When playing a sport with no off season, it was hard to top a city with no seasons like Los Angeles. Sunny Southern California. It was catchphrase, the stuff of lore. Hit songs were written about it. For the place where it never rained was now my home.
Like a color has shades, Los Angles had seasons, some sunnier than others, but only by degree. A typical SoCal forecast. Warm and sunny, with a patch of wispy clouds passing for weather. I no longer needed to travel for endless summer conditions. They were the norm here in the southland 12 months a year. For a young tennis player forever in a t-shirt and shorts, I'd moved to a town where the climate suited my clothes.
Los Angeles would get some weather during the winter months. Even then, at the height of the rainy season, massive outdoor events took place with rarely a hitch. The last time it rained on Pasadena's New Years Day Rose Parade was 2006. The time before that was 1955. You get the idea.
There was a lot to learn being the new tennis kid in town. The locations, the players, their parents, the coaches, the clubs, the courts, the conditions, the tournaments. There were no frigid inflatable bubbles here in Southern California. Nor indoor courts or grass courts. And the few clay courts sprinkled throughout town were borderline unplayable and near impossible to maintain. With Los Angeles being an endless urban asphalt sprawl, it would be on the region's indigenous concrete that all my SoCal tennis would get played.
The Gregorian calendar structures our daily lives, unless you played junior tennis in SoCal. Our lives ran by the junior tennis schedule, the annual tournament dates as fixed as the holidays. Same cities, same dates, year after year after year. The 74th annual Pasadena, 59th annual Anaheim, 82nd annual Whittier, and right on through the year. Fullerton, Long Beach, Ojai, CIF, South Bay, Sectionals. Players could recite the schedule like the alphabet. We could have made bank designing Southern California Junior Tennis Tour t-shirts. Probably still could.
What was also constant to SoCal junior tennis were the playing conditions. Medium Fast hard courts in dry warm conditions, literally every event. Occasionally a freshly surfaced slower court at a private club, but junior tournaments in SoCal were mass events, with routinely a 1000 entries or more. It took entire cities two full weekends to play them. No private club could possibly host a SoCal junior tennis event, though one did try in Los Caballeros. Sixty-five courts of simultaneous junior matches going on and off, sun-up to sundown for a week straight. Dante's Inferno for the aspiring Tournament Director.
Most early round matches would be played at public courts; high schools, parks or junior colleges, anywhere that courts were a-plenty, available and cheap. If the courts got lots of play, they'd be run down. If the courts got little play, they weren't well maintained. The result: Sketchy nets, cracked courts, fast surfaces, with wind screens optional. The world's best junior tennis players competing in sub par conditions, far cries from the luxurious tennis facilities we all trained at. We were competing in a jungle, yet training at a zoo.
And what jungles they were. One hundred twenty eight draws (some with rounds of 256), to win an event a player had to win seven-eight matches over two full weekends. As luck would have it, my age group was loaded, with easily a dozen of the top 40 kids in the nation. We had the best kids, but also the most, with our depth unrivaled. On any given day, nobody was safe, just too many hungry talented players. Growing up in New England, I might get 2 or 3 chances a year to play kids of this caliber. In SoCal, that could all be done in one weekend. It was tennis wack-a-mole. Beat one stud, you get an even tougher one the next round.
But my Dad already knew this. He grew up here. He fell in love with tennis here. SoCal kids were the special ones. The best of the best. These were the kids winning the National tournaments, getting ranked number one in the country, on the covers of the magazines, getting the full scholarships to college, eventually going on to professional careers, becoming some of the best tennis players the game's ever produced.
Never in the history of tennis had a geographic region the size of SoCal produced so many world class players over an extended period of time. Just like sets in the ocean, the players came in waves, with my age group a veritable tsunami. If New York New York was a tennis song, Sinatra would have crooned about Southern California...if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. An absurdity of riches. A goldmine of opportunities. The pathway to tennis greatness lie right before me, here in my new home of Southern California.
Yet, with such an opportunity before me, I had no plan. I had no coach, could count on one hand all the tennis lessons I'd had. I still hit with my Dad on the occasional weekend, assuming we weren't at a tournament, but not enough to be of any assistance. I was still using wood rackets against the considerably more powerful graphite frames taking over the scene. I had no training regiment, couldn't find a gym if you paid me and wouldn't have the first clue what to do if I did. I ate like crap, drank diet cokes all day, unless I was binge drinking beer on weekends, all the while being high as a kite, smoking as much marijuana as I could get my hands on literally every moment of every day.
My peers were engaged in high performance Player Development. I was simply high...
