Murder Is My Racquet (24 page)

Lockhart beat Douglass 6–4, 6–4, 6–4 that Saturday night, the feature match of what they used to call Super Saturday at the Open, never came close to having his service broken. When Douglass would try one of his feathery drop shots, Lockhart would come flying in from the baseline and cover it on young legs. When Douglass tried to stay back and rally with the kid, Lockhart would move him from side to side, making Douglass work harder and harder on older legs, before finally putting him out of his misery and putting another point away.

Even Tony Douglass should have had the grace to accept what was happening; there was no disgrace in losing to a talented kid having this kind of day.

But he could not.

Three games into the third set, with the crowd begging Douglass to come back, to make a match of it, the chair umpire overruled a call by the service linesman, saying Douglass had double-faulted even though the linesman saw his second serve as good. The point gave the game to Ken Lockhart, put him up a service break at two games to one.

Of course Tony Douglass thought the guy in the chair was criminally insane.

It had happened on an odd game, which meant a change of side. Ken Lockhart went to towel off. Douglass stayed right where he was, two steps inside the back line, staring at the chair. Somehow it was as if a fuse had been lit in Louis
Armstrong Stadium. You could hear the ripple of tension, nervous excitement, run through the crowd the way it always did when the people thought Douglass was ready to blow. It had been the same way with Nastase, Ted knew, and Connors, and McEnroe, the whole line of them.

“You saw that ball out?” Douglass snapped.

“I did, Mr. Douglass.”

“You thought the call was
egregiously
wrong, that’s what you’re telling me?”

He was quoting the rules, the umpire was only supposed to overrule in case of an egregious error.

“The ball was clearly out, Mr. Douglass.”

The first people, high up in the stands, began to rhythmically clap.

Douglass stood there, glaring still, hands on hips. Finally he said, “Okay, asshole, my turn.”

The umpire should have given him a warning right then, for audible profanity, but this was the Open, everyone watching had to know this might be Douglass’s last great chance to win the Open. So the umpire gave him some room, hoping only the people close to the court could hear. Douglass wasn’t nearly in range of the powerful chair microphone yet.

Even if the umpire knew he was going to be, because now here came Tony Douglass, marching toward the chair.

“The guy on the line said the ball was in,” Douglass said,
“you fucking moron!”

That was it, the whole stadium heard that one. Hell, the home plate umpire at Shea Stadium, across Roosevelt Avenue from where they were, probably heard.

“Warning, Mr. Douglass,” the umpire said, having no choice now. “Verbal abuse.”

Douglass made a motion with his racquet as if masturbating.

An old standby.

“Abuse
this
.”

Now they were off to the races.

“Point penalty, Mr. Douglass. Fifteen-love, Mr. Lockhart.”

There was an explosion of boos from the crowd. Not for Tony Douglass. For the umpire, who had just given the first point of the next game to Ken Lockhart, doing exactly what the rules said he had to do.

Lockhart had taken his place at the other end, to the umpire’s left, bouncing a ball, waiting to serve. Watching, mesmerized, like everyone else.

“Eat me,” Douglass snarled, the words somehow sounding worse, as they always did, because of the good-boy Brit accent he’d never lost.

It was all by the book now.

“Game, Mr. Lockhart. He leads 3–1, third set.”

The rules in those days were simple enough. Douglass had gone right past his warning, the beginning of the process, and now had two strikes against him. Strike three meant he was defaulted from the match. Semifinal match of the Open.

The ball was officially and irrevocably in Tony Douglass’s court. He was the one who had to decide if this was the way he wanted to go out at the United States Open.

“I will not
allow
you to do this to me,” Douglass screamed.

“The ball was out,” the umpire said.

“Liar!”
Douglass screamed.

“The rules are fairly straightforward, Mr. Douglass,” the umpire said patiently, sitting there in the chair, standing his ground at the same time. “You should know that better than anyone. You are doing this to yourself.”

Douglass was right underneath the chair now, staring up, his eyes as hot and bright as sparklers.

“I am Tony Douglass,” he said.

