Trophy Son(36)

“I’m sure it’s overwhelming to a degree. Not depressing, but it feels big and we’ll start to make it smaller.”

“No, it’s depressing.”

“You’re not depressed, Anton. If you were truly depressed, we’d look into that and I could prescribe something for you.”

“I’m not taking a pill for depression.”

He laughed. “That’s interesting. Why not?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“If you felt bad and there was a pill that could make you feel well, why wouldn’t you take it?”

Hmm. When he put it that way. “I don’t know.” It also occurred to me that there was a pill, of sorts, that could make me play well, and I was already taking it.

“You’re not depressed,” he said again. “You’re overwhelmed, daunted, but not depressed.”

I shrugged.

He said, “Anton, I’ve seen many teenagers in my practice, and I’ve worked with them through their twenties and thirties.” He gave me a half smile, the affectionate kind. “You are a highly self-aware young man. Not just for a nineteen-year-old, but for any age.”

I watched him and his words swirled around inside me. We watched each other. I smiled. It was the nicest compliment anyone had ever paid me. “Thanks,” I said.

“When you leave today, consider yourself at square one. Your naked self with no tennis clothes. Consider that you could be a nineteen-year-old retiree from tennis. What might motivate you then? What would you do?”

“Okay.”

“And not just a thought-bubble exercise. Put it on the table. Really make it a choice.”

“Okay.”

“If you want to quit tennis, let’s talk about it. That might be the right answer. If you want to stay with tennis, let’s make sure it’s for the right reasons and then let’s discuss practical ways to improve your life inside and outside tennis. That might mean changing up your team, limiting your father’s involvement, moving out of your parents’ home and getting your own apartment.”

This all sounded good. Dad would hate it.





CHAPTER

24

You cannot make an omelet without cracking eggs. You cannot make a revolution with white gloves. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

I would tell myself things like that over the next couple years. My world ranking hit a plateau at twenty-five but everyone thought I’d be a top-five player by then so everyone was disappointed in me.

I had taken something from my first face-to-face meeting with Dr. Minkoff. I didn’t quit tennis, but I quit being the old me. The dependent child. My first step had been to tell Dad that I wanted him to travel with me only to the four majors each year, same as Mom. I knew that would be a fight so I had gone to Gabe first to say that Dad was a distraction to me, that I couldn’t focus on tennis and winning in Dad’s authoritarian presence. With Gabe on my side, Dad grumbled his agreement. He was off the team.

His departure was like the parent leaving after the drop-off of a college freshman. I had freedoms and free time away from watchful eyes. I hadn’t realized how much the constant chaperone my father had become had impeded me from making friends. I spent more of my downtime with other players on the tour, playing cards, watching movies, talking. Drinking.

I dated a few girls on the tour. Nothing serious. No one like Ana, with whom there was little now other than periodic updates that she was happily and casually dating some actor or another.

I was having fun. And having some sex. I’d gone from a nineteen-year-old virgin to a twenty-two-year-old of experience with beautiful women. I was shocked at just how experienced the European women of my own age were. Most had dated older and more experienced European men at some point in their teens and so while I was shocked at the experience they displayed in the bedroom, they were equally shocked at my lack of experience.

But we were all lonely in our ways, and in it together, child campers at a never-ending summer camp. Some of the girls were patient with me, taught me things. By twenty-two, I knew everything that a European pervert twice my age would know.

The worst moments were the frustrated calls from Dad after each loss, threatening to rejoin our travelling band. Nothing useful happened on the calls. He would just ask in a hundred different ways, What’s wrong with you? I had no answer to satisfy him so after thirty minutes of mutually inflicted brain damage we would hang up.

This was the two-front war that I kept fighting. The front that was the tennis world, my tennis ranking, was classic trench warfare. I was on one side, the tournaments and hotels on the other, everyone dug in, static, no sign of a breakthrough in either direction.

On the other front, there was movement. It was a campaign across plains, through valleys and over a mountain pass to liberate the prized, occupied city. For the first time I learned how I handled situations on my own, who was my independent self. Was I funny and goofy on a date to dinner and a movie, or was I brooding and reserved? I didn’t have any idea so I tried out different things to see which version of me I liked and wanted to stick with, like picking characters out of a book for me to play.

I hear people say of someone, Oh, he’s this type or that type, and Oh, he won’t care if you borrow his shirt and I guarantee he won’t even notice if you wear it right under his nose. So-and-so is the opposite and would have a conniption.