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.
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.
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.
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