When Michael Joyce of Los Angeles serves, when he tosses the ball and his face rises to track it, it looks like he’s smiling, but he’s not really smiling—his face’s circumoral muscles are straining with the rest of his body to reach the ball at the top of the toss’s rise. He wants to hit it fully extended and slightly out in front of him; he wants to be able to hit emphatically down on the ball, to generate enough pace to avoid an ambitious return from his opponent. Right now it’s 1:00 Saturday, 22 July 1995, on the Stadium Court of the Stade Jarry tennis complex in Montreal. It’s the first of the qualifying rounds for the Canadian Open, one of the major stops on the ATP’s “hard-court circuit,”1 which starts right after Wimbledon and climaxes at NYC’s U.S. Open. The tossed ball rises and seems for a second to hang, waiting, cooperating, as balls always seem to do for great players. The opponent, a Canadian college star named Dan Brakus, is a very good tennis player. Michael Joyce, on the other hand, is a world-class tennis player. In 1991 he was the top- ranked junior in the United States and a finalist at Junior Wimbledon,2 is now in his fourth year on the ATP tour, and is as of this day the 79th best tennis player on planet earth.
A tacit rhetorical assumption here is that you have very probably never heard of Michael Joyce of Brentwood/LA. Nor of Florida’s Tommy Ho. Nor of Vince Spadea, nor of Jonathan Stark or Robbie Weiss or Steve Bryan—all American men in their twenties, all ranked in the world’s top 100 at one point in 1995. Nor of Jeff Tarango, 68th in the world, unless you remember his unfortunate psychotic break in full public view during last year’s Wimbledon.3
You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it’s hard.
Stade Jarry’s Stadium Court facility can hold slightly over 10,000 souls. Right now, for Michael Joyce’s qualifying match, there are 93 people in the crowd, 91 of whom appear to be friends and relatives of Dan Brakus. Michael Joyce doesn’t seem to notice whether there’s a crowd or not. He has a way of staring intently at the air in front of his face between points. During points he looks only at the ball.
The acoustics in the near-empty Stadium are amazing—you can hear every breath, every sneaker’s squeak, the authoritative pang of the ball against very tight strings. Professional tennis tournaments, like professional sports teams, have distinctive traditional colors. Wimbledon’s is green; the Volvo International’s is light blue. The Canadian Open’s is—emphatically—red. The tournament’s “title sponsor,” du Maurier cigarettes, 4 has ads and logos all over the place in red and black. The Stadium Court is surrounded by a red tarp festooned with corporate names in black capitals, and the tarp composes the base of a grandstand that is itself decked out in red-and-black bunting, so that from any kind of distance the place looks like either a Kremlin funeral or a really elaborate brothel. The match’s umpire and linesmen and ballboys all wear black shorts and red shirts emblazoned with the name of a Quebec clothing company.5 The big beach umbrella that’s spread and held over each seated player at end-change breaks has a lush red head and a black stem that looks hot to hold.
Stade Jarry’s Stadium Court is adjoined on the north by the Grandstand Court, a slightly smaller venue with seats on only one side and a capacity of 4800. A five-story scoreboard lies just west of the Grandstand, and by late afternoon both courts are rectangularly shadowed. There are also eight nonstadium courts in canvas-fenced enclosures scattered across the grounds. Professional matches are under way on all ten Stade Jarry courts today, but they are not exactly Canadian Open matches, and for the most part they are unwatched.
The Stade Jarry grounds are all spruced up, and vendors’ tents are up, and Security is in place at all designated points. Big TV trailers line the walkway outside the stadium, and burly men keep pulling complicated nests of cable out of ports in the trailers’ sides.
