A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (39 page)

The idea that there can be wholly distinct levels to competitive tennis—levels so distinct that what’s being played is in
essence a whole different game—might seem to you weird and hyperbolic. I have played probably just enough tennis to understand
that it’s true. I have played against men who were on a whole different, higher plateau than I, and I have understood on the
deepest and most humbling level the impossibility of beating them, of “solving their game.” Knowle is technically entitled
to be called a professional, but he is playing a fundamentally different grade of tennis from Michael Joyce’s, one constrained
by limitations Joyce does not have. I feel like I could get on a tennis court with Julian Knowle. He would beat me, perhaps
badly, but I don’t feel like it would be absurd for me to occupy the same 78 × 27–foot rectangle as he. But the idea of me
playing Joyce—or even hitting around with him, which was one of the ideas I was entertaining on the flight to Montreal, to
hit around with a hot young U.S. pro—is now revealed to me to be absurd and in a certain way obscene, and during this night
match I resolve not even to let Joyce
⁴⁷
know that I used to play competitive tennis, to play seriously and (I’d presumed) rather well. This makes me sad.

Sunday, the second day of the Qualies, is mostly a rainout. It rains off and on all day. The umpire, courtside in his tall
chair, decides when the rain’s falling hard enough to suspend play. A second-round match between the world’s 219th- and 345th-ranked
players gets suspended four different times and takes most of the day to complete. What happens when it rains is reminiscent
of baseball. The players are hustled off back to the Players’ Tent but can’t leave because it could stop raining any minute;
they have to just sit there, match-ready. The spectators (there are slightly more on the second day) stay where they are,
but little fungal domes of umbrella start appearing all over the stands. The local Quebec reporters up in the Press Box curse
in French and bring out newspapers or hand-held video games or begin telling one another long sexual-adventure stories that
my French is just good enough to establish as tiresome.

When it stops raining and stays stopped long enough for the umpire to give the old raised thumb, there’s suddenly a flurry
of custodial activity down on the Stadium Court, a Chinese fire drill of ballboys and linesmen turned groundskeepers. Strange
and expensive-looking machinery appears from nowhere and is brought to bear: huge riding-mowerish forced-air machines go over
the court, bludgeoning the pooled rainwater and spreading it out; then a platoon of squeegees goes over every cm of the surface;
then portable blowers—rather like leaf-blowers, with an over-the-shoulder strap and a wand attachment—are applied to the persistent
individual wet spots that always beset a drying court.

This article is about Michael Joyce and the untelevised realities of the Tour, not me. But since a big part of my experience
of the Canadian Open and its players was one of sadness, it might be worthwhile to spend a little time letting you know where
I’m coming from w/r/t these players. As a young person I played competitive tennis, traveling to tournaments all over the
Midwest. Most of my best friends were also tennis players, and on a regional level we were fairly successful, and we thought
of ourselves as extremely good players. Tennis and our proficiency at it were tremendously important to us—a serious junior
gives up a lot of his time and freedom to develop his game,
⁴⁸
and it can very easily come to constitute a big part of his identity and self-worth. The other fourteen-year-old Midwest
hotshots and I knew that our fishpond was somehow limited; we knew that there was a national level of play and that there
existed hotshots and champions at that level. But levels and plateaux beyond our own seemed abstract, somehow unreal—those
of us who were the hotshots in our region literally could not imagine players our own age who were substantially better than
we.

A child’s world turns out to be very small. If I’d been just a little bit better, an actual regional champion, I would have
qualified for national-level tournaments, and I would have gotten to see that there were fourteen-year-olds in the United
States who were playing tennis on a level I knew nothing about.

