Consider the Lobster (19 page)

In the subsequent section, Austin recalls a 1978 pro tournament in Japan that she hadn’t much wanted to enter:

It was just too far from home and I was tired from the travel grind. They kept offering me more and more money for an appearance fee—well over a hundred thousand dollars—but I said no. Finally, they offered to fly my whole family over. That did it. We went, and I won easily.

Besides displaying an odd financial sense (she won’t come for $100,000+, but will come if they add a couple thousand in airfare?), Tracy Austin seems here unaware of the fact that, in the late Seventies, any player who accepted a guaranteed payment just for entering a tournament was in violation of a serious tour rule. The backstory here is that both genders’ player associations had outlawed these payments because they threatened both the real and the perceived integrity of pro tennis. A tournament that has paid some star player a hefty guarantee—wanting her in the draw because her celebrity will help increase ticket sales, corporate sponsorships, TV revenues, etc.—thereafter has an obvious stake in that player’s survival in the tournament, and so has an equally obvious interest in keeping her from getting upset by some lesser-known player in the early rounds, which, since matches’ linesmen and umpires are employed by the tournament, can lead to shady officiating. And has so led. Far stranger things than a marquee player’s receiving a suspicious number of favorable line calls have happened … though apparently somehow not in Tracy Austin’s experience.

The naïveté on display throughout this memoir is doubly confusing. On the one hand, there’s little sign in this narrator of anything like the frontal-lobe activity required for outright deception. On the other, Austin’s ignorance of her sport’s grittier realities seems literally incredible. Random examples. When she sees a player “tank” a 1988 tournament match to make time for a lucrative appearance in a TV ad, Tracy “couldn’t believe it… . I had never played with anyone who threw a match before, so it took me a set and a half to realize what was happening.” This even though match-tanking had been widely and publicly reported as a dark consequence of skyrocketing exhibition and endorsement fees for at least the eleven years Austin had been in pro tennis. Or, drugswise, although problems with everything up to cocaine and heroin in pro tennis had been not only acknowledged but written about in the 1980s,
^*
Austin manages to move the reader to both scorn and pity with pronouncements like “I assume players were experimenting with marijuana and certainly were drinking alcohol, but I don’t know who or when or where. I wasn’t invited to those parties, if they were happening at all. And I’m very glad I wasn’t.” And so on and so on.

Ultimately, though, what makes
Beyond Center Court
so especially disappointing is that it could have been much more than just another I-was-born-to-play sports memoir. The facts of Tracy Austin’s life and its trajectory are almost classically tragic. She was the first of tennis’s now-ubiquitous nymphet prodigies, and her rise was meteoric. Picked out of the crowd as a toddler by coaching guru Vic Braden, Austin was on the cover of
World Tennis
magazine at age four. She played her first junior tournament at seven, and by ten she had won the national girls’ twelve-and-under championship both indoors and out- and was being invited to play public exhibitions. At thirteen she had won national titles in most junior age-groups, been drafted as a professional by World Team Tennis, and appeared on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
under the teaser “A Star Is Born.” At fourteen, having chewed up every female in US juniors, she entered the preliminary qualifiers for her first professional tournament and proceeded to win not just the qualifying event but the whole tourney—a feat roughly equivalent to someone who was ineligible for a DMV learner’s permit winning the Indianapolis 500. She played Wimbledon at fourteen, turned pro as a ninth-grader, won the US Open at sixteen, and was ranked number one in the world at just seventeen, in 1980. This was the same year her body started to fall apart. She spent the next four years effectively crippled by injuries and bizarre accidents, playing sporadically and watching her ranking plummet, and was for all practical purposes retired from tennis at age twenty-one. In 1989, her one serious attempt at a comeback ended on the way to the US Open, when a speeder ran a red light and nearly killed her. She is now, as of this writing, a professional former sports star, running celebrity clinics for corporate sponsors and doing sad little bits of color commentary on some of the same cable channels I’d first seen her play on.