There are very few paying customers on the grounds on Saturday, but there are close to a hundred world-class players: big spidery French guys with gelled hair, American kids with peeling noses and Pac- 10 sweats, lugubrious Germans, bored-looking Italians. There are blank-eyed Swedes and pockmarked Colombians and cyberpunkish Brits. There are malevolent Slavs with scary haircuts. There are Mexican players who spend their spare time playing two-on-two soccer in the gravel outside the Players’ Tent. With few exceptions, all the players have similar builds: big muscular legs, shallow chests, skinny necks, and one normal-sized arm and one monstrously huge and hypertrophied arm. They tend to congregate in the Players’ Tent or outside the Transportation Trailer awaiting rides in promotional BMWs back to the Radisson des Gouverneurs, the tournament’s designated hotel. Many of these players in the “Qualies,” or qualifying rounds, have girlfriends in tow, sloppily beautiful European girls with sandals and patched jeans and leather backpacks, girlfriends who set up cloth lawnchairs and sun themselves next to their players’ practice courts.6 At the Radisson des Gouverneurs the players tend to congregate in the lobby, where there’s a drawsheet for the Qualies up on a cork bulletin board and a multilingual tournament official behind a long desk, and the players stand around in the air-conditioning in wet hair and sandals and employ about 40 languages and wait for results of matches to go up on the board and for their own next matches’ schedules to get posted. Some of the players listen to personal stereos; none seem to read. They all have the unhappy self-enclosed look of people who spend huge amounts of time on planes and waiting around in hotel lobbies, the look of people who have to create an envelope of privacy around them with just their expressions. Most of these players seem either extremely young—new guys trying to break onto the Tour—or conspicuously older, like over 30, with tans that look permanent and faces lined from years in the trenches of tennis’s minor leagues. The Canadian Open, one of the ATP Tour’s “Super 9” tournaments that weigh most heavily in the calculation of world ranking, officially starts on Monday, 24 July. What’s going on for the two days right before it is the Qualies. This is essentially a competition to determine who will occupy the eight slots in the Canadian Open’s main draw designated for “qualifiers.” It is a pre- tournament tournament. A qualifying tourney precedes just about every big-money ATP event, and money and prestige and lucrative careers are often at stake in Qualie rounds, and often they feature the best matches of the whole tournament, and it’s a good bet you haven’t heard of Qualies.
The realities of the men’s professional tennis tour bear about as much resemblance to the lush finals you see on TV as a slaughterhouse does to a well- presented cut of restaurant sirloin. For every Sampras- Agassi final we watch, there’s been a week-long tournament, a pyramidical single-elimination battle among 32, 64, or 128 players, of whom the finalists are the last men standing. You probably know that already. But a player has to be eligible to enter that tournament in the first place. Eligibility is determined by ATP computer ranking. Each tournament has a cutoff, a minimum ranking required to get entered in the main draw. Players below that ranking who want to get in have to compete in a kind of pre-tournament. That’s the easiest way to explain what Qualies are. In actual practice the whole thing’s quite a bit messier, and I’ll try to describe the logistics of the Canadian Open’s Qualies in just enough detail to suggest their complexity without boring you mindless.