But I did have my Father. Being too young to drive, without his help, there would be no tournaments. He would enter me in them all, continuing to take his entire weekends to transport me all around Southern California as I battled to find my way. My first year in the 16s, my results were for the most part uneventful. The flat boring part of the run. Then I met up with a boy named Antony Emerson, son of Australian legend and all time Majors record holder Roy Emerson. Antony was an heir to tennis royalty.
I was as good as beat before we ever took the court...
Match time. I came out nervous, trying to hit every ball as hard as I could, far more interested in impressing Antony's famous father than winning a tennis match. After a dismal first set, I settled down, playing some of the best tennis of my young life, evening the match at a set a piece. During the ten minute set break, Antony approached his father, who became quite animated in his coaching. I remembered thinking... Wow, I can't believe the Emersons are taking me this seriously.
In an odd way, I felt I'd already won...
I would lose the match in a close third set. Afterwards, Roy Emerson approached my Dad and I, congratulating us on a fine match and what a fine player I was and that he looked forward to seeing us around in the years to come. Wow, full props from a certified legend. So maybe I did win, if not the match, the respect of a tennis Hall of Famer and his top ranked kid. My first year in SoCal and we were already mingling with tennis royalty. If my goal was to reach tennis' big time, I had just been introduced to it and shook its hand.
All soothing accolades aside, in reality, I still felt out-manned. All the top players came with an entourage. Parents, siblings, coaches, friends, But not myself. I was flying solo, with my Dad waiting impatiently in the wings, still watching stoically from afar, arms crossed, head down, expressionless, chain smoking away.
Was I going to need more support to be successful at this level? My plan was just to play a lot. Which I did. I had a club and a growing crew of good kids to practice with. But was that enough? My peers were talking three dimensional chess whereas I barely knew where to put the pieces. And that wasn't about to change. I had no mentor, no guidance, no coaching, and no real emotional support. But I did have my Dad, who knew what he knew, but this was the big leagues. My opponents Dad's were Hall of Famers. All my Dad knew was take it early, hit it hard, hit it flat, keep it deep, play like Jimmy Connors.
But could that be enough?
Yet in my brief time in tennis, I saw few things more over-rated than an overbearing coach. Tennis wasn't like football, with complex offensive and defensive schemes. Tennis was all flow. What's working, what's not, manage your emotions, manage your game and most importantly, pay attention, to yourself and to your opponent. There were few constants in tennis, everything was flux. Tennis for me was mathematical, algebraic, a function of probabilities. If A, then likely B. If B, then likely C. Seeking and Avoiding. Go here, don't go there. Yet remain fluid. For the best laid plans were futile without execution.
If styles made fights, my style was pretty simple. First strike tennis and fight like hell. I found if I was making my shots, I could make people play poorly. But it was high risk, high reward tennis. I knew I was going to miss some, but it was the cumulative effect I sought. Never let them get comfortable. never let them find a rhythm. In essence, take the racket out of their hands. Attack attack attack and never take your foot off the gas. Of course, easy to apply at 2-1 in the first set. Whole different ball game late in the third with a match on the line.
Ultimately, tennis success hinged on executing under pressure. Yet for all my lack of drilling and instruction and technique and training, I did play an obscene number of sets every week, all by myself, playing each one like my life depended on it. Certainly no coach would advocate for such a training regime, it essentially eliminated their job. But guess what tournament tennis was. Exactly that. A lone player on a court playing an obscene number of sets with no coaching allowed. For better or worse, I practiced like I played, knowing every big match came down to a few points, always hoping against hope I could hold my shit together and not succumb to the pressure.
Feeling outgunned with my Jack Kramers, there were benefits to learning tennis with a wood racket. If I wanted the ball to go anywhere, I had to do everything right. Which meant get set, get down, load up, make clean contact and swing as hard as I could with every fiber of my being into each and every ball, or else. And what practice didn't make perfect, it made permanent. And what was becoming permanent was my full commitment to hit every ball as hard as I fucking could. For though I was still a little kid with inferior equipment, when my shots were falling, good things happened. And I was now practicing at the most elite clubs in the nation with some of the best juniors in the world, and though I got my ass handed to me regularly, I was starting to take some sets. Not all the time, but enough of the time, implanting me with enough hope that maybe someday I could put a couple winning sets together in a tournament when it all mattered
My first full season in California I held my own. I took some sets off the nation's best, but failed to notch that signature win. Interspersed within all the tournament play was high school tennis. California Interscholastic Federation, a massive structure of 100's of high schools covering the entire state, culminating in the season's end CIF Championships, the most prestigious and largest junior tennis event of the year. Our team was terrible, but we played in one of the more powerful high school leagues not just in the country, but of all time. Tons of competition. One set at a time.