The umpire, who’d taken as much as he was going to take, as much as anyone could have been expected to take, put his hand over his mike now and said, “You used to be.”

“Fuck you,” Douglass said.

“Game, set, match, Mr. Lockhart,” the umpire said.

Which is what it should have been.

Which by any sense of justice and fair play is the way the match should have ended, right there. Except that now all holy hell broke loose at Louis Armstrong Stadium. People started throwing programs and seat cushions and soft drink cups. A tennis crowd suddenly acting like one of those hooligan soccer crowds. People running from the cheap seats, or what passed for cheap seats in tennis, down the aisles, trying to get closer to the court, to the action, maybe so they could throw things themselves.

Not at Tony Douglass.

In the direction of the chair.

As if this were somehow the
chair’s
fault.

The tournament referee came running out. The whole world saw what happened next, even if no one except the umpire and the referee could hear, the referee apologizing profusely, saying the umpire had done nothing wrong, really did have no choice, but please understand, he, the referee, he was the one who had no choice now, that he was going to have to allow the match to continue, that he was going to have to ask the umpire to step down from the chair.

That he had to do it for the good of the Open.

As if the umpire were the bad guy.

Not the prick.

They cheered Tony Douglass when he went back out, got ready to take the rest of his ass-kicking from the kid. They booed the umpire, kept throwing things in his direction, the ones close to the court even spitting at him, Tony Douglass finally turning everybody lousy, until the umpire mercifully disappeared into the runway between the stadium court and the grandstand.

• • •

N
ow Tony Douglass was forty-two. He could have tried the new over-forty circuit a couple of years before, but he thought he was too big for that. The exact quote from Douglass, as Ted recalled, was, “I’m too rich and too old for this shit.” He had already tried broadcasting for a while, working for TNT at Wimbledon, but had been too lazy off the air to be any good at it, much too mean on the air. There had also been the unfortunate incident his last year on the air, Douglass thinking his mike was dead when he said over a close-up of Princess Anne that she should be pulling the royal carriage instead of sitting in it.

He had produced a couple of movies with some Hollywood friends, gotten divorced again, even written an autobiography, called “What a F——ing Racket,” which had spent a couple of months on
The New York Times
best-seller list. Now he had decided he wanted to play tennis again, mostly, Ted had heard from old friends in tennis, because the prick was bored. The people running the over-forty circuit didn’t care why he wanted to play, they just wanted him to play, they needed a drawing card, and Tony Douglass had always been that, no matter what.

So now here he was making his debut at Westchester, all the stories leading up to the event talking about how the bad boy of tennis had finally grown up.

Lawrence Semple, Jr., Ted’s driver, had said on the way up from the city that there was as much chance of Tony Douglass changing as the goddamn ocean. But Ted wanted to see for himself, see if the stories were just the normal hype and bullshit that had surrounded Douglass during the prime of his career, when he always seemed to be coming back from something, another injury, or one of his famous sabbaticals, which Ted had assumed was another code for rehab, covering a drinking problem that had always been the worst-kept secret in tennis.

Douglass would always talk about a new attitude, a new outlook on his tennis life. Once he said yoga had turned him around. Another time it was Jesus. The year he lost the Lockhart match at the Open, his last year on the regular circuit, he was extolling the virtues of a radical new macrobiotic diet.

The day before the Westchester tournament Douglass had told the woman tennis writer from the
Times
, “I just finally decided that hitting a tennis ball was the only thing I’d ever really loved.”

Ted read that one and thought: Where is Jesus when
I
really need Him?

Ted Carlyle: the Laver man. The Rosewall man who’d spent all those hours trying to perfect the same kind of backhand little Muscles had. Ted Carlyle: who’d been a boy in the fifties when tennis was in its last Golden Age, because of the Aussies, and the great Gonzales. Who’d heard the stories about the barnstorming matches between Gonzales and Hoad. Who’d
read Gordon Forbes’s book,
A Handful of Summers
, a marvelous account of those years from the old South African player, of that golden time in tennis, more than twenty times, because it was a way of going back, of remembering when the players acted the way they were supposed to, when his world would come alive for those two weeks at West Side Tennis Club, on those glorious grass courts, when the Open would come back to town.