The du Maurier Omnium Ltée has a draw of 64. The sixteen entrants with the highest ATP rankings get “seeded,” which means their names are strategically dispersed in the draw so that (barring upsets) they won’t have to meet each other until the latter rounds.7 Of the seeds, the top eight—here Agassi, Sampras, Chang, the Russian Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Croatia’s Goran Ivanisevic, South Africa’s Wayne Ferreira, Germany’s Michael Stich, and Switzerland’s Marc Rosset, respectively—get “byes,” or automatic passes into the tournament’s second round. This means that there is actually room for 56 players in the main draw. The cutoff for the 1995 Canadian Open isn’t 56, however, because not all of the top 56 players in the world are here.8 Here the cutoff is 85. You’d think that this meant anybody with an ATP ranking of 86 or lower would have to play the Qualies, but here too there are exceptions. The du Maurier Omnium Ltée, like most other big tournaments, has five “wild card” entries into the main draw. These are special places given either to high-ranked players who entered after the required six-week deadline but are desirable to have in the tournament because they’re big stars (like Ivanisevic, #6 in the world but a notorious flakeroo who “forgot” to enter till a week ago and got a last-minute wild card) or to players ranked lower than 85 whom the tournament wants because they are judged “uniquely deserving” (read “Canadian”—the other four players who get wild cards here are all Canadian, and two are Québécois). By the way, if you’re interested, the ATP Tour updates and publishes its world rankings weekly, and the rankings constitute a nomological orgy that makes for truly first-rate bathroom reading. As of this writing, Mahesh Bhupathi is 284, Luis Lobo 411. There’s Martin Sinner and Guy Forget. There’s Adolf Musil and Jonathan Venison and Javier Frana and Leander Paes. There’s—no kidding—Cyril Suk. Rodolfo Ramos-Paganini is 337, Alex Lopez-Moron 174. Gilad Bloom is 228 and Zoltan Nagy is 414. Names out of some postmodern Dickens: Udo Riglewski and Louis Gloria and Francisco Roig and Alexander Mronz. The 29th-best player in the world is named Slava Dosedel. There’s Claude N’Goran and Han Shin (276 but falling fast) and Haracio de la Pensa and Marcus Barbosa and Amos Mansdorf and Mariano Hood. Andres Zingman is currently ranked two places above Sander Groen. Horst Skoff and Kris Goossens and Thomas Hagstedt are all ranked higher than Martin Zumpft. One more reason the tournament industry sort of hates upsets is that the ATP press liaisons have to go around teaching journalists how to spell and pronounce new names. So, skipping a whole lot more complication, the point is that eight slots in the Canadian Open’s main draw are reserved for qualifiers, and the Qualies is the tournament held to determine who’ll get those eight slots. The Qualies itself has a draw of 64 world-class players—the cutoff for qualifying for the Qualies is an ATP ranking of 350.9 The Qualies won’t go all the way through to the finals, only to the quarters: the eight quarterfinalists of the Qualies will receive first-round slots in the Canadian Open.10 This means that a player in the Qualies will need to win three rounds —round of 64, round of 32, round of 16—in two days to get into the first round of the main draw.11
The eight seeds in the Qualies are the eight players whom the Canadian Open officials expect will make the quarters and thus get into the main draw. The top seed this weekend is Richard Krajicek,12 a 6’5” Dutchman who wears a tiny white billed hat in the sun and rushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid crane. Both his knees are bandaged. He’s in the top twenty and hasn’t had to play Qualies for years, but for this tournament he missed the entry deadline, found all the wild cards already given to uniquely deserving Canadians, and with phlegmatic Low Country cheer decided to go ahead and play the weekend Qualies for the match practice. The Qualies’ second seed is Jamie Morgan, an Australian journeyman, around 100th in the world, whom Michael Joyce beat in straight sets last week in the second round of the main draw at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic in Washington. Michael Joyce is seeded third.
If you’re wondering why Joyce, who’s ranked above the #85 cutoff, is having to play the Canadian Open Qualies at all, gird yourself for one more bit of complication. The fact is that six weeks ago Joyce’s ranking was not above the cutoff, and that’s when the Canadian entry deadline was, and that’s the ranking the tournament committee went on when they made up the main draw. Joyce’s ranking jumped from 119 to around 80 after this year’s Wimbledon, where he beat Marc Rosset (ranked 11 in the world) and reached the round of sixteen. Despite a bout of mononucleosis that kept him in bed through part of the spring, Joyce is having his best year ever as a pro and has jumped from 140 in the world to 79.13 But he was not in the world’s top 85 as of early June, and so he has to qualify in Montreal. It seems to me that Joyce, like Krajicek, might be excused for brooding darkly on the fact that four wild cards in the Canadian’s main draw have been dispensed to Canadians ranked substantially lower than 85, but Joyce is stoic about it. 14
The Qualie circuit is to professional tennis sort of what AAA baseball is to the major leagues: somebody playing the Qualies in Montreal is undeniably a world- class tennis player, but he’s not quite at the level where the serious TV and money are. In the main draw of the du Maurier Omnium Ltée, a first-round loser will earn $5,400 and a second-round loser $10,300. In the Montreal Qualies, a player will receive $560 for losing in the second round and an even $0.00 for losing in the first. This might not be so bad if a lot of the entrants for the Qualies hadn’t flown thousands of miles to get here. Plus there’s the matter of supporting themselves in Montreal. The tournament pays the hotel and meal expenses of players in the main draw but not in the Qualies.15 The eight survivors of the Qualies, however, will get their weekend expenses retroactively picked up by the tournament. So there’s rather a lot at stake: some of the players in the Qualies are literally playing for their supper, or for the money to make airfare home or to the site of the next Qualie.
