Trophy Son(56)

“I know you, Anton. Pretty well, I think. You choose distance from him over fights with him. But you’re strong and stand up for yourself so if he comes after you then there’s going to be a fight. You’re a good person and I know what you did was okay, and probably sent him the right message.”

“The message was to sneak into Wimbledon to start a riot during my match?”

“Your dad needs more time than most to hear the message.”

I took a deep breath, sunk into the couch, felt good, warm in my chest. “I miss you.” What the hell. Nothing to lose.

“I miss you too.” Not mere reciprocity. She thought about that before she said it.

“I’d like to see you.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

Damn!

“I can’t see you without telling Caleb. That would be,” it hung for a moment, “not right.”

“I understand.”

“Let me think about it.”

“Of course.”

“Thank you,” she said. For what? Patience? She thanked me for something. A masochist would take that as a good sign.

“Thanks for the call, Ana.”





CHAPTER

39

Ana didn’t get back to me. I had made the stakes pretty high so I shouldn’t have expected her to. They didn’t break off the engagement but there was still not a wedding announcement, so the length of the engagement was becoming newsworthy.

The next twelve months I played hurt a lot. Nothing major, nothing for the newspapers, just nagging stuff. Sore knees, sore shoulder, sore wrist, temperamental lower back. Sometimes my lower back would seize and cripple me, then Bobby would get some cortisone shots in me to knock back the pain and inflammation and get me back on the court. I was into the second half of my twenties and I noticed recovery was taking a little longer, even with the help from drugs.

I’d skip a tournament to get two weeks off here and there, enough time to rest but not enough to heal. By the third or fourth match back after a two-week break, I’d have the same pains, same cortisone shots. Like a car that’s overheating and needs to fully reset before it can run right again, but I didn’t have the time to reset my body. I had to play. I needed tournament points to keep my ranking. If a player doesn’t enter enough tournaments in the year, skipping has the same effect as a first-round loss.

I wondered how many of my injuries were the result of the regular wear and tear of an eleven-month season on a 6'3" frame, and how many were the result of my steroid program commanding an unnatural level of performance from my body.

I remembered deaths of old NFL players like Lyle Alzado, some of the Pittsburgh Steelers from the 70s, all the WWF professional wrestlers from the 80s dying off. I had to believe the medicine was a little better now, a little cleaner.

Most of the American guys a few years older than me who played when I was first coming up were all long gone. Rufus Parker hadn’t played a professional tournament in two years and was running a tennis camp for teens in San Diego. In tennis, a player can go from kid to veteran in the span of what might be an internship for most industries. And a player can go from a veteran to gone and forgotten in the same span of time.

Bobby made small adjustments to my steroid program. Always tweaking, optimizing, keeping me at the maximum. We’d committed to that for a few more years, as long as I could stay at the top of the game. Money was coming to me from places I’d never imagined before.

Of course the prize money was good and the sports apparel endorsements were great, and that I expected. But my agent also got money deals for me on fragrances, watches, private airlines, clothing labels, cars. I never did much for any of these deals. I just allowed my agent to tell people they could use my name, and they paid me. What my agent called “passive income.” It was more than my prize money.

There was a lot invested in staying on top of the game. My body was reminding me all the time that my run at number one would be finite and that my run in the game at all wouldn’t be much longer than the time at number one. I didn’t feel a slow decline coming on. I felt a collapse, like the snapping of a rope bridge over a canyon.

I also increased the amount of alcohol I drank during my two-week mini-breaks. I dated no one seriously. Tennis was a sentence and I needed to serve my time first and until then I’d make do with the company I could find.

I was in my New York apartment drinking beer with Adam on a mini-break when Gabe called my phone. I muted the TV and tried to sound sober. “Hey, Gabe.”

“Anton, we have a problem.”

Gabe was never dramatic. He didn’t talk that way so I stood up as a reflex, which reminded me how drunk I was. “What’s up?”

Adam looked over since the TV was muted.

Gabe said, “You got flagged. BB&T Atlanta Open. The test came back positive.”

“Bullshit. That’s not possible.” I sounded drunk since I was starting to panic and forgetting to try to sound sober. “Gabe, I don’t flag these, ever.” My brain was scrambling. In calm moments, I’ve wanted out of tennis plenty of times, but now this felt like a death sentence. First humiliation, then death, and I was having a physical reaction to the news. My heart was pounding more blood into my skull than the veins there could handle and I was out of breath. “Could there be a mix-up? Did they make a mistake?”