What’s nearly Greek about her career’s arc is that Tracy Austin’s most conspicuous virtue, a relentless workaholic perfectionism that combined with raw talent to make her such a prodigious success, turned out to be also her flaw and bane. She was, even after puberty, a tiny person, and her obsessive practice regimen and uncompromising effort in every last match began to afflict her with what sports MDs now know to be simple consequences of hypertrophy and chronic wear: hamstring and hip flexor pulls, sciatica, scoliosis, tendinitis, stress fractures, plantar fasciitis. Then too, since woe classically breeds more woe, she was freak-accident-prone: coaches who fall on her while ice-skating and break her ankle, psychotic chiropractors who pull her spine out of alignment, waiters who splash her with scalding water, color-blind speeders on the JFK Parkway.

A successful Tracy Austin autobiography, then, could have afforded us plain old plumbers and accountants more than just access to the unquestioned genius of an athletic savant or her high-speed ascent to the top of a univocal, mathematically computed hierarchy. This book could actually have helped us to countenance the sports myth’s dark side. The only thing Tracy Austin had ever known how to do, her art—what the tragic-savvy Greeks would have called her
techne?248-175?,
that state in which Austin’s mastery of craft facilitated a communion with the gods themselves—was removed from her at an age when most of us are just starting to think seriously about committing ourselves to some pursuit. This memoir could have been about both the seductive immortality of competitive success and the less seductive but way more significant fragility and impermanence of all the competitive venues in which mortal humans chase immortality. Austin’s story could, since the predicament of a dedicated athletic prodigy washed up at twenty-one differs in nothing more than degree from that of a dedicated CPA and family man dying at sixty-two, have been profound. The book could, since having it all at seventeen and then losing it all by twenty-one because of stuff outside your control is just like death except you have to go on living afterward, have been truly inspirational. And the publisher’s flap copy promises just this: “The inspirational story of Tracy Austin’s long struggle to find a life beyond championship tennis.”

But the publisher’s flap copy lies, because it turns out that
inspirational
is being used on the book jacket only in its ad-cliché sense, one basically equivalent to
heartwarming
or
feel-good
or even (God forbid)
triumphant
. Like all good ad clichés, it manages to suggest everything and mean nothing. Honorably used,
to inspire
means, according to Mr. American Heritage, “to animate the mind or emotions of; to communicate by divine influence.” Which is to say that
inspirational,
honorably used, describes precisely what a great athlete becomes when she’s in the arena performing, sharing the particular divinity she’s given her life for, letting people witness concrete, transient instantiations of a grace that for most of us remains abstract and immanent.

Transcendent as were Tracy Austin’s achievements on a public court, her autobiography does not come anywhere close to honoring the promise of its flap copy’s “inspirational.” Because forget divine—there’s not even a recognizable human being in here. And this isn’t just because of clunky prose or luxated structure. The book is inanimate because it communicates no real feeling and so gives us no sense of a conscious person. There’s nobody at the other end of the line. Every emotionally significant moment or event or development gets conveyed in either computeresque staccato or else a prepackaged PR-speak whose whole function is (think about it) to deaden feeling. See, for instance, Austin’s account of the moment when she has just beaten a world-class adult to win her first professional tournament:

It was a tough match and I simply outlasted her. I was beginning to get a reputation for doing that. When you play from the baseline, perseverance is everything. The prize money for first place was twenty-eight thousand dollars.
^*

Or check out the book’s description of her career’s tragic climax. After working for five years to make a comeback and then, literally on the way to Flushing Meadow’s National Tennis Center, getting sideswiped by a van and having her leg shattered through sheer bad luck, Tracy Austin was now permanently finished as a world-class athlete, and had then to lie for weeks in traction and think about the end of the only life she’d ever known. In
Beyond Center Court,
Austin’s inspirational prose-response to this consists of quoting Leo Buscaglia, reporting on her newfound enthusiasm for shopping, and then giving us an excruciating chapter-long list of every celebrity she’s ever met.