You could think of Michael Joyce’s career as now kind of on the cusp between the major leagues and AAA ball. He still has to qualify for some tournaments, but more and more often he gets straight into the main draw. The move up from qualifier to main-draw player is a huge boost, both financially and psychically, but it’s still a couple plateaux away from true fame and fortune. The main draw’s 64 or 128 players are still mostly the supporting cast for the stars we see in televised finals. But they are also the pool from which superstars are drawn. McEnroe, Sampras, and even Agassi had to play Qualies at the start of their careers, and Sampras spent a couple years losing in the early rounds of main draws before he suddenly erupted in the early ’90s and started beating everybody.
Still, most main-draw players are obscure and unknown. An example is Jacob Hlasek,16 a Czech who is working out with Switzerland’s Marc Rosset on one of the practice courts this morning when I first arrive at Stade Jarry.17 I notice them and come over to watch only because Hlasek and Rosset are so beautiful to see; at this point I have no idea who they are. They are practicing groundstrokes down the line —Rosset’s forehand and Hlasek’s backhand—each ball plumb-line straight and within centimeters of the corner, the players moving with the compact nonchalance I’ve since come to recognize in pros when they’re working out: the suggestion is one of a very powerful engine in low gear. Jacob Hlasek is 6′ 2′′ and built like a halfback, his blond hair in a short square East European cut, with icy eyes and cheekbones out to here: he looks like either a Nazi male model or a lifeguard in hell and seems in general just way too scary ever to try to talk to. His backhand’s a one-hander, rather like Lendl’s, and watching him practice it is like watching a great artist casually sketch something. I keep having to remember to blink. There are a million little ways you can tell that somebody’s a great player—details in his posture, in the way he bounces the ball with his racquet-head to pick it up, in the casual way he twirls the racquet while waiting for the ball. Hlasek wears a plain gray T-shirt and some kind of very white European shoes. It’s midmorning and already at least 90° and he isn’t sweating. Hlasek turned pro in 1982, six years later had one year in the top ten, and for the last decade has been ranked in the 60s and 70s, getting straight into the main draw of all the big tournaments and usually losing in the first couple rounds. Watching Hlasek practice is probably the first time it really strikes me how good these professionals are, because even just fucking around, Hlasek is the most impressive tennis player I’ve ever seen.18 I’d be surprised if anybody reading this has ever heard of Jacob Hlasek. By the distorted standards of TV’s obsession with Grand Slam finals and the world’s top five, Hlasek is merely an also-ran. But last year he made $300,000 on the tour (that’s just in prize money, not counting exhibitions and endorsement contracts), and his career winnings are over $4,000,000 U.S., and it turns out his home base for a long time was Monte Carlo, where lots of European players with tax issues end up living. Michael Joyce is listed in the ATP Player Guide as 5′ 11′′ and 165 pounds, but in person he’s more like 5′9′′. On the Stadium Court he looks compact and stocky. The quickest way to describe him would be to say that he looks like a young and slightly buff David Caruso. He is fair-skinned and has reddish hair and the kind of patchy, vaguely pubic goatee of somebody who isn’t quite able yet to grow real facial hair. When he plays in the heat he wears a hat.19 He wears Fila clothes and uses Yonex racquets and is paid to do so. His face is childishly full, and while it isn’t freckled it somehow seems like it ought to be freckled. A lot of professional tennis players look like lifeguards—that kind of extreme tan that looks like it’s penetrated to the subdermal layer and will be retained to the grave—but Joyce’s fair skin doesn’t tan or even burn, though he does get red in the face when he plays, from effort.20 His on-court expression is grim without being unpleasant; it communicates the sense that Joyce’s attentions on-court have become very narrow and focused and intense—it’s the same pleasantly grim expression you see on, say, working surgeons and jewelers. On the Stadium Court, Joyce seems boyish and extremely adult at the same time. And in contrast to the Canadian opponent, who has the varnished good looks and Pepsodent smile of the stereotypical tennis player, Joyce looks terribly real out there playing: he sweats through his shirt,21 gets flushed, whoops for breath after a long point. He wears little elastic braces on both ankles, but it turns out they’re mostly prophylactic.
