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
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