Trophy Son(20)







CHAPTER

14

It was time to start acting like the player everyone expected that I would be in twelve months. Dad said I needed to start acting like a pro, feeling like a pro, then I’d start playing like a pro. Gabe agreed. He thought putting on all the trappings of a star now would prepare me for becoming a star. And Dad could afford it.

Gabe used to string all my rackets but we hired a racket stringer. It was absurd. I needed maybe twelve rackets strung each week which Gabe or I could easily do, but for big tournaments our stringer would travel with us and be a part of my entourage, mostly for the sake of having an entourage at all.

His name was Adam Hennes and he loved surfing more than tennis. He’d been a decent college player, then a teaching pro at a private tennis club but was fired, as I found out later, because he loved the female membership even more than surfing. He was taking some time off and he knew Gabe somehow and agreed to make some extra money stringing for me.

The first day he came by our house in jeans and a concert T-shirt which is about what he always wore unless we travelled. He had long blond hair and looked like the front man of a grunge band.

I liked him a lot and came to realize that Gabe knew I would. Adam was easy company. He was amused by life and any version of it, so he had no agenda other than to take what came. He was stoned most of the time. I wasn’t so na?ve as not to recognize that, and of course Gabe knew also. This was never discussed and the rule Gabe gave Adam was that he was never permitted to light a joint around me. Gabe would tolerate Adam with a buzz as long as the smoking was out of sight.

Adam knew enough about competitive tennis to relate to me. I didn’t view him as having failed out of tennis. I viewed him as a survivor, even a success story. He was happy.

The other hire to our entourage was our trainer, Bobby Hicks. He was about fifty. Too old for the amount of tan and muscle he had, and certainly too old for the ponytail, but he was a well-known and expensive trainer. He’d worked mostly with major league baseball players and Dad paid him as much as a Yankee would.

Now I had infrastructure, a team around me. Gabe, Bobby, Adam and Dad. They were supposed to help me get ready for the tennis court but I thought they might also be able to help me in other ways. At least there were more people to talk to.

We’d travel to small towns to play Challenger events. Sunrise, Plantation, Calabasas, Rochester, Tulsa, Wichita, Godfrey, Decatur, Champaign, Birmingham, Pensacola. There’d be young up-and-comers like me or slightly older up-and-comers, and some much older guys on the way down trying to hang on to the game. Some of the older guys had held a top-100 world ranking in years past, before age, injury and burnout. Even those guys didn’t have the money for a team around them.

We pulled into the Marriott in Reston, Virginia, in the black Suburban that Dad rented. It was a large circular drive with a carport over the lobby entrance and hardscaping all around the front with landscaped flowering trees that couldn’t be indigenous. The five of us climbed out and unloaded luggage and bags of tennis equipment while players, guests and hotel employees watched the car waiting for a celebrity to get out next. When they realized the car was empty, they scanned the five of us to see who they should recognize. With my infrastructure all checking in to see that I was okay, onlookers realized that this was my team. Making me someone to watch in the parking lot made me someone to watch on the court. I had to get used to it sooner or later. So went the thinking.

“Big Gabe, what’s the schedule?” said Adam.

“Anton, we have a practice court in thirty minutes. We’ll do a ninety-minute light workout, then you have a sixty-minute warm down and stretching with Bobby.”

I nodded.

Adam said, “Thirty and ninety and sixty. Anton-Atom-Bomb, I will have the PlayStation up and running in the suite in one-eighty.”

Something to look forward to. “I’ll be there,” I said.

Adam left to get stoned and find something to eat. He’d have several new friends by the time I next saw him. Could be a travelling business executive, a player’s parent or a homeless person. Adam didn’t judge others. He just liked people, all shapes, sizes, types. That’s also why he didn’t really judge himself, which has to be an easier way to go through life, if you’re okay with it. Adam was the person most receptive to help I’d ever seen. The help could be advice, narcotics, a free lunch. He was very accepting.

That day I practiced, stretched and got a massage, then played Adam in PlayStation back at the hotel. I walked to the suite window and looked down at the brownish-orange roof of the carport and the landscaping around the drive. Sprinklers rose from the mulching like submarine periscopes and began painting the shrubs with water. The next day was the same except instead of practicing ninety minutes, I won a match in less than sixty. Back in the hotel I walked to the suite window at exactly the same time and was able to confirm that the sprinklers were on a timer. Every day that week was the same until I won the tournament and we left.

Then we played more tournaments and I won those too. People were starting to know who I was even without the entourage.

More winning meant not only more tournaments on my schedule, but also more matches at every tournament. Instead of an early round loss, then a few days off, I won and played matches through the end of the week then flew off to play another.

There are impact workouts and non-impact workouts. Impact happens when you jam your feet to the hard court in order to stop and change direction. That kind of impact breaks down the body. Non-impact is riding a stationary bike. I could work myself to the bone with non-impact and still recover because I was a teenager. But even then, the impact was getting tough. I was taking on the rigor of a pro schedule and I could feel my body starting to break down, starving for recovery time.

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