Chapter 5: Go West Young Man

In spite of erratic results, dysfunctional behavior, alarming meltdowns, and family tension, there was an inertia to junior tennis. Kids kept playing. It was a fun house, it was a mad house. It was a rollercoaster ride that was risky, that broke down often, but at some primal level continued to thrill. For you're  strapped in. You rise, you fall, you rise again. Only rarely did you come off the tracks. Even then, you got up, cleaned yourself off and got right back on for another loop. Because tennis. You kept playing, no matter what. 

The junior tennis experience was like going for a run. There were stretches on the run when you're flying downhill, the wind's at your back, you're feeling invincible as you hit your stride, and for a fleeting moment all is well in your little tennis world. Bottom of the hill, you turn a corner, the course flattens out some, but the views are still pleasing and you're making good time. Little farther up, you begin to tire, a flat mundane stretch of course appears that seems to last forever. You just try to keep your pace until you reach the home stretch, where it's back up the hill and in to the wind and your knee is sore and your pace is crashing and you're no where near your personal best and all the energy expended seems like a complete waste of time and now you fucking hate running and why do you keep running as you fall behind kids you used to lap just last year and you begin to get frustrated. You're trying your hardest but getting worse and that feeling you're falling behind begins to gnaw at you and for the first time in your life  you ask yourself why keep running at all? But you don't quit. You keep going, because that's what you do. You are a tennis player. You keep going, no matter what. 

The junior tennis calendar could be unforgiving. There was no off season, only next season. If you managed to achieve big fish status in your little pond, you immediately found a bigger pond. For in tennis, to rest on your laurels even for a moment was to fall behind.

Tennis' improvement was not linear. It was sporadic and erratic, like a cardiogram or a seismograph. It was a cycle of peaks and valleys, with dizzying rises and crushing falls, full of thrilling victories and agonizing defeats. And that could all be in the same tournament. 

Tennis' highs were the best. In the jargon of sports, they're referred to as zones.

In tennis, there's playing well. And then there's zoning. Zones were stretches of playing other-worldly. Zones were the downhill, wind at your back part of the run. When zoning, tennis got easy. Everything moved slowly. Your mind calmed. Decisions once confounding become instinctual. You can literally do no wrong. You start making shots you've never made before, shots no one has taught you and you don't really know how to hit yourself. (but that's your little secret). Running topspin lobs, carving off drop volleys. Shots hit by the professionals on television. Yet they're coming off your racket. Intentionally no less.

As exciting as zoning could be, I began to find them unsettling. Suddenly performing way beyond my comfort zone, I'd begin to question reality. Am I really doing this? Am I really this good? Zoning was ever thing I ever dreamed about, to be able to play that well. But now with it happening, was this really the new me?

In time, I would learn not to get too attached to zoning, for zones wore off. Like the most beautiful of dreams, however randomly they appeared, they would disappear just as mysteriously.

If tennis was school, junior tournaments were the tests. As with all tests, nerves played a part. We all know that feeling, of studying hard for an exam, nailing all the homework and practice questions, only when the test appeared to go frighteningly blank. 

In tennis, this would be called choking. In tournaments, the same script began to appear. Practice great all week. Start a match, everything would be going along just fine. Then at crunch time, my nerves would appear. I began breathing the pressurized air of tournament tennis. Soon I would tighten. My mind racing. My muscles seizing up. So much so, my feet felt stuck in mud. Afraid to miss. Unable to swing. I physically couldn't pull the trigger on my shots any longer. Desperate times. Then the pushing would begin. Physiologically unable to swing at my shots, I could look like I forgot how to play tennis. And there was no medicine for this. It was like a migraine taking over. Making it worse was the anxiety of everyone thinking of me a pusher. Another of tennis' scarlet letters. P for pusher. 

All because of a voice...

The voice of doubt. Arch enemy of belief. Every close match, right at winning time, this voice would appear. Always unwelcomed, always when it mattered. Aggressive it could be, telling me all sorts of crazy things. That I sucked, that I was awful, that I was never going to be any good and there was no way I was good enough to win this match. 

And if you asked me who the voice reminded me of, I'd say it sounded a lot like my Dad during his worst rants. But I was alone on a tennis court. Why during my matches would I channel him so?

Unable to quiet that voice, I would get in arguments with that it, trying to shout it down or shut it up, anything to over ride it. But the committee in my head had been seated, with my Dad's voice at the head of the table. And try as I might, his voice trumped all, telling me I didn't have it, silencing my attempts at self support. 

And though I knew his voice was wrong, his voice was all consuming. And as the anxiety of a tight match mounted, his voice would simply take over, drowning out my last feeble attempts at supporting myself. And once his thoughts became my thoughts, I was as good as done, as radio station K-Fucked streamed between my ears, myself incapable of changing the frequency. 

Tennis was hard enough without my Dad's voice occupying a whole floor in my head. Would I ever be able to evict him? 

Choking. Cracking under the pressure. I felt nuts. I just wanted to die. Chokes were traumatizing. Another tennis Scarlet Letter. Nothing worse than being thought of a choke. Choking became a virus in my tennis operating system. Tennis PTSD. I never forgot my chokes. The match, the opponent, the tournament, the round, the moment, the score, how far ahead I was, how many match points I blew and how I blew them and all the people there in attendance who saw.

Losing was never fun, but losing from choking was the worst. All the practicing, the training, all the work refining the hardware, to have the software let me down. The first hint of tension, a tight swing or deceleration and my mind would start racing. Catastrophizing I called it. A couple nervy swings at the wrong time and here we go again. 

Choking became a self-fulfilling prophecy, for all my thoughts would turn to choking and trying not to choke and how bad will this choke be and will the consequences for choking this time be worse than last time because last time really sucked and all my friends know I choked and I know I choked and I know as soon as I leave the room they're all calling me a choker just like my Dad did but they're laughing at me where as my Dad was yelling at me and I'm not really sure which is worse and its the end of a long weekend of matches and I'm trying to win an important tennis point with all this going through my mind and I'm 12 years old out there all by myself, battling an opponent, myself, the expectations of my father and the approval of my friends and my ranking is on the line and if I lose this match I won't make nationals and I'll fall out of the top 5 and not get anymore free stuff and somehow someway my little 12 year old self was able to override all that madness and tough out some close matches when I looked as good as dead. 

But on other occasions, the stress would overwhelm me and I'd flat out choke...

But I kept playing. Because tennis. And though my performances were often over-scrutinized (Imagine getting a report card every day at school) I was still young and improving, and in spite of the highs and lows, the moving average trend line remained positive, with hopes of better tennis just around the calendar at the next event.

Its in that hope I trudged on. The inertia. I was in an adolescent riptide, not fully in command, ebbing and flowing to powers far greater than myself. It could all feel out of control at times. Was I pushing too much or not enough? My judgement clouded by my immersion in the process, mysterious forces steering my decisions. Answers rarely appearing in the moment, only in hindsight. I was racing down a wide open highway on a seemingly endless road, no rest areas or off ramps in sight, a faint yet tantalizing pot of gold lurking just over the horizon. I'd become enslaved to the goal.

I was in the game, competing against thousands of wildly talented athletic driven kids my age, all putting in the time. I was a ping pong ball in a lottery draw. The chances of being the one were slim. But as long as there was a chance, I kept buying tickets. As I kept putting in the work, there was little talk of doing anything else. All the benchmarks of a healthy childhood; academics, socialization, becoming well-rounded, developing other interests, somehow became distractions to the greater goal and all that really mattered anymore. The tennis.

Tennis wanderlust. Go everywhere. Get nowhere. There was no blueprint for success, nor paydirt here. I was learning early it was a long slog for all. There would be no diversifying the portfolio, little risk management, only strengthening of the positions. Doubling down, tripling down, the sacrifices asked began to mount. This is not a normal life. But I'm not a normal kid. I'm different. I might even be special. And my vital formative teenage years would be spent inside a fence chasing a fuzzy yellow ball around a rectangular court. And the downsides to all that could be dealt with long after my tennis dreams played themselves out.

