Trophy Son(45)

The US Open was the last major of the season. The majors wouldn’t start again until the Australian in January, so I went into the rest of the hard court season at twenty-five years old never having won a major.

I said to Bobby, “It’s working. My body is still adjusting but the candy poppers definitely work.”

“How do you feel?”

Gabe never joined the meeting when we talked about drugs. Of course he knew and he probably rounded back with Bobby later to make sure he was fully in the loop with my training. He just didn’t want to be in the meeting. Whatever made people feel a little better about things was fine with me. I said, “I need to get stronger.”

“We’re through the busiest part of the season. If you skip the November tournament, we can get almost eight straight weeks off to devote to training. We’ll adjust the conditioning program, focus on building up some muscle.”

I nodded. “Stronger than that.”

“Okay.” He trailed the word into a question mark.

“I want to accelerate the whole program. Everything,” I said. Bobby had been pushing a broader drug program for a while and I had been resisting up to now.

“Alright. I can lay out some options for you.”

“I know the option I want.”

Bobby wasn’t certain what I meant. His face said clue me in.

“I’m not doing anything half-assed now.” I pointed at his chest. “You do whatever it takes.” There, I said it. Whatever it takes.

It was a moment between us, something to build on and remember when the work got hard, an exchange of words to print up on T-shirts. I could hear the Rocky training music start playing in my head and I watched Bobby, wondering if he’d say, “What are we waitin’ fer,” like Burgess Meredith.

Instead, he said, “There’s a mix I’ve been looking at that’s having some success out there. It’s three elements but we’d do it in a single shot, oil-based so we need a wide gauge needle. I’ll dose it out so we need one hit per week. Side of the upper butt and we’ll alternate sides so there should be no issues.”

Right to business. He had been ready for this. “And the tests?”

“Everything in the mix will be under the radar.”

“This mix gets results?”

“You’ll be a beast.” He smiled. He liked doing his job well.

I didn’t feel sad at all. I’d become numb to considerations of morality in sport. I wanted advantage. “Good,” I said. “Let’s dial it up.”

I had a mental slip then and returned to the what-if question I’d had before. What if I was never meant for tennis, this was all a mistake, a lie, but here I was worshipping at the altar of my false tennis gods, sacrificing, self-flagellating.

Then I regained balance from my mental slip, beat the questions away. I told myself this was time-limited and I could do anything if it was time-limited. My usual logic. “I need to see Gabe now. Thanks, Bobby.”

I slid off the training table in the back room of the Florida gym where Bobby and I met for strength training. I drove to the tennis club where I had a practice session scheduled with Gabe.

He was standing midcourt, leaning on the net post when I swung open the wire door. “Ready to work?” he said.

“I am.”

He straightened up and twirled his racket. I said, “I just had a good meeting with Bobby.”

“Oh?”

I put a hand on Gabe’s shoulder. He was so much shorter than me. He was shorter even when we first met but I wasn’t a boy anymore. Our relationship had changed. He had gone from a sort of camp counselor to a professional colleague, and I was the boss. He provided a service for which I paid. I said, “This is our year, Gabe. It happens now.”

He knew exactly what Bobby and I had met about.





CHAPTER

32

Making the finals of the US Open raised my profile. I followed up the Open by winning the next two hard court tournaments so I was back in the conversation of top players to watch. My world ranking was eleven and moving in the right direction.

My agent signed two endorsement deals, one for razor blades and one for an energy drink. Good money, and the camera crews flew to me to make quick and easy TV spots. There are step-change moments in fame that a person can feel happening. More double-takes and whispers happen on the periphery, an entire ecosystem shift, like moving as a guest from a Holiday Inn to the presidential suite of the Four Seasons where everyone had memorized my name and said it with a slight bow.

I went to parties, the same kind of parties I’d gone to for years, but people decided I was a different person. I used to hug a drink to my chest and pull out my phone to pretend there were emails that needed attention so that I wouldn’t appear to be a friendless mute. Now I couldn’t handle the incoming, couldn’t find time to break away for another drink. My face had been on enough American TVs during the Open that people recognized me and wanted to congratulate me. There’d be five or six people waiting in semicircle formation for their turn, and there were famous people. Actors, musicians, politicians, and they wanted to talk to me, treated me as though I were the celebrity, not the other way around. It gave me a sense of not belonging. Someone else belonged here and if I ever became that someone else, how much connection would there be to the old me?