My own game as a junior was a particular type of the classic defensive style, a strategy Martin Amis describes as “craven
retrieval.” I didn’t hit the ball all that hard, but I rarely made unforced errors, and I was fast, and my general approach
was simply to keep hitting the ball back to the opponent until the kid screwed up and either made an unforced error or hit
a ball so short and juicy that even I could hit a winner off it. It doesn’t look like a very glamorous or even interesting
way to play, now that I see it here in bald retrospective print, but it was interesting to me, and you’d be surprised how
effective it was (on the level at which I was competing, at least). At age twelve, a good competitive player will still generally
miss after four or five balls (mostly because he’ll get impatient or grandiose). At age sixteen, a good player will keep the
ball in play for more like maybe seven or eight shots before he misses. At the collegiate level, too (at least in Division
III), opponents were stronger than junior players but not markedly more consistent, and if I could keep a rally going to seven
or eight shots, I could usually win the point on the other guy’s mistake.
⁴⁹

I still play—not competitively, but seriously—and I should confess that deep down somewhere inside I still consider myself
an extremely good tennis player, real hard to beat. Before coming to Montreal, I’d seen professional tennis only on television,
which as has been noted does not give the viewer a very accurate picture of how good pros are. I thus further confess that
I arrived in Montreal with some dim unconscious expectation that these professionals—at least the obscure ones, the nonstars—wouldn’t
be all
that
much better than I. I don’t mean to imply that I’m insane: I was ready to concede that age, a nasty ankle injury in ’91 that
I haven’t bothered to get surgically fixed yet, and a penchant for nicotine (and worse) meant that I wouldn’t be able to compete
physically with a young unhurt professional; but on TV (while eating junk and smoking) I’d seen pros whacking balls at each
other that didn’t look to be moving substantially faster than the balls I hit. In other words, I arrived at my first professional
tournament with the pathetic deluded pride that attends ignorance. And I have watched the Qualies—not even the main draw yet,
mind you, but the competition between 64 fairly low-ranked world-class players for the eight qualifying slots in the Canadian
Open field—with a mixture of awe and sad surprise. I have been brought up sharply. I do not play and never have played the
same game as these low-ranked pros.

The craven game I spent so much of my youth perfecting would not work against these guys. For one thing, pros simply do not
make unforced errors—or at any rate they make them so rarely that there’s no way they’re going to make the four unforced errors
in seven points necessary for me to win a game. For another thing, they will take any shot that doesn’t have simply ferocious
depth and pace on it and—given even a fractional moment to line up a shot—hit a winner off it. For yet another thing, their
own shots have such ferocious depth and pace that there’s no way I’d be able to hit more than a couple of them back at any
one time. I could not meaningfully
exist
on the same court with these obscure, hungry players. Nor could you. And it’s not just a matter of talent or practice. There’s
something else.

Monday commences the main draw, and the grounds are packed. Most of the Qualies’ players are in planes high above some ocean
somewhere by now.

Going to a major ATP tournament is like a cross between going to a major-league ball game and going to the fair. You can buy
a Grounds Pass and wander from match to match, sampling the fare. You can also buy specific expensive tickets for big-name
matches in the Stadium and Grandstand. In the early rounds, these headline matches tend to feature the high seeds and household
names—Agassi, Sampras, Chang—against main draw also-rans like Jacob Hlasek.
⁵⁰

Being a tennis spectator is different from being at a baseball game, though. Whether crowd-noise or -movement is any more
distracting to someone getting ready to serve than it is to someone getting ready to shoot a freethrow, players and tournaments
act like it is, and play itself is supposed to be conducted in as close to funereal silence as possible.
⁵¹
If you’ve got a seat for a Stadium match, you can leave and return only during the break that happens after every odd-numbered
game, when the players get to sit under red umbrellas for a second. Ushers cordon off the exits during play, and a concession-laden
mass of spectators always stretches from just behind these ropes all the way down the slanted ramps into the Stadium’s bowels,
waiting to get back in.