1977: First year in the 14's. It all began to get exhausting, the flat boring part of the run with no view. Just going from tourney to tourney, because that's what I did. Some decent wins, some bad losses, some misbehaving defaults, with a few crushing chokes sprinkled in. All in just a couple months. I was all over the place

Then late one winter's evening we got a phone call. Dad was in the hospital undergoing surgery. He had torn his Achilles tendon in half on an overhead at that same frigid bubble we played at all those early winter mornings. Dad was in a heap of trouble, with a cast from hip to toe, grounded for six months if not longer. 

With Dad incapacitated, my structured tennis world was now thrown asunder. I didn't just lose my only practice partner and de facto coach, I lost my catalyst to all things tennis.

For as challenging as our relationship was, none of my tennis was happening without my Dad. And now he was out. At first, I thought not having Dad at my tournaments would be liberating, helping me relax  and to some degree it was. I didn't have to worry about the drives home with the scathing critiques of my effort and play. But desperately seeking his approval (or avoiding his wrath) turned out to be the fuel for my competitive spirit. My on court fire had been about trying to convince him of my worth, that I mattered, that I wasn't the failure he was so quick to deem me. Now not having to worry about all that, I felt lost on the court. A little feral in these uncharted waters. I felt no gravity, no pull or direction to guide my efforts. I felt light as an escapee, happy to no longer be imprisoned in our toxic dynamic. But I also felt lost on the court. Without Dad to impress, all of a sudden I could care less how I did.

With little to no practice during the week, I began showing up for events out of form and apathetic, a feeling so foreign I didn't know what to think. I just felt numb, competing without a care in the world, meaning I didn't care one way or another how I played or how I did. My fear of consequences diminished, my competitive pilot light became a mere flicker.  I played like I was in mourning, my tennis raison d'etre missing, sitting at home in a cast convalescing. 

Suddenly not caring if I won or lost, in a nutshell, I started tanking.

Tanking. In tennis jargon it means not trying. Its a defense mechanism really. Not wanting to make oneself fully vulnerable to an uncertain oft painful outcome. Its complicated. Its an internal emotional state of mind where a player pretends not to care that manifests in play resembling somebody not trying their best to win. 

There was a tanking spectrum. Just walking off the court and quitting was the most extreme. Other modes of tanking involved not running down balls, going for winners on every shot, trying ridiculous shots from ridiculous positions, or just meekly sleepwalking one's way through a match. Whichever way, the result was the same. It was competitive fight or flight and for the first time in my young athletic life, I chose flight.

Competitive tennis was about making oneself fully vulnerable. To be able to give 100% of oneself, to practice, to training, to each and every match, knowing full well it may not work out and when it didn't (which will be frequent) it was going to hurt like hell. It's a unique pain. To give absolutely every fiber of your being to something you love year after year after year and have it not be enough. Its not for everyone. 

And it was starting to look like it wasn't for me...

No longer able to play, my Father decided the next best thing to playing was watching other people play. But not just any old people, the best tennis players we could find. 

With America's tennis boom in full swing, tournaments were now a-plenty. The Virginia Slims Women's tour came to Boston, playing in some makeshift warehouse. The ATP Men's Tour made their way to Longwood for the summer clay court swing. The New England men played their Open locally with the venerable Ned Weld winning all. The Girls 16 and 18 National indoors were played an hour away on the Cape in Plainview, Massachusetts. And the Boston Lobsters World Team Tennis team practiced at my club. With an embarrassment of viewing riches at our disposal, Dad had absolutely no problem pulling me from school to take day trips to watch the professionals play.

At first, it was peculiar watching all the pros cheat, choke, flip out and tank just like I did. Apparently growing up was not the antidote for growing out of such behavior. Was this a feature or a bug of this mysterious tennis? Some players though, like Chris Evert, were able to keep their cool no matter what. They appeared like aliens to me. Others, like Jimmy Connors and Ilie Nastase wore their angst on their sleeves, cursing and spitting their way to victory. It was the rambunctious players I became transfixed by, though I had to admit, the way they carried on made them look like morons. Did I really come across that way too?

In Plainview, Mass for the finals of the girls 18 indoors. Anne Smith vs Zenda Leiss. Two names I'd been reading about in the yearbooks for some time. Wandering the grounds before the big match, my Dad and I came upon a scene. Smith with her coach on a back court, him feeding her ball after ball after ball, exactly the same shot til she got it right. The shot was a backhand overhead. I remember looking at my Dad thinking what the hell are they doing. And sure enough, as she marched through the finals in straight sets, she capped off a huge point with a precision backhand overhead winner.

So that got my Dad thinking. What about some repetition?

In spite of being incapacitated, my Father remained committed to tennis' impossibly steep learning curve.  He saw tennis as a sport of observation and implementation within your own athleticism. He saw the machine like efficiency of the professionals juxtaposed against the confounding beauty of the game, for any observer of tennis would see there was no consensus way to play the sport. One handed two handed cross handed big guy little guy attacker defender, top spin slice flat western eastern continental. The beauty of tennis was its variety. It was also what made it confounding.

The scientist in my Dad deduced if there was an agreed upon best way to strike a tennis ball, everybody be doing the same thing. But there was not. They all did it differently, but the same though. For it didn't seem to matter how you swung the racket as long as you were able to repeat said swing. And he deduced the best way to repeat said swing perfectly was through endless mindless soul scorching repetition against a ball machine. 

Seeing the efficiency of tennis' best players got my Dad's wheels rolling. Practice was becoming a problem. My Dad was still months away from being able to hit. At age 12, having already won my club's junior tournament, I entered the adult open and won that too. There was literally nobody for 20 miles who could push me around. 

So Dad got an idea. He always wanted a house with a tennis court in his backyard. So he upped and moved our family to the town next door, the provincial Andover, Mass, with Phillips Academy, arguably the most prestigious prep school in the nation now just a couple blocks away. With a bigger flatter lot to work with, my father got busy, building a private tennis court in our back yard. (By himself, of course. He designed it, graded it, and sub-contracted out everything)

With Dad healing up, the court went in. In his heart Dad wanted a clay court, but his practical side won out, opting for a far lower maintenance all-season hard court. Late 77, we get a little tennis in, Dad and me. With his leg still healing, his stamina was limited, but not our new Lobster ball machine. It could go all day with an efficiency Henry Ford would be proud.

Dad would get me up early again, filling the Lobster to overflow, setting the oscillator for maximum punishment, targets properly placed in corners, with the only reward for hitting them a chance to rest. Whether it was my ADD or my low frustration tolerance, the ball machine and I never clicked. Too static, too impersonal.

The old adage that practice made perfect wasn't exactly true. What was true was practice made permanent, and what was being made permanent was my distaste for all things drilling. I hated drills.  Never did a cross-court, never had a ball fed to me. All I wanted to do was crack a couple cans and get at it, just like Dad and I used to do. Except there wasn't anybody for me to play anymore and the hopes that a court in our backyard might enhance my practices proved shortsighted. I needed a live body across the net. If I hated the ball machine, I loathed the wall even more. I would rather be waterboarded than hammer balls against an inanimate object. And all the discussions taking place over dinner about how to best train soon became moot as the winter of 78 arrived. 

Weather events can unite communities. They can also break them apart. In the midst of a brutal cold New England winter, a Nor'easter came a-calling, dropping a record 35 inches of snow on the ground, paralyzing Massachusetts for the next several weeks. And just when the state had dug its way out, another blizzard blew through, dropping 37 more inches, crippling the state once again.

