Chapter 23 South Bay 1987-1988 Tighten chapter 23

Summer of 1987. 

I'd been home from Georgia less than a month and I'd already ripped through the bankroll. For there were holes in my nose where my money went. Despite the amazing opportunity with the Parkers, within weeks I had nothing to show for it. I was going nowhere. I knew it. My friends knew it. My drinking and drugging accelerating, yet there was no human power to relieve me of my burden. With the school year coming to a close, it was time for me and my housemates to disperse. My roommates, all graduated, moving on to new lives and careers. Myself a drop out, a drifter, seeking out new partners in crime to support my next hustle. Its what I had to do to get by.

I took my act back home to the South Bay. It'd been 5 years since I moved away for college. Five years since I last lived there. Could I go home again?  

My van was on its last legs, but I had it ready for dual purpose. Transportation and crash pad. Then the clutch popped. Down to single purpose now. The van would remain parked outside my tennis club, myself unable to stop partying long enough to have it fixed. The van, our family van, the one my father bought to drive us cross country to California to start a new life now sat in the parking lot broken down with its drugged out owner passed out in the back. Such a bad look, sleeping in your car outside the club you grew up at. Yet I was oblivious.

Twenty-three years old. Spending my days and nights in the upstairs lounge of my club with many of my original corruptors. Opening the bar, closing the bar, before heading out to another bar. Then sleeping it off in the van. It all seemed so new and innocent years ago. Now years later. The same people sitting in the same seats at the same bar, night after night. Where everybody knew your name. Cheers, but without the cheer. You saw the wear, you felt the tear. It was the downward progression of alcoholism.

I wasn't doing well. It was obvious. College drop out. Tennis flame out. Partying burn out, getting grossly wasted every night and day. I could bullshit most of my crew. But a select few knew how bad I was fucking up, that I wasn't well and heading for trouble. They could tell. And I could tell they could tell. They didn't ask questions. They didn't have to. Their silence spoke volumes, seeing with their own eyes before them all they needed to know.

Older now. No longer a kid on the rise, I was now an enigma. A talented bright likeable mess to have around. The adults from my club would try to help, offering what they could. A meal here, a ride there, an occasional couch to sleep on. Out of sympathy or sorrow, they were kind people who sensed my struggles. Some were aware of my challenges at home, others could just tell not all was right. The booze. The drugs. Self-inflicted yet self destructive, utterly harmless, yet harming myself. Everyday a scramble. Always broke, always hustling. Beg borrow or steal, because I had to. The survival skills of a life in decline. A portrait of an addict as a young man. None of it lyrical or poetic. 

I'm not back in the South Bay a month and my club has tired of me. And the van. They asked me to move the van. I procrastinated. Getting impatient, they asked again. I copped some attitude. Don't you know who I am? They had the van towed to the junkyard the next day. The end of an era. The end of an error. 

Now I had to really get scrambling. I sought out my first party friend. Corrupter zero. The guy who handed me my first beer, and my second, who passed me my first joint, and hooked me up with mushrooms and cocaine my first times. The one whose van I got sick all over, yet he picked me up again the next day. We had a bond.  But that was nine years ago. 

I no longer needed help in corrupting. The torch well passed now, there was still more to experience, more yets to check off. I discovered he was living in Gardena and had a room for rent. I jumped at the offer. Gardena was not like Newport Beach though. The only Newport you saw there were menthols. No Edwin Moses here either. The only running happening in Gardena was from robbed stores and pursuing police. 

The year was 1987. An epidemic engulfed US inner cities. Crack cocaine. A highly potent smoke-able form of the once fun and social drug. Yet there was nothing fun nor social about smoking crack. The high was overwhelming. A party could be in full swing, but when the rock came out, all conversation ceased. All focus shifted to getting high, and higher, and the next hit, and tending to the stash, making sure there was enough to last, and when there wasn't, finding the money to go get more. 

