A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (59 page)

Knowles is tall and thin, muscular in the corded way tall thin people are muscular, and has an amazing tan and tight blond curls and from a distance is an impressive-looking guy, though up close he has a kind of squished, buggy face and the slightly bulging eyes of a player who, I can tell, is spring-loaded on a tantrum. There’s a chance to see Knowles up close because he and Joyce play their match on one of the minor courts, where spectators stand and lean over a low fence only a few yards from the court. I and Joyce’s coach and Knowles’s coach and beautiful girlfriend are the only people really seriously standing and watching, though a lot of spectators on their way to more high-profile matches pass by and stop and watch a few points before moving on. The constant movement of civilians past the court aggrieves Knowles no end, and sometimes he shouts caustic things to people who’ve started walking away while a point is still in progress.

“Don’t worry about it!” is one thing Knowles shouted at someone who moved. “We’re only playing for money! We’re only professionals! Don’t give it a second thought!” Joyce, preparing to serve, will stare affectlessly straight ahead while he waits for Knowles to finish yelling, his expression sort of like the one Vegas dealers have when a gambler they’re cleaning out is rude or abusive, a patient and unjudging look whose expression is informed by the fact that they’re extremely well compensated for being patient and unjudging.

Sam Aparicio describes Knowles as “brilliant but kind of erratic,” and I think the coach is being kind, because Knowles seems to me to belong on a Locked Ward for people with serious emotional and personality disorders. He rants and throws racquets and screams scatological curses I haven’t heard since junior high. If one of his shots hits the top of the net-cord and bounces back, Knowles will scream “I must be the luckiest guy in the world!” his eyes protruding and mouth twisted. For me he’s an eerie echo of all the rich and well-instructed Midwest kids I used to play and beat because they’d be unable to eat the frustration when things didn’t go their way. He seems not to notice that Joyce gets as many bad breaks and weird bounces as he, or that passing spectators are equally distracting to both players. Knowles seems to be one of these people who view the world’s inconveniences as specific and personal, and it makes my stomach hurt to watch him. When he hits a ball against the fence so hard it seems to damage the ball, the umpire gives him a warning, but in the sort of gentle compassionate voice of a kindergarten teacher to a kid who’s known to have A.D.D. I have a hard time believing that someone this off-the-wall could rise to a serious pro plateau, though it’s true that when Knowles isn’t letting his attention get scattered he’s a gorgeous player, with fluid strokes and marvelous control over spin and pace. His read on Joyce is that Joyce is a slugger (which is true), and his tactic is to try to junk him up—change pace, vary spins, hit drop shots to draw Joyce in, deny Joyce pace or rhythm—and because he’s Joyce’s equal in firepower the tactic is sound. Joyce wins the first set in a tiebreaker. But three times in the tiebreaker Knowles yells at migratory spectators “Don’t worry! It’s only a tiebreaker in a professional match!” and is basically a wreck by the time the first set is over, and the second set is perfunctory, a formality that Joyce concludes as fast as possible and hurries back to the Players’ Tent to pack carbohydrates and find out whether he has to play his first round in the main draw later this same day.

⁵⁰
Hlasek lost in the first round of the main draw Tuesday morning to obscure American Jonathan Stark, who then lost to Sampras in the second round on Wednesday in front of a capacity Stadium crowd.

⁵¹
This is in the Stadium and Grandstand, where the big names play, this ceremonial hush. Lesser players on the outlying courts have to live with spectators talking during points, people moving around so that whole rickety sets of bleachers rumble and clank, food service attendants crashing carts around on the paths just outside the windscreen or giggling and flirting in the food-prep tents just on the other side of several minor courts’ fences.

⁵²
This is Canada’s version of the U.S.T.A., and its logo—which obtrudes into your visual field as often as is possible here at the du Maurier Omnium—consists of the good old Canadian maple leaf with a tennis racquet for a stem. It’s stuff like Tennis Canada’s logo you want to point to when Canadians protest that they don’t understand why Americans make fun of them.