With the final flurries fluttering harmlessly down, my Dad stepped out on our porch to survey the damage. We had a brick wall that ran down one side of our driveway. To my Father's astonishment, there stood a 7 foot snow drift along the whole bricked side, with absolutely nowhere for the snow to go. Awestruck by the shoveling task ahead, my Father shook his head in resignation, muttering under his breath.. "Fuck this. We're out of here"

But to where.

The year was 1978. There were two great American tennis migrations occurring. East Coast. West Coast. Before Biggie and Tupac, there was Bollettieri and Lansdorp. Bollettieri had just opened a tennis Academy in Bradenton, FL, attracting many of America's top juniors. (Arias, Banck, White, Korita, Bassett, Bonder). Turns out I wasn't alone. Great junior players were emerging from all sorts of off the path locales

But my Father had his sights set on Southern California. With the Apollo projects long wound down, the next frontier for space travel was the manned Space Shuttle, with my Father's field of work taking place at Hughes Aerospace in the South Bay section of Southern California. Coincidentally, Robert Lansdorp and his fast growing stable of up and coming junior tennis phenoms also resided there. A couple business trips out West and it wasn't long before Dad had accepted a new position all the way across the country to Southern California.

And though my tennis had hit a snag, I still had a decent year, getting ranked 2nd in New England that year, qualifying me for Nationals again. By now though, I was 13 years old and already the best adult in my area. I needed new challenges, and Southern California would soon to be it. So much had been invested in my tennis. It was time to triple down on the double down. If I had any chance of making it, of being special, it wasn't going to happen in the sleepy suburbs of Boston Mass. My time in New England had run its course. If becoming a big time tennis player was the goal, I wasn't going to get there living here. 

So in the scorching summer of 1978 our entire family, Mom, Dad, my brothers Larry Jerry our two Siamese cats Fred and Samantha and our prized bulldog Princess all piled in to my Dad's Volkswagon Van, embarking on a 3000 mile slog across our great country. 

I was leaving New England, the only world I knew. But it was time. 

It was time to go. It was time to go west, young man.. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

chapter 4: My tennis tantrums

As bad as my cheating became, there was always plausible deniability. The art of the hook involved guile and deception. Learning how to block out your opponents vision, oversell your calls with conviction, disarm your opponents with kindness (always use their first name.."Geez John, you just missed that") and most importantly, cheat when no one else was around.

For the most part, I was able to go undetected. Fortunately still playing small time New England junior tennis, I was winning enough to argue it made no sense for me to cheat. But no tennis player wants a reputation, to be referred to as a cheater, to be branded with tennis' version of the scarlet letter C. For that kind of labeling doesn't peel off so easily. 

But I did burn some kids back then. And I learned the hard way, when you screw people ever, some never forget. But my cheating didn't distinguish me from my peers that much, I was far from the only kid making tight calls back then,  It was my on court tennis tantrums though that left an entirely different impression.

With junior tennis now in full swing, Dad and I really started to cover some ground. Turned out a kid could play a tournament darn near every weekend if he didn't mind traveling some. So we began to venture out.

At first it was exciting, seeing all of New England for the first time, staying in hotels in little towns I could barely pronounce, let alone find on a map. The mood to the tourneys was often light. Dad flooring his sports car of the moment, telling his same drawn out stories, me in the passenger seat, eyes barely above the dashboard, just soaking it all in. His favorite story involved a guy getting lost in Maine and having to ask for directions. I forget the story's build up, but the punchline always stuck with me, with the old Maine gas station attendant saying... "You can't get there from here." 

And then late one night, as fate would have it, lost in the Maine countryside for what seemed forever, we found an open gas station to ask directions, and true to form, a craggly old guy peaked in to our car and said. "I'm sorry sir, you can't get there from here." 

Unsure if he was jiving us or not, but that had to be the hardest I heard my Dad laugh.

With my early tournament success, our travels soon took us even further from the greater Boston area. Going in Dad's sports car meant these were not family outings. Just Dad and me with the stakes greatly amplified. My results for the most part were unremarkable. I beat who I was supposed to, got drubbed by the older better kids, with my father in full observation mode, sizing up the junior tennis experience while archiving every detail of my performances.

But the drives home soon took on a darker tone. The better I was getting, the more intense he became, with the rides home filled with animated words of encouragement and consternation. I sensed early on that trying hard and playing well were my only defenses against the sharp barbs that could come my way, yet sometimes even that wasn't enough. Being critical was simply my Father's bedside manner, which in retrospect, wasn't very mannerly. His abusive tones were all I knew, and having little knowledge of other Father/son dynamics, I just assumed this was how every Dad talked to their sons.

With Dad's hunger for the tournament experience growing by the event, before long we were traveling out of New England for more regional events. Albany, Southern Connecticut, New York's Easter Bowl,  Long Island's Port Washington Junior Tennis Academy. Those weekend getaways took on ever greater significance, partly because of the stiffer competition involved, but more so for the rewards and consequences that came with my play. 

If I did well, we would stop at this giant candy store in Central Connecticut, loading up to feast away for the long haul home. Poor results were not so sweet. Harsh verbal lashings with no place in the car to hide, always followed by dead silence. Long lonely hours of mind numbing night driving, no music, no conversation, just two people in a small car, together but separate, him staring straight ahead chain smoking away, my face stuck to the fogging window, straining to see through the darkness outside while not succumbing to the darkness within.

Continuing to improve, the drives soon became trips. They were not all grim though. I had worked my way up to the top five in New England, qualifying me for national tournament play. And so it was in July 1976 as I set forth to play my first ever national tournament, the twelve and under Clay Courts, taking place in Winston Salem, North Carolina.

On a sweltering hot summer day of the bicentennial year 1976, Dad and I drove down to the RV rental place to pick up our motor home for the week. A quick drive in to greater Boston to pick up three of my twelve and under peers, and it was south we went to Connecticut to pick up another father-son combination, making our ensemble complete. My father, one other father, myself and 4 of my new best friends from New England's 12 and under division, careening our way down the Eastern Seaboard to do battle at our first ever USTA national event. 

The event was eye opening. I won my first round, but got crushed by the top seed and future champion Michael Kures. Not the worst, yet far from the best, I was in the game, learning I could hang at the National level.

What was memorable about the trip though was having friends around me when I lost. They were my human shields, providing me cover from my Dad's temper, at least for a while. Dad would still find time to get me alone and get a little of that meanness off his chest. Fortunately though, others would soon arrive, filling that ever growing chasm between us, my friends saving me from another protracted silence.

The following summer came a bigger trip. I was having another good year, At age twelve, I had qualified for the fourteen and under hard courts in Fort Worth, Texas, to be held on the campus of TCU. There would be no RV trip with buddies on this one. It was going to be me and Dad alone for a week straight, making me anxious about the trip for obvious reasons. 

But the night before I was to leave, he called me in to the kitchen to talk. Maybe he knew he'd been crossing some lines with me, or maybe he'd checked out the junior tennis scene enough and deemed it safe, but as I sat down to talk, he handed me a couple sheets of paper. One was a plane ticket, the other was my transportation information. He told me my mother would be dropping me off at the airport the next morning for my flight and all the information I needed was right here and to call them collect when I got to my housing. He then handed me some spending money, wished me good luck and that was it. 

The next morning Mom dropped me off at Boston's Logan Airport, suitcase and rackets in tow, flying solo toward the biggest tournament of my life to a place I'd never been and did not know. 

 

And I was twelve years old and entirely on my own.

 

In this day and age, some might think that child endangerment. I thought it one of the greatest things to ever happen. Complete freedom. Freedom to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, but most importantly, freedom from him. I celebrated said freedom by rushing out to the local Dunkin Doughnuts, getting myself a dozen powder topped cream filled, securing myself a sleepless night and a world class stomach ache the evening before my first match. Yet I performed well at the event, winning a few rounds against older higher ranked kids, making it to and fro without a hitch, while winning the trust of my Dad that I could go to such events by myself without incident. 