But that was early in the evening. Later on, it was making sure they didn't get in. They. The ones who were coming for us. They were out there. Surrounding us on all fronts. Where will they attack. How will they breach our lines. It was paranoia bordering on psychosis. Sensory overload, every light and noise amplified. You felt them coming. They were getting closer. Shut the drapes. Block the door. They know what we're doing. They're coming. An attack from abroad, an attack from within. On our minds, from the crack. Hours upon hours. All night long, face smashed to the door, eyes to the peep hole. My funhouse lookout on a warped world. I was playing scout on high alert. Because they were coming. They had to be. What else could it be?

I went from a beach house to a crack house. Crack. Never start cause you can't quit. The first hit is orgasmic. The last one, hours, days, years later, devastating. The rise. The fall. It took everything, then asked for more. You didn't cross lines, you moved the lines. Always edgy. Strung out. Fried. I knew how to live hungover. Strung out was different. It was an energy. Your nervous system gets hot wired. Twitchy, shifty. Eyes sullen, darting, the pathways to a darkening soul. Crack was a mean drug. An addict could strike at any minute. When needs trumped morals. People pick up on it. The shadiness. You'd steal from your best friend just to get a hit. And you do.

Crack addiction was a violent descent. None of that slow-burn, circling the drain alcoholism decline. One night I was at my dealers. I asked for a surface. He handed me a picture frame. Behind the picture frame lay my roommates gold watch and ring. Hopefully it was collateral. My fear was he'd been bartering. A crack house and a pawn shop, all in one.

I looked at the frame's picture. My dealer's children were in it. I'm breaking up crack rock on his children. It was wrong. It was all wrong. But I couldn't stop. I needed to get high. From the garage appeared a man. His name was Blackie (nobody used their real names here). They said he played in the pros, that once he was a Raider. He spent his nights in the garage now, smoking rock. Blackie didn't like to share. Until he was out of rock. Then he liked sharing. Don't become like Blackie. But the slide was unstoppable. I became like Blackie too.

Becoming a crack addict was a risky business. One evening, so drunk, middle of the night I needed to score. With no one around and no one to deliver, I got on my bike. In my bathing suit, on my beach cruiser, I pedaled through Gardena and Carson to the edge of Compton. Miles and miles. I crashed. I got sick. I kept going. Had to score. Had to score. I was possessed. Nearing my dealers, the police came up on me, flashing their lights, blaring their siren. 

With their spotlight on me, he yelled.. 'Surfs up, dude' He then said be careful, you gonna get killed out here. 

The streets. They were mean...

I finally make it to my man. Awkward. Sweating. Wasted. But it was business. I'm sure he'd seen worse. I scored. Riding home. It was late. I got lost. Gotta keep going. Gotta get high. I came upon a warehouse. Had to be four in the morning. Huge group of kids, easily a hundred, assembled in the back. It was a gang meeting and I was cruising their turf on my beach cruiser. If they saw me, I was dead. Petrified, I put my head down. WTF was  I doing? But I escaped. I kept pedaling. Now I felt invincible. Because I scored. I had stash. Just get home. Keep pedaling. Keep going. 

The need to get high...

Yet through all the madness I was still hitting lots of balls. The inertia. I was in the South Bay, home to countless touring professionals. With lots of good guys to train with, I was still playing fine. But they would leave, to play satellites and the tour. I would stay home and talk about getting in shape again and maybe hit the road to play some events.

But I smoked now. Casually by day. Feverishly by night. Up to two packs a day of Marlboro Reds. Every day. Chaining. Sucking smoke in to my lungs like a bong hit, desperate to fill whatever that emptiness was within. My life became an outtake of Groundhog Day, with each day playing out the same. Every moment, every silence, every feeling. Nullify it, with drink and drugs and smoke.

Working hard to go nowhere. Splashing around in the dysfunctional end of life's pool. I was barely treading water. It was all exhausting. And I started falling behind. And I felt it. Drinking drugging smoking. Cheating lying using.  Caught in a trap and I couldn't get out. Not even for a day. So irresponsible. My life now a certified mess. Carless and nearly homeless. Bumming rides or hitchhiking to get around, or just taking the RTD bus. The 232 line. Pacific Coast Highway. From LAX to Long Beach. The schedule still etched on my mind to this day.

