.

There is no question it gave me toughness, a knowledge that no opponent across the net could fathom my training, but it was all built on hate.

We had rallied for ten minutes when the kid returned with the money. We put all the cash in an empty tennis ball can. They made jokes about having their drinking money for the night.

A guy about fifty years old in sweat clothes had taken a seat in the bleachers. I thought he was probably the coach. I didn’t see Dad but I knew he was there. I knew he was smiling like a hunter with a doe in his crosshairs.

Jim graciously let me serve first without spinning for it.

I got to my spot on the baseline and said, “These are good.”

“No practice serves?” said Jim.

“No.”

Jim shrugged. It was his last relaxed gesture.

At fourteen, I could already serve a hundred miles per hour. More impressive than the speed was that my service form was perfect. It was beautiful, and I could place the ball anywhere I wanted. Anyone watching knew that with a few years and a few inches I’d be serving one-forty.

I uncorked an ace up the middle. It landed an inch inside the T. Jim didn’t move. His knees flinched to the middle but his feet never moved.