⁵³
(though best of luck getting fudge home in this heat…)

⁵⁴
“Le Média” has its own facilities, though they’re up in the Press Box, about five flights of rickety and crowded stairs up through the Stadium’s interior and then exterior and then interior, with the last flight being that dense striated iron of like a fire escape and very steep and frankly dangerous, so that when one has to “aller au pissoir” it’s always a hard decision between the massed horror of the public rest rooms and the Sisyphean horror of the Press bathroom, and I learn by the second day to go very easy on the Evian water and coffee as I’m wandering around.

⁵⁵
(a recent and rather ingenious marketing move by the ATP—I buy several just for the names)

⁵⁶
It’s not at all clear what N.V.G.B.’s have to do with the Omnium, and no free samples are available.

⁵⁷
Du Maurier cigarettes are like Australian Sterlings or French Gauloise—full-bodied, pungent, crackly when inhaled, sweet and yeasty when exhaled, and so strong that you can feel your scalp seem to leave your skull for a moment and ride the cloud of smoke. Du Maurier-intoxication may be one reason why the Canadian Open crowds seem so generally cheery and expansive and well-behaved.

⁵⁸
(=“Give me your mouth”—not subtle at all)

⁵⁹
These are usually luxury cars provided by some local distributorship in return for promotional consideration. The Canadian Open’s courtesy cars are BMWs, all so new they smell like glove compartments and so expensive and high-tech that their dashboards look like the control panels of nuclear reactors. The people driving the courtesy cars are usually local civilians who take a week off from work and drive a numbingly dull route back and forth between hotel and courts—their compensation consists of free tickets to certain Stadium matches and a chance to rub elbows with professional tennis players, or at least with their luggage.

⁶⁰
He will lose badly to Michael Stich in the round of 16, the same Stich whom Michael Joyce beat at the Lipton Championships in Key Biscayne four months before; and in fact Joyce will himself beat Courier in straight sets next week at the Infiniti Open in Los Angeles, in front of Joyce’s family and friends, for one of the biggest wins of his career so far.

⁶¹
Chang’s mother is here—one of the most infamous of the dreaded Tennis Parents of the men’s and women’s Tours, a woman who’s reliably rumored to have done things like reach down her child’s tennis shorts in public to check his underwear—and her attendance (she’s seated hierophantically in the player-guest boxes courtside) may have something to do with the staggering woe of Chang’s mien and play. Thomas Enqvist ends up beating him soundly in the quarterfinals on Wednesday night. (Enqvist, by the way, looks eerily like a young Richard Chamberlain, the Richard Chamberlain of
The Towering Inferno
, say, with this narrow, sort of rodentially patrician quality. The best thing about Enqvist is his girlfriend, who wears glasses and when she applauds a good point sort of hops up and down in her seat with refreshing uncoolness.)

⁶²
Who himself has the blond bland good looks of a professional golfer, and is reputed to be the single dullest man on the ATP Tour and possibly in the whole world, a man whose hobby is purported to be “staring at walls” and whose quietness is not the quietness of restraint but of blankness, the verbal equivalent of a dead channel.

⁶³
(Just as Enqvist now appears to be Edberg’s heir… Swedish tennis tends to be like monarchic succession: they tend to have only one really great player at a time, and this player is always male, and he almost always ends up #1 in the world for a while. This is one reason marketers and endorsement-consultants are circling Enqvist like makos all through the summer.)

⁶⁴
Nerves and choking are a huge issue in a precision-and- timing sport like tennis, and a “bad head” washes more juniors out of the competitive life than any sort of deficit in talent or drive.

¹
(though I never did get clear on just what a knot is)

²
Somewhere he’d gotten the impression I was an investigative journalist and wouldn’t let me see the galley, Bridge, staff decks,
anything
, or interview any of the crew or staff in an on-the-record way, and he wore sunglasses inside, and epaulets, and kept talking on the phone for long stretches of time in Greek when I was in his office after I’d skipped the karaoki semifinals in the Rendez-Vous Lounge to make a special appointment to see him; I wish him ill.