Hitting with Eliot Teltscher one day at West End, super-coach Robert Lansdorp approached. Robert immediately went in to character, with him and Eliot going back and forth, teasing each other mercilessly. I knew my place in this conversation, be seen and not heard as Robert carried on in his best performative self, myself nodding and laughing right on cue. 

Lansdorp was never my favorite. He demanded reverence without earning it, playing favoritism to all who kissed his ring. As a local kid, it was impossible not to respect his success. His methods though were a whole other story. Even if an act, his frequent condescending overbearing assholery left a sour taste in my mouth. He was the embodiment of my father in too many ways, an energy I'd strived mightily to escape. Having grown up with an asshole for a Dad, I had little need for a Coach who was one too. 

Three days a week at West End Racket Club in Torrance, Robert ran the hottest junior tennis Academy on the west coast, grooming many of the nation's top junior tennis players from Southern California and beyond. It was 1987, peak Lansdorp time. Credited with former world #1 Tracy Austin's meteoric rise, (though a strong argument could be made that Tracy made Robert more than the other way around), Lansdorp had a formula for greatness. A larger than life personality, he'd become one of the top 2 or 3 celebrity coaches of the Tennis Boom. 

Family's moved from all over the world to the South Bay in hopes of some Lansdorp transformative magic. Local family's took their kids out of school just to get a weekly lesson with Robert. He was the man in demand in junior tennis. And as our conversation circled back toward myself and what I was doing, Robert asked me if I'd be interested in helping him with his Academy. When Robert Lansdorp asked you to help him out, there was only one answer. And with that I had myself a job as a feeder/hitter for the thriving Robert Lansdorp Tennis Academy.

Still in the tennis game, I was picking up some coaching hours. Those who can, do. Those who can't, coach. I was a coach now. On my off days from Robert's, I helped out at the Jack Kramer Club. Nicknamed the Club of Champions, as a kid I used to train there quite a bit. In the clubhouse they had  Wall of Fame. Head shots. Action shots. All signed. Rows and rows of them. All Champions from the Jack Kramer Club. Many of them I battled with and beat. But I never made it on to the Wall of Fame. Apparently I wasn't of champion stock. 

But I would look at their pictures. I knew them all. They saw it through by making the sacrifices. What might have been if I could have made them too. Instead, I was a practice partner. A ball feeder. I was haunted by the Champions, they embodied everything I was not. Austin, Teltscher, Martin, Rostagno, Letts, Lewis, Amend, Po, Davenport. 

And the latest addition, a wiry young teenager named Pete Sampras.  

Before he became Pistol, he was Smiley, with an adolescent face and an ear to ear grin. Sampras didn't take to the Academy model, preferring to train solo on the backest of courts, away from the prying eyes and poolside distractions of Kramer. We met through a fence, myself playing pointless practice, himself crafting his game under the watchful eye of one Dr. Pete Fischer. I would watch them train through said fence, Dr Fischer explaining his methods, Pete buying in, hanging on every word, his trust complete. 

Fischer had a vision for how a tennis professional should play. He believed in the proto-attacking California hard-courter, feeling the two-handed backhand limited a player's transition abilities. So there they trained, Fischer the mad doctor, the court the laboratory, Pete the experiment. The move was controversial. He was changing Sampras' beautiful two-handed backhand to a one hander. I watched through the fence with interest mumbling to myself what could he possibly be thinking? 

From a court away, Dr Fischer asked if I'd hit some with Pete. And I did, his new one-hander shaky, rarely penetrating, often ineffectual. But play we did, determined they were to make the change work. And in hindsight, its hard to argue with the outcome, though correlation is not always causation. Following Pete's career closely, I can't remember too many matches Pete's backhand won him outright, but I can sure remember quite a few it cost him.

