Trophy Son(35)

“It would sound weird. We’ve never texted like that.”

“So change it up. If she’s canoodling on the red carpet with another guy, you need to change it up. That’s just basic math.”

“No pumpkins.”

“Fine,” he said.

I had an idea. I typed:



I hit send before reason could get in the way.

“Atom Bomb. What did you write?”

“I have no idea,” I said. I held the phone and in my mind listened to the beep from hers. Then mine beeped.



Reversal of emotional fortunes. I was sweating, my heart racing.



Mine beeped.



I reconsidered Adam’s pumpkin message, then wrote instead:

I leaned back in the couch and the rush subsided. I tossed the phone to Adam.

“Not a bad back and forth,” he said after reading.

“I’m in the same spot. She didn’t say she’s getting dinner with Ryan Hall but she may as well have.”

Adam moved next to me on the couch and put an arm around my shoulders. “Buddy, will you let me set you up on a date?”

“I don’t know, Adam. I’m an idiot. I wouldn’t know what to do on a date.”

“You were just talking about thongs with the hottest actress on the planet. That puts you in the top one percent of one percent of people who know what to do.” He shook my shoulders. “Come on. There’s that hot Croatian. Victoria Jancovic. She’s eighteen, mile-long legs.”

“Her English is pretty broken.”

“Even better. Focus on the legs.”

“What, like a dinner?”

“Sure. Or you can even start with hitting practice balls one afternoon. Gabe can set that up.”

“Maybe.”

“Plus, the media might get a hold of it. Take a few photos. Then it’s Ana clicking around the Internet and getting all worked up.”

Now you’re talking. “Okay, set it up.”

“My man,” he said.

I had underestimated Adam to that point. Not his strategic capability. It didn’t matter what the strategy was. It was that he cared, he was rooting for me, not as a player but as a person. He was getting to know me.





CHAPTER

23

Months later back in New York I saw Dr. Minkoff face-to-face for the first time. I talked for ten minutes about how my life was rote, same routine with the same people in similar hotel rooms with similar tournament results, and an identical me. I could actually feel my utter lack of personal growth.

It was the same talk I’d given him weekly by telephone since he and I started together.

When I had finished, he said, “Anton, now that we’re together in person, I feel more comfortable saying this.” He paused. “Don’t you get tired of hearing yourself?”

I was stunned. He had insulted me. I replayed the remark in my head a few times to be certain, then I was certain that it was a flat insult. “Am I boring you, doctor?”

“We can talk about whatever you want to talk about. I’ve just noticed that you talk about the same things every time and I wonder if you’ve noticed as well.”

“I have,” I said. My voice was clipped and angry.

“Why do you think we’re stuck on this issue?”

“Because it’s a big issue,” I said getting louder. I was in an argument with my shrink.

“It is, and we can make small amounts of progress.”

“I was hoping we were.”

“We probably are,” he said. “But I think we can do more. We can do better.”

“Okay.” I was trying to cool off, stay constructive, the way I would take a tip from Gabe on the court.

He said, “Before we come up with a plan, we need to determine who the players are, the people who will carry out the plan.”

“Sure,” I said.

“There’s only one that matters, and that person is you, but I’m not sure that you’ve truly realized that yet.”

I wanted to say obviously I have, but maybe there was something not obvious that I had missed.

He said, “You are very recently a child, a dependent, and people, parents usually, made decisions on your behalf. You are no longer a child and you need to enforce that transition in your own life. Given your profession, you have unusual circumstances and I would argue this makes it even more important that you take charge of the way your life is going to be. Only you can set up your life the way you want it. If you offer that role to someone else, if it is usurped by anyone else, then your chance of happiness is greatly diminished.”

Our argument had turned into something healthy. Everything he said would have made sense to me at any point in the last years, but now I heard it in such a way that I felt it too. It wasn’t just an intellectual thing.

I said, “Sure, I get it. I just don’t know how to put any of that into practice. As simple as some of this sounds, it feels very complex.”

“Why complex?”

“It’s like a two-front war. One front is just to keep moving ahead with my tennis. Then the very support structure to help me with the one front is actually the second front. It’s like a virus that makes your cells eat yourself. I need to fight my own team that’s helping me fight everyone else. That just feels overwhelming. Depressing.”