Before pricks like Tony Douglass, every one of them, ruined everything….

It happened in the very first set at Westchester.

Douglass was playing Arazi Siddarides, the Greek guy who’d beaten him in the French Open finals when Douglass was seventeen. Ted Carlyle had a front-row seat for that one, too, the way he’d had such a great seat that day for Douglass versus Lockhart. Ted used to love the trip to Stade Roland Garros in May, the elegance and romance and beauty of Paris in the spring, before that was another place Douglass and the rest of them ruined for him.

Now at Westchester, at 4–5 and 30–40 against Douglass on his own serve, he hit what he thought was an ace, a bomb out of his youth, right down the middle.

It was called wide by the woman working the center service line.

“You’re kidding, right, lady?” Douglass said.

Ted Carlyle knew the deal with the senior circuit. There was no code of conduct, no rules, no point penalties or game penalties, mostly because the older guys didn’t need rules to rein them in, they were just happy to be out there, still making a few dollars playing the game, they were lucky if the
matches even made it to Cable America in the middle of the night.

There was another woman, an old friend of Ted’s named Helen Kaiser, sitting in the chair.

“The ball was wide, Mr. Douglass,” Kaiser said.

“Bullshit!” Douglass said, and now he was walking slowly toward the umpire’s chair. “That was a goddamn ace and you know it.”

“It’s her call,” Helen Kaiser said.

“Well, guess what, honey?” Tony Douglass said, his voice loud enough in the small temporary stadium to be heard by everyone. “It’s my
turn
,” he said.

The idiots, maybe two thousand of them, actually cheered.

“Listen…” Helen Kaiser said meekly.

“No, honey,” he said, “
you
listen to
me
.”

Ted Carlyle watched it like an old nightmare.

“Second service,” she said. “Please.”

She’s negotiating with him, Ted thought.

“You were blind when you were young,” Douglass said.

He was right underneath the chair now, pointing at her with his racquet.

Helen Kaiser had been a beauty when she was young, a terrific local doubles player who had actually gotten into the Open a couple of times, then stayed in the game for the simple reason that she loved it, working the lines at the Open in her silly Fila clothes, working her way up through the Eastern Tennis Association until she became president, finally getting the chair for a couple of women’s finals after the Open moved over to the National Tennis Center in the late seventies.

Now Ted, right across the court from her, was afraid she might cry.

Maybe the plan started to form then.

He knew he couldn’t watch another minute of this. He got out of his seat, walked along the front row of the bleachers, made his way to the parking lot, to where Lawrence Semple, Jr., said he’d be waiting.

Lawrence Semple, Jr., had said he’d rather listen to the Mets than watch Tom Douglass and his chicken ass play another match, no matter how much he said he’d changed.

“I’m sorry…” Helen Kaiser was saying over the sound system.

“No,” Tony Douglass said, as though he were talking into the same microphone, “you’re a moron…”

The idiots cheered again, as though this was what they had come to see, this was what they wanted.

This zoo.

The car was right where Lawrence said it would be, parked near the golf driving range, the motor running, as if Lawrence somehow knew Ted was on his way, the back door already open. Ted got in and told him to drive straight to the country house.

There was so much to do.

• • •

T
ed Carlyle had retired five years before after making one last huge score in the market, with the equipment that did the laser eye surgery. The score came after the divorce and, more important, after Rachel remarried; it meant Ted could finally look at something as sheer profit again, after all the years when she got half. Rachel had told him during that time she would remarry
when the sky was a different color on this particular planet, but then she met the guy whose coffee shops were outdoing Starbucks now, and all of a sudden she didn’t need Ted’s money the way she did oxygen.

It was funny, Ted thought, how much he associated Rachel with Tony Douglass, as if there were some sort of weird connection there. Maybe it was because she used to tell him so often that he worried more about some obnoxious tennis player than he did about his own marriage.