³
No wag could possibly resist mentally rechristening the ship the m.v.
Nadir
the instant he saw the
Zenith
’s silly name in the Celebrity brochure, so indulge me on this, but the rechristening’s nothing particular against the ship itself.

⁴
There’s also Windstar and Silversea, Tall Ship Adventures and Windjammer Barefoot Cruises, but these Caribbean Cruises are wildly upscale and smaller. The 20+ cruise lines I’m talking run the “Megaships,” the floating wedding cakes with occupancies in four figures and engine-propellers the size of branch banks. Of the Megalines out of South FL there’s Commodore, Costa, Majesty, Regal, Dolphin, Princess, Royal Caribbean, good old Celebrity. There’s Renaissance, Royal Cruise Line, Holland, Holland America, Cunard, Cunard Crown, Cunard Royal Viking. There’s Norwegian Cruise Line, there’s Crystal, there’s Regency Cruises. There’s the Wal-Mart of the cruise industry, Carnival, which the other lines refer to sometimes as “Carnivore.” I don’t recall which line
The Love Boat’s Pacific Princess
was supposed to be with (I guess they were probably more like a CA-to-Hawaii-circuit ship, though I seem to recall them going all over the place), but now Princess Cruises has bought the name and uses poor old Gavin MacLeod in full regalia in their TV ads.

The 7NC Megaship cruiser is a type, a genre of ship all its own, like the destroyer. All the Megalines have more than one ship. The industry descends from those old patrician trans-Atlantic deals where the opulence combined with actually getting someplace—e.g. the
Titanic, Normandie
, etc. The present Caribbean Cruise market’s various niches—Singles, Old People, Theme, Special Interest, Corporate, Party, Family, Mass-Market, Luxury, Absurd Luxury, Grotesque Luxury—have now all pretty much been carved and staked out and are competed for viciously (I heard off-the-record stuff about Carnival v. Princess that’d singe your brows). Megaships tend to be designed in America, built in Germany, registered out of Liberia or Monrovia; and they are both captained and owned, for the most part, by Scandinavians and Greeks, which is kind of interesting, since these are the same peoples who’ve dominated sea travel pretty much forever. Celebrity Cruises is owned by the Chandris Group; the X on their three ships’ smokestacks turns out not to be an X but a Greek chi, for Chandris, a Greek shipping family so ancient and powerful they apparently regarded Onassis as a punk.

⁵
I’m doing this from memory. I don’t need a book. I can still name every documented
Indianapolis
fatality, including some serial numbers and hometowns. (Hundreds of men lost, 80 classed as Shark, 7–10 August ’45; the
Indianapolis
had just delivered Little Boy to the island of Tinian for delivery to Hiroshima, so ironists take note. Robert Shaw as Quint reprised the whole incident in 1975’s
Jaws
, a film that, as you can imagine, was like fetish-porn to me at age thirteen.)

⁶
And I’ll admit that on the very first night of the 7NCI asked the staff of the
Nadir
’s Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant whether I could maybe have a spare bucket of
au jus
drippings from supper so I could try chumming for sharks off the back rail of the top deck, and that this request struck everybody from the maître d’ on down as disturbing and maybe even disturbed, and that it turned out to be a serious journalistic faux pas, because I’m almost positive the maître d’ passed this disturbing tidbit on to Mr. Dermatitis and that it was a big reason why I was denied access to stuff like the ship’s galley, thereby impoverishing the sensuous scope of this article. (Plus it also revealed how little I understood the
Nadir
’s sheer size: twelve decks and 150 feet up, the
au jus
drippings would have dispersed into a vague red cologne by the time they hit the water, with concentrations of blood inadequate to attract or excite a serious shark, whose fin would have probably looked like a pushpin from that height, anyway.)