 

And that's how I would travel for the remaining years of my junior tennis experience. Solo, and entirely on my own.

 

But air travel to tournaments was the exception. The majority of my events involved myself and my Dad. As I began to do better and better, the stakes got higher. Going deeper in to bigger tournaments meant facing some of the nation's best. Before I would get crushed, now I was competitive with them, giving some of them a scare. Not much later, I finally notched a few high level wins. Now Dad was really getting fired up, and with this amplification came even higher expectations, and pressure to perform better and better, and roll all that up in to a big ball, and all that mattered now was winning.

 

Everything became about winning, and not just winning, but complete efforts, start to finish, perfectly played, perfectly behaved. Anything less was unacceptable and had consequences, and those consequences would be played out on long drives home, away from the eyes and ears of others. 

 

A young boy and his angry father. Angry at what I would never learn...
 

I didn't have a voice back then. I was incapable of explaining myself, that I was trying my absolute best but just couldn't live up to his standards. I was also incapable of defending myself when his rage would start raining down. He was very intimidating, with a booming voice that just paralyzed me when he started in. I hated the outbursts, but waiting for them to start was even worst. When would it come, and how bad would it be, or did I escape this time? And what if I reacted and fought back. Would it escalate further, would it get physical?  Because that's what I needed to do. To fight back. 

 

To be loud instead of silent...

 

I was doing life with an increasingly pent up rage. It was going to get released somewhere. But where?

How about a tennis court. Before long, I started to get angry on the court. Real angry. Streams of profanity, delivered with guttural emphasis to achieve maximum effect. Cries for help. But help for what? My utterances never made much sense. Word salads really. Funny to my friends, pretty disturbing to everyone else. If someone walked by my court, it wasn't hard to tell how I was doing, and I'm not referring to the score or how I was playing. I'm talking about my sanity. I was a postcard from the edge, a kid in distress, cracking up right before you, no longer able to keep my angst to myself. 

 

It turned out playing tennis didn't make me angry. Sure, the competitor in me hated losing, but that paled in comparison to how much I hated how I was treated for losing. Tennis provided me an arena to vent my anger. Because it wasn't safe for me to express my anger toward my Father, so it came out sideways. On my rackets, on the fences, on the netposts, on the balls, worst of all, at myself. Enough to make Freud blush. At my worst, when I'd miss, I'd smash my legs with my racket as hard as I could, leaving  discolored welts, bruises of shame. I was just so angry. Because I knew what was coming for not playing up to his standards.

Not that my outbursts went unnoticed. The adults in the room would admonish me for my behavior, try to explain to me I needed to reign it in a bit. Or a lot. That tennis was a gentleman's sport and that I needed to comport myself accordingly. They would explain to me that I was representing my family, and my club, and my tennis section, years later it would be my country. Off the court, I could understand all that and agree to try harder to keep it under control. I would even sign conduct agreements, that if I acted up, I would be pulled off the court (which I was) and given a serious time out from the game.

And knowing there were severe consequences for losing my cool, I would walk on the court appearing jovial and light. To the non-initiate, I appeared a happy good-natured young lad, quick to smile, easy to laugh. I see pictures of myself from my youth, always with a smile, seemingly so very grateful to be able to play this great game of tennis with all its lore. And as play would begin, I would joke around in the warm up and applaud my opponents good shots both verbally and otherwise, and then without any real sign a tempest was brewing, a couple sloppy points or a bad error later and it was F %$#SH%$$ !!!!!!!! at the absolute top of my lungs, utterly involuntary, 100 percent spontaneous, and play around me would halt for as far as one could hear.

 

Why so angry? The first in a long list of questions I could not answer. My court needed a couch instead of a bench. Why did I keep acting in ways detrimental to my best interests? My anger. Was it my first survival skill? Was it my way of expressing how helpless I felt?  My tennis court rage, getting me in constant trouble, costing me matches that really meant something to me. Yet I knew all that and couldn't control it. To allow something to do so much to me, it must have been doing something for me. But what? 

 

Yet the outbursts kept coming. I would just stand there, shocked as everyone else. My tennis Tourette's had got away from me again.  If my father didn't come down and pull me off the court immediately, the tournament director was soon going to himself, for my levee had broken, and they had seen this all before, and as vile as what just came out of my mouth just was, it was just the opening salvo of far greater outbursts to come.  And I was 12 years old now and completely out of control, and nobody had the first clue what was wrong with me, or what to do with me, including myself and my Dad.  I just could not contain how angry I was. Powerless and overwhelmed by a rage within me the form and scope of which I would not discover for many years to come.

It's been said one never knows what worse luck their bad luck saved them from...

 

How fortunate I was to have a tennis court to channel my fury.  For to express that degree of anger, with that intensity and frequency in the real world, where life is not a gentleman's game, could have had dire consequences for myself and those who crossed my path  So in a convoluted way, I got lucky to have found tennis as a place to exorcise my rage, for greater society is not kind to those incapable of self-control.  

But something was obviously not right with me. Off the court, I was an energetic, talkative, engaging, funny kid.  I had to be; those became my survival skills. I needed you to like me, to listen to me, to be my friend and support system.  I became malleable, chameleon like. I could become whoever you needed me to be, whatever it took for you to accept me. Because I was struggling with how my Dad thought of me, a young little boy in a lazy New England suburb who was told early and often that little boy was no good. That he was a screw up, a fuck up, worthless, stupid, a flawed failure right from the get go. The messaging was clear right from the gate.

So again, all subconsciously, and infected with a toxic sort of shame a young child doesn't shake off so easy, I had to get creative.  I got the message loud and clear. I was no good, and if people got to know me like my Dad did, they would all agree with him. It was bad enough having to feel that way at home all the time; no chance I was going to go out in the world and let you all pile on to my already fractured sense of self. 

And there were some lean years in there of being bullied and socially ostracized by my peers during my  mobile adolescence.  But I always had my tennis as my safe harbor, a place I could, at least for a couple hours a day, feel some peace in the world.  A place I could find validation from within myself by a well-placed shot or a two set victorious thumping. It was the only place and the only source of validation I had keeping me sane and afloat.   

So when things would start to go badly, when I would miss that shot, that lone source of self-esteem, my only shot at approval, I was losing much more than a tennis point. I was losing what little bit of self I had, for to miss was to fail, which somehow got transferred from a tennis result to a referendum on my value as a young human being.   

 

And when the errors really started to add up and the score was not tilting my way, I would just flat out fucking snap, for my one safe validating place in my strange young world was conspiring against me like all else.  I would push back, push back hard, and loud, and with fury in my blood, because to lose meant I was a loser and my Dad was right.  But I knew he wasn't. I knew he was wrong.  I knew it and I fought that injunction. I just didn't have the emotional skills to defend myself against that injunction, that I was flawed and no good. 

 

And I was 12 years old, and the battle for my soul was on.

 

I often wonder if I had the ability to express myself back then, would it have made a difference? If I had the emotional intelligence to put in to words what it was like for me on those drives home, sitting there next to him, ground zero for his incoming rage, yet wholly invisible to him.

 

How could he not have known the damage he was doing?  

 

How could he live with himself if he did? 

 

If I could have just found the strength to say...