Being the only tournament player on a terrible team meant I would play number one singles for my school all four years, pitting me against the top kids from the other schools. Matches were only one set in high school. I would lose my first set as a freshman. I would lose my last set as a senior. (To Jorge Lozano, Mexican Davis Cup..picture of Jorge and Mac) I would lose only one other set during the 4 years in between, compiling a gaudy 162-3 record along the way. I became a one set wonder machine, playing nearly all of them obscenely high.
At some point, I knew my two worlds of playing tennis and getting high would eventually intersect. And that occurred during high school tennis. I discovered when high I could play inspired stress free tennis all day. I didn't question it. I just did it and loved it. The inertia. The downhill portion of the run, feeling no pain, floating five feet above the ground.
Playing tennis high became my safe haven. My two favorite feelings, both at the same time. The weed seemed to soothe my racing mind. What I lost in reaction time, I made up for in calmness. A tricky trade off. Playing brain chemistry games. Dancing with euphoria. Constantly tinkering, trying to get the combination just right. I didn't dare get high during the weekend tourneys against the nation's best with my Dad in the wings. Too risky, too stressful. I was already getting away with enough as it was. But with high school tennis, I knew of nothing else that compared. The tennis court, the place I felt the best about myself, all be it in a perpetually altered state.
Back at the homestead, Dad and I had been treading water. With the demands of his new job and myself spending all my time at our new club, I didn't see him much anymore, and when I did, I was usually pretty high, trying to avoid him and everyone else as much as possible. With my results mediocre at best, his tennis obsession lay dormant, waiting for a spark to be reignited. My next tourney would provide just that spark.
Free weekends from the junior circuit left openings for adult events against the best Open players in Southern California. And I thought the junior tournaments were tough. Playing in Long Beach, I drew the top seed and number one ranked male in all of SoCal Mark Andrews in the first round. My Dad knew who Andrews was, he wasn't quite touring pro good, but he did play Wimbledon the year before. Seeing my draw, my Dad could barely contain his sarcasm, saying I should have the rest of the weekend free if I wanted to make other plans.
In junior tennis, its called playing up, when juniors play older age groups for better competition. Everything to gain, nothing to lose. Pressure free tennis. Perfect conditions to let it fly and fertile soil for stunning upsets. And without a care in the world, I took the court against Andrews, catching a spark early and then a flame, playing better than I knew myself capable, notching far and away the best win of my young life. Walking off the court with an ear to ear grin, almost embarrassed at my good play, my Dad approached, trying not to laugh himself while shaking his head in disbelief.
And all I could say was... "Guess I better cancel my weekend plans."
My first breakthrough win. What a rush. Only fifteen and perpetually high, but this high was different. Drug highs wear off, this high was a deeper feeling. It was an accomplishment, from something I did instead of something I took. Finally something to proud of. But as excited as I was for winning a big match, there was also an uneasiness to it. It felt foreign, electric even, but a little frightening too, for all emotions made me uncomfortable in my skin. Now squarely out of comfort zone, I was no longer the pretty good new kid who gave top players a scare. I'd gone from being a bad loss to a good win in a day.
I had spent my junior tennis career on the outside, looking up at the elite players, draw watching, consuming junior tennis magazines cover to cover, going full Rain Man on the USTA Year books, memorizing all the scores and rankings of every age group. The success of tennis' top players mystified me. How were they able to win big match after big match? How were they able to keep their cool under such pressure? Being the nervous wreck I was, their success seemed other-worldly. Yet now I was getting to know many of them, practicing with them, playing them in tournaments, giving them runs for their money. Getting to know them brought them down a few pegs, making them real to me. Fallible. Human. Maybe even beatable.
I would spend my time daydreaming of becoming one of them, but never really believing it could happen. They just seemed calmer and tougher and better than me no matter how well I played. But now, at least for a match, I was among them. And all those endless hours dreaming about making it big in tennis, for the first time the gap between my dreams and my reality didn't seem so delusional. Yeah, I wasn't on Center Court of Wimbledon giving a victory speech, but I just beat somebody who'd played Wimbledon mere months ago. And I was fifteen years old on the cusp of a break through, with alien thoughts and feelings racing through my head that apparently were going to take some getting used to.
As excited as I was to finally have a breakthrough win, I wasn't the only one. Nothing triggered my Father more than a good tennis result. With the wind at my back, I won a couple more tough matches against stronger adults, placing me in the semifinals the following weekend against fellow junior rival and future Kalamazoo (footnote) Champion John Letts.