Either way, Pete was a prodigious talent. But just one of a dozen young phenoms throughout the South Bay. Which worked well for the shy and introverted Pete, for tennis tended to treat its young prodigies like rock stars, smothering them with overwhelming attention before ever winning a thing. The bright lights of predicted fame were never good for development. But that would not be Pete's experience at the Kramer Club. There, he was just Smiley. One of the boys. But a boy on a back court, executing a master plan.

Pete and I got to playing practice sets. He was all of 16. His serve. Accurate. Deceptive. Penetrating. Popping. Wiry frame, live arm. A great combo. I'd watch him refine that serve with Dr. Fischer hour after hour. Day after day. Meticulous. Disciplined. Serve a few. Talk a bit. Grooming. Mentoring. Fischer knew things. Technique first, Accuracy second, power the least of concerns. It will be there when you grow. I knew a little about this.

Pete started getting wild cards, notching some noteworthy wins. At Indian Wells, he beat two top 40 players, Ramesh Krishnan and local hero and former top-ten pro Eliot Teltscher. Now Pete was no longer one of the boys. And it was getting harder and harder to avoid attention. 

We started playing regularly, becoming friends in the process. We started hitting the golf links after tennis for Pete had the golf bug too. He showed up the first time to play with some so so clubs. Next time out, he had a brand new set of Yonex everything. I asked where he got them. He said they were on his doorstep when he woke up that day. How the seduction begins.

Next time we played he had a brand new set of Wilson clubs. Nice clubs I said. He just smiled. Playing Los Verdes on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Front nine, there's a long Par 5 dog leg back in to the wind. We played it from all the way back, a three shotter for sure, but Pete hits a bomb off the tee, wrapping it around the corner dead center of the fairway. Hardest golf ball I'd ever seen hit. Two fifty in. He hits a three wood laser that landed on the green pin high before running off. He blew it over in two. Athlete. Maybe even special. And not even close to full grown. We played a few more times. Turned out Pete could putt too, under pressure no less. I still owe him three bucks to this day  

I'm working more at West End now. Making friends, having fun. There's a bar upstairs. They mistakenly give me credit. I use it avidly. I soon meet a new partner in crime. And its on. Work all day. Party all night. Sometimes sleep. Often times not. Its a grueling life and I'm barely hanging on.

One night I got a phone call. It was a local businessman/tennis club owner asking if I'd be interested in playing an exhibition match at his daughter's wedding that weekend. There would be prize money. Five hundred to the winning team. I'm a whore, I'll play anywhere for money. Sure. Who would we be playing I ask? A couple local junior standouts from the Kramer Club. Bill Behrens and Pete Sampras he said. Absolutely I'm interested. See you in a couple days.

Night before the match. Its a Friday. Its a night on the town night, with all the usual hi-jinx. Lots of booze, lots of blow, out all night chasing women through the beach cities. Night getting late, morning arrived. And I'm still going. I had a match against Pete Sampras in 12 hours and I hadn't slept and I'm getting low on drugs. Always a tough call. Try to get some sleep, or get more drugs and power through. Again, I choose the latter, praying there's no repeat of my Olympic Trials meltdown.

Match time. It was a cool evening. I arrived sleepless and high with the reception in full swing. The band was playing and the dance floor was shaking. Mr Farrar greeted us. He knew what he had in Pete. With us, not so much. We were introduced to the throng, then led down to the court to play. With the fog rolling in, it was not warm. And I'm not warm. The match starts, and somehow we're managing. And Pete's cracking balls, fortunately for us, they're not all going in. 

Midway through the first set, I leaned over to my partner, saying this will be the last chance we ever have of beating Pete, so lets dig in. And we did. And as darkness descended on the court, the temperature dropped even lower, sending the wedding party scurrying back toward the main house and the warmth of inside. Half way through the second set, we looked up and there was nobody watching. We were the band at the end of the party, still playing after everyone's headed home.

Crowd or not, The 500 bucks meant something to me. Maybe not so much to Pete who was about to sign a multi-year 6 figure deal with Tachini. The match was close. We won the first in a tiebreaker. Running out of gas, we managed to do the same in the second. I was relieved more than excited, for a third set might have gotten ugly.