 

'Do you know what I'm thinking right now? When I turn away from you to look out in to the pitch black darkness for something that would make me feel better...I prefer to stare at an abyss of endless nothing than turn my attention back toward you...Do you know what I'm thinking...what I want to say to you...You got me right where you want me now, don't ya? I gave you three hours on the court to figure out what to say...got any new material? That old shit is stale man...I've heard it too many times now....What do ya got for me this time? We got a couple hour drive...so pace your rage, you asshole....You know I can't say that to you...but if I could I would, and I'd say a lot more than that...I'd pop you in the fucking mouth if I could...I mean, I could...you're almost sick enough to respect me for doing so...but that's a risk I can't take...cause we're a long way from home..that place I can't wait to get the fuck out of...Are you trying to toughen me up with your words??? Well you do. Are you trying to break me? Well you can't break me, but you've destroyed us.. damn right you have...Am I just supposed to shake your words off... carry on our father son thing like nothing was said between us on these drives home.. Did you know when you're yelling at me, when you're getting stuff off your mind it's being permanently lodged in mine...And I don't know what to do with your words...I can't let go of something I never had a handle on...that never belonged to me....and I just so want to throw every fucking one of them right back at ya...But they're inside of me...And I can't find em...can't locate em...they just show up sometimes..and when they appear, I want to give em back to you so bad...but you know what???...I don't give em back to ya cause I don't want to hurt your feelings or make you feel bad and how fucking sick is that...

 

And so much more I would love to say to you, but responding to abuse with more abuse is not a solution....And I struggle with all this all the time, did you know that???....Battling my confusion...so thankful for all you did for me....so angry at you for all you did to me...and just unable to shake how unsafe you made me feel as a vulnerable young child ...all those haunting memories from those long drives home

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

Chapter 3: My Cheating Ways

Being all in with junior tennis meant playing tournaments, officially sanctioned United States Tennis Association (USTA) events that counted toward a ranking. I already knew what rankings were all about. My Dad and I used to stay up nights scouring the USTA yearbooks, learning about all the tournaments, the players, their marquee matches and most importantly, who was ranked where. As my Dad would tell me, if I wanted to be the best, I needed to know who to beat. But those were the national events. In order to get there, I needed to qualify from my section first. And that meant playing lots of tournaments. 

Start locally. Dream globally. Rankings were achieved by winning matches, with the math pretty straight forward. The more tournaments played, the more chances to win meaningful matches. This simple factoid was not lost on my father.

Tournaments were organized via age groups (12, 14, 16, 18 and under) with boys and girls competing separately. They were open to anyone with a valid USTA card and a desire to compete. Every player in tennis' Hall Of Fame began their careers this way: unseeded, unranked, inexperienced and unknown, from Roger Federer to Serena Williams to John McEnroe and my new boyhood idol Jimmy Connors. (Easter bowl photo of young Jimmy at tourney desk) 

This was the highway every junior tennis player with a dream traveled, take the first onramp when you're young, get off at the last exit, hopefully as a professional tennis player

With junior tennis now seated at the head of the table, our nightly dinner conversations took on a more urgent tone. Now it was all about scheduling. What tourney to play next, who was going to drive me to practice, would we be staying overnight for that weekend's event, who would stay home to hold the fort, all with the same goal in mind, to get my ranking high enough to qualify for Nationals. 

Qualifying for Nationals was an arduous task. The USTA was composed of 17 sections across the United States of which 128 positions were up for grabs. Yet not all sections were created equal. My section New England, composed of the northeast states of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine was considered one of the smaller weaker sections in the country compared to the powerhouse sections of the sunbelt like Florida and Southern California. 

Spots in the Nationals were determined by the number of USTA memberships a section had. New England, not being a tennis hotbed, was only allotted 5 of the 128 entries to the National level events. So the task before me was simple. Out of the thousands of kids my age playing junior tennis throughout New England, I had six months and maybe a dozen tournaments to get my ranking in to the top five to qualify for Nationals and a coveted national ranking.

Junior tournaments could be all weekend affairs. Living in the Northeast, most were played indoors, the host clubs hosting anywhere from 4-8 separate age group events, depending on the size of the facility. Most of the draws were open, meaning all who wanted to play were admitted, resulting in draw sizes routinely reaching 64 players if not more. The draws were single elimination. You win, you advance. You lose, you go home. The original bracketology.

With so many entrants, tournament directors had to be scheduling jedis. Matches would begin Friday afternoon, running straight through the evening til midnight if not later, only to be back first thing  the next morning until Sunday's last ball was hit. With all players not created equal, many early round matches could go quickly, a tournament director's dream. But all it took was for a couple of evenly matched hustlers to play a 3 hour marathon to throw the weekend's best scheduling intentions in to total chaos. What this meant is if a player played well, entire weekends would be spent away from home either playing or waiting to play.

It was the waiting around the tournament sites that defined the junior tennis experience. The weekends became experiments in group psychology. Throw a couple hundred young boys and girls together, with all their parents and extended families into a cramped upstairs lounge woefully unprepared for a crowd, add in the thick air of expectations and tension and history and things could get a little volatile.

My first few events felt like day one at a new school. I knew no one, no one knew me, but we all had something in common, parents who thought we were ready for tournament tennis. As with all social gatherings, cliques evolved. The older kids already knew each other, siblings clung closely together, the better kids stood apart, their elite fraternity not open to any old player. Those familiar with each other had an ease about them. For us newcomers, we stayed to ourselves, hoping to play well enough to earn some cred. It would take a good win or putting a scare in to a top player to gain admittance to this mysterious new club. It was the latter way that I came to be accepted to the junior tennis scene. 

Unseeded and unknown, I played the number one ranked kid in New England tight, losing a close three setter in our first ever meeting. Walking to the parking lot about to head home, the father of the boy who just beat me came up to my Dad and I to congratulate me for such a fine match. Fighting back tears, I sheepishly said thank you. To which he turned to my Dad, held out his hand, and introduced himself.. 

"My name is Leo Power. I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot of each other." 

And with that gesture, my Father and I had been accepted in to this strange foreign world of junior tennis we were just getting to know. I had passed the first test of belonging.

As an insecure, hyper-selfconscious young boy, tournaments became proving grounds. Did I measure up? Could I hang with my section's best players? Coming from a sleepy little working class town named Tewksbury, where no one was exceptional and little noteworthy happened, it was natural to assume everybody was better than me at everything. They certainly looked better than me, some of my peers had two and three rackets (all the same model, some even got them free!!), some were sponsored head to toe with the latest clothing lines, some came with their coaches, some had a court at their house, some kids had an older sibling who was ranked nationally, other kids had a parent who played the tour. 

It was details like those that mattered most to my 11 year old self.

Many of the kids looked like professional mini-mes, all decked out like their favorite pro player, racket bagging their way from tournament to tournament. I would arrive wearing clothes my Mom would sew to save us some money, lugging Dad's spare racket along in case I broke a string. These moments would become the first in a long series of events where I felt less than, where I believed I didn't measure up to my peers, comparing how composed they looked on the outside to how I unsure I felt about myself.  Fortunately for me, clothes didn't make the player and matches were decided on the court. But the feelings of inadequacy were real and penetrating, like I was down a set and a break before my matches even began

Each tournament, the ritual was the same. My morning practices with Dad at the Bubble intensified. Whatever wasn't clicking had increasingly scarce time to get clicking. The night before the tournament, an excitement filled the house. I was going in to battle again, all hands on deck. I would get through a distracted day at school as Dad would get off work early, and it was pack up the car and hit the interstate time for a weekend of possibilities few other kids my age experienced. For I was an eleven year old kid with a purpose. To go out and win a tennis tournament and get myself qualified for Nationals.

Dad in charge, slicing through the suburbs of Boston, we were a team on a mission. Find the club, park the car, pop the trunk, grab the gear, find the entrance, enter the club, find the sign...

 "Tournament Desk Upstairs". 

The long slow walk up the stairs to the lobby, the butterflies of competing temporarily replaced by the dread of a possible bad draw. Catch a tough draw and the all weekend junior tennis event could be over before the weekend even started.

Reaching the upstairs lobby, eyes dart to the walls where white poster board sized draws hung. Find your age group, scroll down from the top, look for your name, hoping against hope not to draw the top seed in the first round. Parents and their kids huddled together, speaking in soft hushed tones. I can't hear their conversations, but I know exactly what they're saying. They're talking about their draw and their opponents and their pathway to the finals come tourney's end. 