Dad thought quite highly of Letts, deemed his two-handed backhand the best backhand in junior tennis. (he wasn't wrong). Talks soon resumed at the dinner table about my tennis and how the match might go. Dad was all aboard again, and though I'd seen this movie before and knew it didn't end well, I surrendered to the flow, for in my messy little tennis world, he was all I had.
I practiced hard that week, a little edgier than normal, with Dad pushing the emotional meter. I cracked a couple rackets in practice, leaving me with only one strung frame for a long weekend, precarious with so much play ahead. My match with Letts started well, both of us swinging for the fences on every ball, not quite powerful enough to finish points quickly. Lots of long rallies and drag out games ensued. We split the first two sets in what seemed like forever, with myself racing out to an early break lead in the third. Serving late in the match, I got tight and he broke back. But worse than that, on break point I broke a string on my only remaining racket.Tennis rules being what they were, I was on the clock and in a jam. A player's not allowed to leave the court, and he's certainly not allowed to leave the court to go round up a strung racket. My Dad, sitting in the stands, stared down in disbelief. Nearly three gut-wrenching hours in, late in the third set, playing about as well and as hard as I can, scraping and clawing for every point, putting every bit of myself out there, and I'm out of rackets. Dad, seeing I'm about to get a time violation, bolts off the bench to his car, pulling out some green Yonex metal frame I've never held or hit with in my life. Trying to make the best of it, I struggled to make a ball, losing the last few games meekly and the match.
The ride home was rough. I caught an earful for not being prepared, for being irresponsible, that if I wanted to keep playing tennis I had to take it more seriously and train like a professional and that he was tired of entering me in tourneys and spending weekends away if I wasn't going to eat breathe and sleep tennis like he would have if he had this opportunity. And if I'm not going to completely commit myself to my tennis. I should just give it up. Because he would never have shown up for a match of that magnitude unprepared. And maybe as a lesson I should start entering myself to these tournaments. And get myself a job. Pay for my entries. Pay for my string jobs. Show him how serious I was.
He was understandably agitated, not having enough rackets at my level was inexcusable, but I was hearing something different from him this time. He wasn't his normal belittling condescending dismissive self. What I was hearing was exasperation at my losing a winnable match against a great player, letting a golden opportunity get away from me, for I'd played some serious tennis that tournament and he knew it.
More so, this was the kind of tennis he fell in love with, local adult tournaments played throughout SoCal. The courts I just played on were the same courts he watched tennis played for the very first time when he was 18 years old, watching Billie Jean King practice and where eventually he would hit his first ever tennis ball. He grew up admiring the players in events like these, they turned him on to tennis. And now I was one of them. And it was just 2 years ago I was a disinterested tanking choking cheating temper tantrum throwing barely playing kid in the sleepy suburbs of Boston and now I was hanging with the world's best junior tennis players and I thought of that guy in the Maine countryside when we were lost and asked for directions and him telling my Dad...
Sir, you can't get there from here...
All lecturing aside, at this juncture of my tennis, the obvious move would be to get me a coach, someone who knew about developing players, but more importantly, take my Dad out of the loop. I needed someone I could lean on through these all important formative years. Someone I could trust. But that was counter to Dad's ethos. His style was do it yourself. That the only noble action was one performed by oneself for oneself with as little assistance as possible, for to ask for help was a sign of weakness. For this is how he made it. And his Father before him. Hard work, full time job, school at night. Discipline to make a Spartan blush. Keep your head down. Don't get distracted. Work work work.
It was the only world he knew...
But tennis wasn't like work. Tennis was brutal, tennis was emotional, tennis was volatile. Tennis players needed nurturing, patience, planning, vision, coordination. An individual sport, impossible without an all important support team. This was no time for an experiment. It was time for all hands on deck for the opportunity of a dozen life times.
I had the makings of a winning ticket, first couple numbers all matching, could I match the remaining few? I had time, I had upside, he saw it, and I knew he saw it. So what was his decision? To put even more responsibility on me for my tennis. That at fifteen years old, I needed to take complete ownership of my tennis. Was this really the time for a teachable moment? A time to teach me a lesson? We'd kinda skipped that whole phase of parenting. I was already way on my own doing my own thing, way more than any teenager should.