Returning to the party, Mr Farrar thanked us, handing us our checks then asking if we'd like something to drink. Pete said sure, asking for a soda. I ordered a double Jack and coke while firing up a Marlboro Red. Sitting together, we cheered each other for a fun match. I slugged down my drink in one gulp, immediately ordering another, when Pete looked right at me, aghast, and called me a psycho. 

Back at Lansdorps, the academy was in full swing. The talent from court to court unparalleled. Davenport, Tarango, Po, Rehe, Gurney and a young boy from Beverly Hills named Michael Joyce. I soon befriend the Joyces, forming a connection. They had a court at their house and wanted me to come up on  weekends and play some sets with young Mike. Once I heard it paid well, I needed not be asked twice.  

Weekends at the Joyce's. Beautiful house, private court. In the heart of Beverly Hills, their backyard overlooked Aaron Spellings obscene attempt at building a home. And young Mike had a Dad too, Mike Sr. And we would play sets. Me, Mike and his Dad. Just like at Als. My favorite kind of practice. Mike was all of fifteen. I was nine years, six inches and fifty pounds his senior, yet the sets were always tight, with his Dad watching every point played, with commentary start to finish.

Mr Joyce was a former player. He would take Mike out of school for weekday lessons with Lansdorp. They were all in. And Mr Joyce knew his tennis. He also knew his son. The tennis dialectic. Break him down. Build him back up, but stronger. Push hard, push harder, increase the pressure. It worked for diamonds. Why not tennis prodigies?

When Mike wasn't off winning junior tournaments on the weekends, we would play local money  tourneys, even traveling out to Palm Springs for weekends. But it was becoming clear my time with them was limited. Mike was going places and I obviously was not. As were all the other juniors in the area. Soon the calls to come play stopped, my services no longer required. It was becoming apparent there was no future for me with any of these opportunities. For these kids had set sites for the top. To peak performance, supported by our sports' top professionals, something as a 24 years old alcoholic and addict I simply was not.

Surrounded by sure things. Pete Sampras was a sure thing. Mike Joyce was a sure thing. Lindsay Davenport was a sure thing. Half the younger girls at Lansdorp's Academy were sure things. The most gifted young players I'd ever seen, fully committed to excellence, building teams of professionals all around them. The pathway to greatness was becoming clear.

But there was a darkness to it all. For most kids weren't sure things. And their less than championship results came with consequences, the pressure to be the next great American champion relentless. The rumor mill was firing. Parents crossing lines, physically and emotionally mistreating their under-performing children. And the local coaches, many taking liberties on their vulnerable underage students, with several getting run out of town. It was still only 1988. People didn't call Social Services back then.

Yet I knew too much. I knew who the mistreated kids were. I knew the abusing parents. I heard the incidents told to me first hand. Yet nothing was being done, my remaining sense of righteousness now triggered. What cost success. What price failure. 

The bartering of a child's safety for a pretty set of ground strokes.  

With the walls closing in. The parents knew I knew. The coaches knew I knew. Now nobody really wanted me around. Not The Jack Kramer Club, nor West End, certainly not Robert Lansdorp. And the feelings became mutual.

I'd come home again, to the South Bay junior tennis scene. But it wasn't my scene anymore. It was different now. And I was different. Years ago, I was a player on the rise. Now I was just getting in the way. Yet instead of leaving town quietly, I burned bridges everywhere I went. Once embraced, now ostracized. Kramer didn't hire me back. My old club wouldn't let me play there anymore. West End had had enough. My parents didn't want me around. I owed money everywhere and was way too close to getting in real trouble. The whole junior tennis scene, I was on the other side of it now as a coach,  trying to be a buffer between children and their abusive parents. 

It was all toxic and hit way too close to home for me.

I'd come home again as a different person to a changed world. And it didn't go well. It was time to move on, from my home, from my past, from junior tennis. 

The only questioned that remained was to where?