Over the balcony the sound of cracked tennis balls filled the lobby. Synchronized. Hit, bounce, hit bounce. In perfect rhythm, like a heart beat, tennis coming to life. The popping resounding echos of an indoor tennis facility. I knew of fewer beautiful sounds.

Sanctioned tourneys were single elimination events. If 64 kids entered, 63 would lose, with only that weekend's winner escaping unscathed. To win a 64 draw tourney meant winning six straight matches, between Friday and Sunday, within a 48 hour period, all of them two out of three tie-break sets, exactly what the professionals played. Once the first ball was hit, the weekend cycle was set. Play, recover, wait to play. Play, recover, wait to play. Rinse repeat. Until you either lost or drove home a champion. 

In professional tennis, the court is a busy place. Umpires, linesmen, security, cameramen, officials, broadcasters, ballboys and ballgirls as well as thousands of boisterous fans surrounding the court. Not so in junior tennis. Its just two kids and a can of balls, given basic match instructions and a court assignment, often quite far from the eyes of supervising adults.

I was eleven years old. If I got through Friday's first match, Saturday had three meaningful matches on the schedule. If a couple of those matches ran long, (and they always did) I would be looking at a 7-8 hour day of stressful tennis competition. Again, I was eleven years old armed with only a basic understanding of tennis' rules and its traditions of sportsmanship, yet tennis' braintrust decided that 11 year olds should go out there and compete all day entirely by themselves. For tennis had some strange traditions. During tournament play, players were not allowed to leave the court, nor were they allowed to talk to anyone, or to receive any coaching or instruction or consoling, though benign encouragement from the stands was permitted, if your parents were in to that kind of thing.

No, junior tennis was literally the purest form of one on one competition, with parents the supply chain, procuring, producing and delivering products to sustain performance. Water and nutrition from the store, the emergency stringing of the favorite racket between matches. To say nothing of the transportation and clerical duties required for entry and attendance. And most importantly, the time invested. A successful tournament run meant being away from their lives and homes often for three straight days, sitting nervously, impatiently, hanging on every point like they were playing themselves. The investment was extraordinary for all parties involved, the only tangible return on that investment being victories.

With everyone clumped together for such long stretches, tournaments could be toxic. They brought out the drama in people. Yelling, cheering, excuse making, arguing, backstabbing, gossiping, complaining, the harsh words of verbal abuse...and that was just the parents.

Us kids were kids, constantly carrying on, off the court and on. There was the usual mean girls/bullying/Lord of the Flies/horse play/practical joking stuff kids do when unsupervised. But on the court was where the behavior really heated up. Tantrums and breakdowns colored triumphs and defeats. Tennis was a test of skill tempered by a test of nerves. Expectations ran high here. Tennis was a high ego sport. Alpha Dogs and roadkill. So much bravado, false and otherwise. Yet the historical numbers didn't lie. If you were a top junior in America in the 1970s, you were in the company of future greatness. Who among us would that be?

Hence the nerves. The week of, the night before, on the drive to. Match time, and a cautious anxious excitement filled the air. Yet always some kid getting sick in the bathroom before a match, or the deer in the headlight freeze of the young and overwhelmed. The human body reacts to stress differently. Let's just say some kids handled their shit better than others.

And that applied to the parents too, for they all had their coping skills. The pacer, the panther, the talker, the stalker, the chart keeper, the cheer leader. To watch your flesh and blood compete at tennis, where nothing was given, everything earned, knowing once they walked on that court there was absolutely nothing you could do to affect the outcome. Not to say some didn't try. Parents would cheat. They gave signals. A smile meant approach. A touch of the hat meant move the feet. Not exactly the carrying-ons of a third base coach, but if you watched closely enough, the codes were not hard to break.

Why all the tension you might ask? As stated, the rankings didn't lie. To win one of these events vaulted a player in to the Nationals conversation. Once there, you're among the best in the nation. And being the best in the USA in the mid 1970s meant you were among the best in the world. And though the pathway to professional tennis was a long shot for even the most successful and talented juniors, you were in tournaments with future champions and world number 1's. And though it bordered on delusional to start preparing for a professional career at such a young age, to come of age with professional level skill and athleticism and not be prepared to make the jump would have been downright criminally irresponsible.

So tennis was stressful. Stressful to watch, even more stressful to play. With the outcome always unknown, the player who managed the stress best often prevailed. For more matches were lost than won, with players often succumbing to the pressure. And it made sense. Human emotions in the extreme can only be experienced in short bursts. One can only laugh and cry and rage for so long. 

So when tennis matches got stressful, part of every player just wanted the match over, win lose or draw, mainly for the stress to cease, for competitive tennis wasn't fun. It was nothing but prolonged anxiety. The whole experience was intense, the pressure and expectations weighing upon young junior tennis players. I always felt if a parent was to regularly subject their child to such a challenging environment, they best really have their shit together. Yet if parents really had their shit together, they would never subject their kids to such an environment.

Of course, nobody tells you any of this when you enter your first event. If junior tennis got Yelp reviews, there would be a lot of 1 stars.

With no manual, everyone's expected to know how to behave  A seat of your pants experiment in growing up. Everybody grab a vine and swing on in to the great unknown. A bunch of perfectionist parents grooming perfectionist kids, all trying to play a game perfectly that was impossible to perfect, all the while being expected to conduct themselves perfectly.

And it was in this environment I would spend seemingly every weekend of my childhood, going in to battle, junior tennis style. Dad and I. Yet even with my Dad at my side, I often felt outnumbered, like Dad was a double agent, even a traitor at times. He developed this habit at my matches. One thing he despised about the junior tennis scene was parents rooting avidly for their child. He thought it so uncool. So not wanting to look uncool, he made a conscious decision to never clap for me. And I mean never. 

He would just stare down upon me, arms crossed, head tilted down, expressionless, motionless, his eyes hidden behind his thick glasses, never showing his hand if he approved of what he saw or not. Of course my focus at hand was beating the kid across the net, but the far tougher opponent I was playing was vying for my Dad's approval against his absurdly unrealistic expectations. And his just staring down at me stone-faced just magnified how alone I could feel on a tennis court. All I was looking for was a little support, a little approval, a wink or a nod, just give me a little hint that I'm doing alright and I'm not going to get yelled at and maybe I could relax and play a little better

But it would never come. So I developed some bad habits on the tennis court.

Feeling I had to win or else, I started cheating. My fierce desire to win no matter what crossed a line to no matter how. Because losing came with consequences. It put me on the wrong side of my Father's temper, on the wrong side of conditional love. Losing was failing and failure was not acceptable; only success was, and success was not celebrated, but expected. 

Even before my matches would be completed, I began to dread the long walk back to the clubhouse. The whole process of the last point, shaking hands, gathering my belongings back toward the tournament desk where all the congregating parents watched. It became a breeding ground for my already developing anxiety.  I would never know how I was going to be treated; if there were a crowd, I knew I was safe for a bit. If there was a long drive home, it was just a matter of time.  

 

The drive's home were always just the two of us with his verbal lashings often brutal, demeaning, hyper critical, relentless. I would learn in time how to disassociate from them. It became a physiological response. I could feel a force field lower around me, trying to protect me from what I knew was coming. Eventually he would run out of things to say, leaving me to wallow in silence the remainder of the drive home.

At first, I liked the silences better, for they lacked the sharp edged words of his rants. But I learned over time the anger and yelling would eventually end. But the silences? They could last the whole drive home, in to the evening, the following day, the entire next week ahead, with no end in sight. 

 

In time, I sought some control over how I was punished. I would scream out in unhinged anger in hopes he'd just spank me and get it over with. So I learned how to misbehave, on the court and off the court,  so he would get angry at me, yell at me, threaten to hit me, for anything was better than the invisible silences. I learned early if I broke a racket in a match, I would get spanked with that broken racket when we got home and the punishment would be over. So I started breaking lots of rackets back then, so I could get yelled at, and spanked, and spanked hard, just to get it over with, anything to avoid the silences, all because I lost a fucking tennis match.