Of course, neither Austin nor her book is unique. It’s hard not to notice the way this same air of robotic banality suffuses not only the sports-memoir genre but also the media rituals in which a top athlete is asked to describe the content or meaning of his
techne?248-175?
. Turn on any post-contest TV interview: “Kenny, how did it feel to make that sensational game-winning shoestring catch in the end zone with absolutely no I mean
zero
time remaining on the clock?” “Well, Frank, I was just real pleased. I was real happy and also pleased. We’ve all worked hard and come a long way as a team, and it’s always a good feeling to be able to contribute.” “Mark, you’ve now homered in your last eight straight at-bats and lead both leagues in RBIs—any comment?” “Well, Bob, I’m just trying to take it one pitch at a time. I’ve been focusing on the fundamentals, you know, and trying to make a contribution, and all of us know we’ve got to take it one game at a time and hang in there and not look ahead and just basically do the best we can at all times.” This stuff is stupefying, and yet it also seems to be inevitable, maybe even necessary. The baritones in network blazers keep coming up after games, demanding of physical geniuses these recombinant strings of dead clichés, strings that after a while start to sound like a strange kind of lullaby, and which of course no network would solicit and broadcast again and again if there weren’t a large and serious audience out here who find the banalities right and good. As if the emptiness in these athletes’ descriptions of their feelings confirmed something we need to believe.

All right, so the obvious point: Great athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination. For me, though, the important question is why this is always so bitterly disappointing. And why I keep buying these sports memoirs with expectations that my own experience with the genre should long ago have modified … and why I nearly always feel thwarted and pissed when I finish them. One sort of answer, of course, is that commercial autobiographies like these promise something they cannot deliver: personal and verbal access to an intrinsically public and performative kind of genius. The problem with this answer is that I and the rest of the US book market aren’t that stupid—if impossible promises were all there was to it, we’d catch on after a while, and it would stop being so profitable for publishers to churn these memoirs out.

Maybe what keeps us buying in the face of constant disappointment is some deep compulsion both to experience genius in the concrete and to universalize genius in the abstract. Real indisputable genius is so impossible to define, and true
techne?248-175?
so rarely visible (much less televisable), that maybe we automatically expect people who are geniuses as athletes to be geniuses also as speakers and writers, to be articulate, perceptive, truthful, profound. If it’s just that we naively expect geniuses-in-motion to be also geniuses-in-reflection, then their failure to be that shouldn’t really seem any crueler or more disillusioning than Kant’s glass jaw or Eliot’s inability to hit the curve.

For my part, though, I think there’s something deeper, and scarier, that keeps my hope one step ahead of past experience as I make my way to the bookstore’s register. It remains very hard for me to reconcile the vapidity of Austin’s narrative mind, on the one hand, with the extraordinary mental powers that are required by world-class tennis, on the other. Anyone who buys the idea that great athletes are dim should have a close look at an NFL playbook, or at a basketball coach’s diagram of a 3-2 zone trap … or at an archival film of Ms. Tracy Austin repeatedly putting a ball in a court’s corner at high speed from seventy-eight feet away, with huge sums of money at stake and enormous crowds of people watching her do it. Ever try to concentrate on doing something difficult with a crowd of people watching? … worse, with a crowd of spectators maybe all vocally hoping you fail so that their favorite will beat you? In my own comparatively low-level junior matches, before audiences that rarely hit three digits, it used to be all I could do to manage my sphincter. I would drive myself crazy: “… but what if I double-fault here and go down a break with all these folks watching? … don’t think about it … yeah but except if I’m consciously not thinking about it then doesn’t part of me have to think about it in order for me to remember what I’m not supposed to think about? … shut
up,
quit thinking about it and serve the goddamn ball … except how can I even be talking to myself about not thinking about it unless I’m still aware of what it is I’m talking about not thinking about?” and so on. I’d get divided, paralyzed. As most ungreat athletes do. Freeze up, choke. Lose our focus. Become self-conscious. Cease to be wholly present in our wills and choices and movements.