The tennis I was playing was already demanding enough. There were no style points attached to your ranking, no bonus points for doing it all on your own. Putting all the responsibility on me was risky, ever more so because I was high all the time and starting to act like it, falling behind on basic things that needed doing. Being 15 and not terribly organized, having to arrange for all of my tennis affairs wasn't a bridge too far but a bridge with a huge expanse missing. It wasn't going to happen, my obsession to self-medicate having taken such a priority. My whole life had become about quieting the noise between my ears, I couldn't be troubled by all that responsibility stuff.
January 1980:
It was back to the pressure cooker that was SoCal junior tennis, with the first tourney of the year in Whittier, the city of my Dad's upbringing. I knew so little about my Father's childhood, it was a glaring blind spot in my understanding of him. It was becoming clear I was only going to learn of him what he wanted me to know. What I did know is he was born in 1938, in the heart of the Depression, right at the outset of our World's greatest war. I knew the first few years of his life were quite hard. The generational gap between him as a kid having enough to eat and me having enough strung rackets must have been hard for any parent of his generation to absorb.
In between rounds, we would have time to kill, but there would be no drives through his old neighborhoods. No trips of nostalgia of where he used to live, or went to school, or landmarks in town remembered fondly. There was a space in his life he refused to share with his children. In trying to understand the man better, what drove him, what groomed him to be the way he was, that part of his life would forever remain a mystery.
Whittier had changed a lot since his days there, but he remembered the tennis tournament coming to town (This year will be the 70th annual). Lets just say its grown some. I was in the mix of kids to make some noise at this event. Second year Boys 16's. I would have a few early round matches before running in to future world #1 Rick Leach, the eldest son from another famous tennis family. (footnote. Dad coach at USC. Younger brother very good and future husband of Lindsay Davenport) Though not quite the stature of the Emersons, the Leach family came with pedigree and presence and a whole lot of talent.
Match time. I got off
to a great
start, winning the
first set. I was playing well and he wasn't. One more good set and I'd have the
biggest victory of my junior tennis life. Late second set, as things did in close junior matches, when the score got tight, so did the line calls. A little older now, I had outgrown my bad call
phase, but it was becoming obvious Leach had
not. I had my chances to close it out in straight
sets, only to get hooked badly on a couple pivotal points. During the ten minute set break, my usually poker faced father was visibly upset, but for once not at
me. He was beside himself at Leach's cheating. Before stepping on the court for the third, he did his best to encourage me, but my competitive ship had already sailed, with me getting run off quickly 6-2 in the third.
After the match, Rick's father passed by my father. Without stopping to shake hands, he looked my Dad's way quickly, said 'nice match', and just kept on walking. His tone wasn't offensive or disrespectful, but it took every bit of restraint from my Dad not to unload on him. In my Dad's mind, this was my chance to enter junior tennis' big time, which meant it was his chance too, but the cheating he saw on our court left a lasting impression on him he never really got over. If this was what it took to become a part of junior tennis' elite, he wanted nothing to do with it, for him or for me.
As bad luck would have it, February's tournament in Fullerton had Leach and I in the same part of the draw again. We both won our early round matches, setting up another battle the following Saturday. My father was noticeably more engaged that week with me, my tennis, and my upcoming rematch. He was also noticeably edgier. As a kid, it's impossible to know the driving forces behind a parent's mood swings. All I knew of his life was his emotional interactions with myself and my brothers and life had become decidedly tenser of late in our household. What I did know was he was agitated about the events in Whittier. It took a lot for my father to say anything disparaging about other people, but he quickly developed a firm distaste for all things Leach: the kid for what he perceived he did in our last match and for the father, for being a phony to him after.
We got home without another word spoken. I quickly shot up to my tennis club, avoiding harm's way for the day. Returning home later that evening for family dinner, yet still not another word spoken. I was getting the silent treatment again. How long would this one last? After dinner, I excused myself, hustling to the phone to set up my weekly practice. In the process, I learned Leach had beaten the top seed in the next round badly, and in those days of rankings and results, I felt somewhat vindicated, having given him a tougher match than the best player in the country.
Minutes later, I heard a knocking on the door and my Dad entered. He had been drinking, a little more than normal. These talks usually didn't go well. He wasted no time starting in..."What are you doing with your life? What are you going to do with yourself? You're out of here when you're 18 you know. How are you going to support yourself? Well??? Don't just stare at me, what are you going to do?"
And on and on and on he went. I had shut down completely. He prattled on for what seemed forever, before eventually walking out. As he closed the door, I was enveloped in a sadness and confusion words could barely describe. And I was 15 years old. Fifteen years old without the first clue what was happening to my life.
What I did know though is he was dead serious. If I wanted to continue playing tennis, I had some serious figuring to do about how.
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