 

And I was 11 years old.

So I cheated a lot in my early junior tennis days, even in matches that were not close.  I just wanted them over with as quickly as possible and as convincingly as possible, for winning ugly came with consequences too.  I was playing more than one opponent. I was also playing against my Dad's expectations  And if he didn't expect perfection, he expected something damn near close. To be perfect was the goal, every time out, every match a win, every set won at love, every game won without loss of a point, every point won on a winner. I learned early the pathway toward approval in my house was to be perfect.  

So in matches when I was ahead convincingly and my opponents would start to make a comeback, I would cheat them. Blatantly too. If the cheating didn't work completely, and my opponent was able to get some games off me unfair and square, I always had my ace in the hole.  For in tennis, he who wins picks up the balls, and he who picks up the balls reports the score. And sometimes my matches would be on distant courts where Dad may not have seen my play that clearly. So I got real good at coming up with a final score that was far different from the real score, but a score that would keep me out of trouble, from being yelled at, criticized, belittled, silenced.

Sadly, I was too young to understand then that my opponents might have been getting treated like I was getting treated; that they too had consequences for losing, for not being perfect. That when we cracked a can of balls to play a match, we were all fighting much bigger battles than the ones on our assigned courts.

 

Yet I knew my cheating ways were wrong, my youthful ethics still a work in progress. But to cheat  seemed the lesser of my evil choices, for the battles I was fighting were so much bigger than the matches I was playing. 

 

For I was only 11 years old, already making hopelessly doomed choices for my well-being and self-preservation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 2: A Haunted House

I was born in Southern California, Norwalk to be exact, to Harvey and Barbara Buss in the summer of 1964. We didn't stay in California long, my parents packing up the wood paneled station wagon for a cross country jaunt to the east coast, moving our young growing family to New England in my first year of life.

 

We landed in Tewksbury, Ma, just off Interstate 93, about 25 miles NW of Boston and an equal distance from the New Hampshire border. It was America in the mid 1960s. With urban flight in full force, once sleepy bedroom communities like Tewksbury were growing wildly as safe and desirable towns to raise young growing families like our own. 

 

Not a lot exciting happened in Tewksbury. Sandwiched between its flashier neighbors Lowell (birthplace of Jack Kerouac) and Andover (home to famed prep school Phillips Academy) Tewksbury was working class, where land was a plenty, with a growing tax base to pay for all the attractive lures of big city suburbs. For every new school or subdivision, Parks and Rec got in on the act, building new spacious parks with acres of open green space and endless fields, all anchored by rows and rows of newly built tennis courts.  

 

The United States was in midst of the Cold War. My father, a rocket scientist and software developer, was firmly enlisted in the Space Race side of the conflict. He worked on the Apollo missions for a company named Avco, writing the computer programs associated with re-entry heat shields. Everyday he wore a badge to work with his picture on it. I just assumed that made him important.

 

My father held a high security clearance, forbidding him from discussing the intricacies of his work with our family. Though I was young at the time, I was able to sense his work was stressful, particularly when the rockets lifted off. Our nation held its collective breath as precious human lives hung in the balance. Dad was responsible for getting them home in one piece, a weighty responsibility for sure. When the lunar modulars splashed down safely, his mood seemed more relieved than joyous that all went as planned.

 

Dad parlayed his Apollo success in to a robust career in Aerospace. He became a man in demand. His work would eventually take our family back to the west coast for the first Space Shuttle. But as with all industries, in spite of the unfathomable exploits of the space industry, it was a business just like all the others as my father would soon discover.

 

All those pretty space pictures from the Hubble Telescope? You can thank my father. He worked tirelessly to save TRW 100s of millions of dollars on the late and grossly over budget project. They were to give him a bonus he could retire on. But somebody changed their mind. He got a plaque instead. He was already bitter at the industry by then. The snub made little difference.

My parents had few friends. They rarely had people over for dinner, nor did they venture out much to socialize. They met in Southern California, my Dad from Whittier, my Mom from neighboring Downey. They were a handsome couple, my Dad young and 50's G-Man slick, my Mom a runner-up for Miss Downey. My Father worked at the first ever McDonalds. He met my Mom there. He gave her free fries. They were married a year later. That's just how it was done back then.

 

I never saw or heard my parents fight, never heard them raise their voices or say a belittling word to each other. I also never saw them show affection toward each other, never seeing them hold hands, or catch them kissing or fooling around. Nothing. Maybe it was the German in them. They stayed married over 50 years. Something was obviously working.

 

My folks were disciplined and extreme. They worked 9-5 their whole lives, though my father would be at work before sunrise. Not that he didn't like people, he just preferred it when they weren't around. We rarely went out as a family. My mother would cook every night. We would eat the same thing nightly. Spaghetti on Mondays, Enchiladas on Tuesday, Wednesday was pork chop night, Thursday we ate salads. Saturday was pizza night, giving Mom a night off from cooking. Sunday Dad would pull out the BBQ and the Kingsford charcoal, grilling burgers and steaks. We all ate our meat the same. Rare. Anything more cooked was uncivilized. 

 

My parents drank a lot. Piping hot industrial strength black coffee all day, warm burgundy wine from a box every night. My father supplemented his fluid intake with a few room temperature Guinness stouts before dinner. And they smoked constantly, two packs of Salem menthols daily for over 40 years.  

 

With such extreme fare on the menu, one could safely surmise my first experiments with things I wasn't supposed to be trying were memorably unpleasant. And they were, slightly delaying my entry to the world of mind altering substances. But I would soon make up for that lost time. And then some.

I have two brothers. Larry two years older, Jerry three years younger. Larry Barry and Jerry. Don't ask. We all graduated from the same high school in Torrance, Ca. We all moved out and went to college right away. We all failed out in our first semester. Straight F's across the board. All of us. Needless to say, getting out of the house and away from our Dad was all that seamed to matter to us back then.

 

The three of us were very different. My older brother Larry couldn't play anything, but could fix everything. I could play everything, but couldn't fix shit. Our youngest brother Jerry got a mix of both. Larry eventually moved to  Baltimore, Jerry to Kansas City. They got as far the fuck away from Southern California and my Dad as soon as they could. And they never came back. 

 

Yet in many ways we're the same. None of us have any children. We all battled our respective demons throughout our lives, depression and other assorted maladies creating all types of personal dysfunction. One of us worked harder on themselves than the others, to make better sense of our upbringing. The others found refuge in selective memory and denial. And I hold no grudge nor pass judgment there. Only a select few in this world dare reckon with the weight of where they've been. In the end, we were all just trying to survive.

 

We had some lean years in there, rarely seeing each other, speaking once a decade, whether we needed to or not. During one heated discussion with my older brother about a book I had written, he threatened to come to California to beat the shit out of me. I responded by giving him my address and that I would feed him his fucking teeth upon arrival. 

 

After that, I didn't see much need for further talks...

 

My father wanted us to be tough, to take no shit from anyone. If a bully ever picked on us, he would implore us to pop the guy right in the kisser, then we'll see how tough he was. Did that include him too?

 

I was too little to pop my father in the mouth, my brothers too. So we took to pounding on each other like only brothers could. We would fight all the time, especially my big brother Larry and I. Yet Mom and Dad would go on about their evening conversation like we were playing a civil game of checkers, never telling us to stop or breaking us up, even when the brawling got hairy.

 

But from the corner of my eye, I could see my father steal glances our way. Tiring of what he was watching, he eventually intervened. With three sets of boxing gloves. If we were going to fight, he wanted us to fight properly, with technique.