Stade Jarry has the same sort of crumbling splendor that characterizes a lot of Montreal. The Stadium/Grandstand structure
used to house the Expos before Montreal built Olympic Stadium, and it’s grimy and old and creaks alarmingly when crowds enter
or exit. The “Players’ Lounge,” which at most tournaments is a temperature-controlled salon with plush chairs and video games
and multiple massage rooms, is at Stade Jarry just a big tent with canvas partitions around the locker room, no video games,
just one TV, and no AC. The parking lots are inadequate and tufted with crabgrass, and the easements between courts and facilities
on the grounds are either dirt or some kind of blacktop that’s decayed back to the point where it’s just about dirt too. The
whole thing’s due to be torn down after the ’95 Open’s over, and a new Flushing Meadow-type tennis complex is going to be
built by Tennis Canada
⁵²
and a whole bunch of the corporations whose names are on the Stadium’s brothelish bunting.

The tournament site’s surrounding Parc du Jarry, on the other hand, is exquisite. From the top row of the Stadium’s seats
you can look out in the sunshine and see rolling grass, a public pool, a pond replete with stately fowl. In the distance to
the north is the verdigrised dome of a really big church; to the west is the EKG skyline of downtown Montreal.

But so you can wander between matches, stand around watching the practice courts, join the lines for the restrooms, or elbow-fight
with little kids and autograph hunters outside the Players’ Tent. Or you can buy concessions. There’s a booth outside one
entrance to the Stadium Court that sells only Evian water. There’s Spanish peanuts and fudge you can buy by the gram and eat
or buy by the kilo and take home.
⁵³
The whole Stade Jarry grounds have a standard summer-touristic reek of fried foods—French fries in cups, nachos, and in paper
trays small spiraled fried things I decline to examine closely. There are two booths for Richard D’s Bars, a kind of Quebecois
cognate for Dove Bars (and not quite as good, but pretty good). There are only two men’s rooms open to the public,
⁵⁴
and the lines for both always resemble a run on a midsize branch bank. There’s the Rado
^®
Smash Booth, where for $3.00 Canadian you can step inside a large cage with a much-handled racquet and hit a serve into a
frayed-looking net and have the speed of your serve appear on a big liquid-crystal display above the cage. Most of the people
availing themselves of the Rado
^®
Smash Booth are men, whose girlfriends watch dutifully as the men step inside the cage with the same testosteronic facial
expression of men at fairs testing their marksmanship or sledge-swinging prowess—and the American men tend to be very pleased
and excited at the displayed speed of their serve until it dawns on them that the readout’s in kph instead of mph. There are
hot dogs and hamburgers and the ambient sizzle-sound of same over near the Grandstand entrances. Just east of the Grandstand
and the second men’s room, there’s a whole sort of cafeteria in a big tent with patio tables arrayed on Astroturf that’s laid
over a low deck of extremely flimsy boards so that your table trembles and your Evian bottle falls over every time somebody
walks by. Starting on Monday there are a lot of Canadian girls in really short tight shorts and a lot of muscle-shirted Canadian
boyfriends who scowl at you if you react to the girlfriends in the way the girlfriends’ tight shorts seem designed to make
anyone with a healthy endocrine system react.

There are old people who sit on red Stade Jarry park benches all day without moving.

At just about every gate and important door on the Stade Jarry grounds there are attendants, young Quebeckers paid by the
tournament—whether their function is security or what remains somewhat unclear—who sit all day with walkie-talkies and red
and black du Maurier visors and the catatonically bored expressions of attendants everywhere.

There are four separate booths that sell good old U.S. soft drinks, you’ll be glad to know, although the booths’ promo-signs
for “Soft Drinks” translate literally into “Gaseous Beverages,” which might explain why most Canadian Open spectators opt
for Evian instead of soft drinks.

Or you can stand in front of the Canadian Open Stringer’s Tent and watch the Official ATP Tour Stringer work through a small
mountain of racquets, using pliers and shears and what looks like a combination blacksmith’s anvil and dentist’s chair. Or
you can join the battalion of kids outside the Players’ Tent all trying to get their Official ATP Player Trading Cards
⁵⁵
autographed by players entering or exiting, and you can witness a kind of near-riot when the passing player turns out to
be Sampras or Courier or Agassi, and you can even get stiff-armed by a bodyguard in wraparound shades when Brooke Shields
passes too close in her own wraparounds and floppy hat.