 

So on those nights when he had a few too many, which was often, out would come the gear. Dad would clear the living room as my brothers and I would warily lace up the cumbersome red boxing gloves. Pairing us off, Dad would referee the action, imploring my brothers and I to pound each other senseless. 

 

A haymaker to the bread basket he would scream out in joy, as one of us landed a clean shot. Left hooks and right crosses, delivered with reckless disregard, would rain down through tears and anguish on those odd hellish nights. Fun times. Fun times. 

 

Whatever his intent, the result was divide and conquer in its sickest manifestation. In his mind, maybe he thought this would help us become more independent, to never have to rely on another to defend ourselves, that somehow this would harden us. Oh, it hardened us alright. In all the wrong places.

We tried a family reunion some years back. Having not all been in the same room in over a decade, we were all a little tense for the occasion. I brought my girlfriend with me for cover, a highly sensitive empathic type she was. We were the last to arrive. Walking in to the house carrying gifts for all, we reached the living room where everyone sat, staring blankly at the blaring television. Nobody got up, only my Mother proffered a hello. 

 

Approaching the room to greet my brothers, from the corner of my eye I saw my girlfriend spin around, running out the front door in obvious distress. She would gather herself momentarily, yet within an hour of our being there, both my brothers would leave with hardly a word spoken between us. My girlfriend and I soon followed suit. 

 

On our drive home I asked her what happened back there when she ran outside. All she could say is that was the saddest most haunted house she'd ever walked in to in all her life. All I could say in response was 'Yeah'.

I was a smart kid. After acing my first battery of standardized school tests, I was found to have a genius IQ. Dad dug this. So he got to thinking.

 

Our house was full of books, books about famous people. Churchill, Kennedy, Patton. Feynman. Biographies about self made men, men considered special. My father was fascinated by them. With my high test scores, he got a gumption. Maybe I could be special too.

 

So he devised a home schooling plan, after regular school of course. It started with reading Encyclopedias. He would pull a random volume from the shelves, opening to an equally random page. After a quick perusal of the page, he would instruct me to read up on that topic, to be discussed after dinner later that evening.

 

Being all of 6 or 7 at the time, my reading comprehension skills weren't quite up for the task. So Dad shifted gears from Encyclopedias to The Great Books Collection. The Great Books chronicled the history of intellectual thought, with a strong emphasis on the early Greeks. He would read them to me late in to the night: Archimedes, Socrates, Plato, Euclid.

 

My father, being a mathematician, settled on the teachings of Euclid. Staying up way past my bed time, I would listen attentively to Dad across the table as we worked through complex geometric proofs late in to the evening. 

 

Somehow I must have been keeping up, for his tutorials soon became a nightly occurrence. And as we trudged through the first chapters of Euclidean geometry, an array of tests soon commenced.

 

I don't recall the questions exactly. I'm sure I answered some right, I know I answered some wrong. But it was the wrong answers that stuck with me, for that's when the barbs began. With every wrong answer, his yelling magnified, calling me numbnuts, stupid, dumb as a screw, all for not being able to answer what fucking  X was. I still shake my head to this day. What the hell was he thinking?

 

And so began the mixed feelings about the mixed messages. With all the attention on my academics, I knew I was smarter than the other kids my age, but somehow in Dad's eyes I wasn't smart enough, that I didn't have it, didn't have the right stuff in Math to be different, to be special. 

 

And as the math lessons stopped, my passion for mathematics would fade. But being told I was stupid and thick and worthless would stick with me. The mixed up messaging. I would became an egomaniac with an inferiority complex, a hybrid of what I would accomplish balanced against the harsh defining words of my Father. And we would do this dysfunctional dance for all our years.

Euclidean geometry safely put away, the year was 1972. I was eight. The World Chess Championships between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky were taking place half a world away in Reykjavik, Iceland. Dad was a tournament chess player with a masters rating at one point, whereas I had won the battle among my brothers for chess dominance, securing Dad's obsessive attention once again. 

 

It was my job to transcribe all the chess moves as they came in over the teletype of the local public television station, then set up the pieces on our chess board so Dad and I could play out the adjourned games well in to the night. The problem was the moves came in fast and in bunches and in a language I was barely familiar. PK4 BxP RE6 and on and on. Sometimes I'd get them all right. Other times I'd miss some moves, making our attempts to play out the games near impossible, and that wouldn't go over well with Dad, the not getting everything right part. But on the times I did, there Dad and me would be, just the two of us, squared off against each other across a chess board, playing out games often deep in to the night and I just loved it.

At first he would slaughter me. Then I began to hold my own somewhat. Not much longer, I was giving him a good run for his money, which intrigued him. Maybe this was the activity I could be special in. Soon, he looked to enter me in my first chess tournament, but not before giving me Chess' version of the bible, the three inch think hard backed copy of MCO: Modern Chess Openings. My father would solemnly hand me the sacred text, telling me which defense to study that day and be prepared to use it in that evening's game.

 

And then it happened. At age 9, I beat him straight up, and then I beat him again. And just when I thought I had it going on, my father's interest in me and my chess waned. He knew I was good, just not good enough. That once again, he decided I didn't have it. Didn't have the right stuff to be special, and that I should just give it up. Too young to present any kind of persuasive counter-argument, I always did what Dad wanted. And before long, Dad would be off on his next obsession, this time woodworking, where he turned our garage in to a makeshift lumber mill. He would proceed to build all the furniture in our house by himself in his latest spell of mania, my far handier brothers winning this round for Dad's undivided attention. I would wait the furniture building phase out in my room, all alone.

A few years later, after acing another round of standardized testing, I qualified for admission to Mensa, the high IQ Society. I was barely a teenager at the time. I remember it cost ten dollars a year to join, which was 10 dollars more than I had. I asked my Dad if I could join. Without explanation, my father said no and wouldn't pay for it. I never asked him why.  How could that not have been special enough? 

 

With my high test scores, he once again became captivated with my mathematical acumen. So resumed after school home schooling. Come Sunday night, he would peruse his vast library of engineering books, eventually settling on a math book he'd want me to consume. 

 

One that stuck out in my memory was Linear Algebra, a subject strictly for Math majors at University level. The fact I had yet to take beginning Algebra meant little to Dad. The way he figured things, if I had what it took, I'd figure it out. He would instruct me to read the book front to back and prepare to be tested on it the following weekend. And I would. And when I failed to show total mastery of the subject matter, down came more chastising, more belittling, more conclusions that I didn't have the right stuff required to be special, and to keep investing in me so was a waste of his time. 

 

With his patience run out, it was banishment to my room again, waiting to see what his next obsession would be and if it included me. And I recall those moments and many others just like them as a long protracted series of events that made me want only two things from my young  life. To get the fuck out of that house as soon as I possibly could, and upon growing up, to do everything in my power to not become like him.

 

Then came tennis. I had some game, not a pretty game, not a complete game, but I could hit a tennis ball. A relative late starter at age 8, I played my first tournament at ten, won my first junior tournament six months later. Not soon after I beat my Dad for the first time, continuing on to win the Men's adult open at my club on my 12th birthday. By then, I was traveling the country playing National level events, and though not excelling at that level yet, my father saw in me something, that I had a chance, a chance to be really good, maybe even special at something, and that something was tennis.

Though I wasn't the biggest kid, or the strongest kid, or the fastest kid, my father did play every sport, so I had some athletic gene pool to draw from. And though I wasn't the smartest player, or the calmest player, or the toughest competitor, right from the start I could always rip a tennis ball. And when I was hitting them well, good things were starting to happen for me. And my Dad loved that, thinking maybe this was the activity to focus on.

 

Because the rankings didn't lie. I was already among the best in my section at an early age, with Dad seeing enough game in me that maybe I could make it in tennis, that this was the activity to focus on. But to make this happen, he knew it would take his full undivided attention, a commitment he soon relished. And from that point forward, it was on. 

 

Dad was all in, with me and my tennis, for all the foreseeable future to be...