It’s 1:30 P.M. Joyce has broken Brakus’s serve once and is up 3–1 in the first set and is receiving. Brakus is in the multibrand clothes of somebody without an endorsement contract. He’s well over six feet tall, and like many large male collegians his game is built around his serve.22 At 0–15, his first serve is flat and 118 mph and way out to Joyce’s backhand, which is a two-hander and hard to lunge effectively with, but Joyce lunges plenty effectively and sends the ball back down the line to the Canadian’s forehand, deep in the court and with such flat pace that Brakus has to stutter-step a little and backpedal to get set up —clearly he’s used to playing guys for whom 118 mumps out wide would be an outright ace or at least produce such a weak return that he could move up easily and put the ball away—and Brakus now sends the ball back up the line high over the net, loopy with topspin, not all that bad a shot considering the fierceness of the return, and a topspin shot that’d back most tennis players up and put them on the defensive, and but Michael Joyce, whose level of tennis is such that he moves in on balls hit with topspin and hits them on the rise,23 moves in and takes the ball on the rise and hits a backhand cross so tightly angled that nobody alive could get to it. This is kind of a typical Joyce-Brakus point. The match is carnage of a particular high-level sort: it’s like watching an extremely large and powerful predator get torn to pieces by an even larger and more powerful predator. Brakus looks pissed off after Joyce’s winner, makes some berating- himself-type noises, but the anger seems kind of pro forma: it’s not like there’s anything Brakus could have done much better, not given what he and the 79th-best player in the world have in their respective arsenals.
Michael Joyce—whose realness and approachability and candor are a big reason why he’s whom I end up spending the most time watching and talking to—will later say, in response to my dry observation that a rather disproportionate number of unranked Canadians seem to have gotten wild cards into the Montreal Qualies, that Brakus “had a big serve, but the guy didn’t belong on a pro court.” Joyce didn’t mean this in an unkind way. Nor did he mean it in a kind way. It turns out that what Michael Joyce says rarely has any kind of spin or slant on it; he mostly just reports what he sees, rather like a camera. You couldn’t even call him sincere, because it’s not like it seems ever to occur to him to try to be sincere or nonsincere. For a while I thought that Joyce’s rather bland candor was a function of his not being very bright. This judgment was partly informed by the fact that Joyce didn’t go to college and was only marginally involved in his high school academics (stuff I know because he told me it right away).24 What I discovered as the tournament wore on was that I can be kind of a snob and an asshole, and that Michael Joyce’s affectless openness is a sign not of stupidity but of something else. Advances in racquet technology and conditioning methods over the last decade have dramatically altered men’s professional tennis. For much of the twentieth century, there were two basic styles of top- level play. The “offensive”25 style is based on the serve and the net game and is ideally suited to slick (or “fast”) surfaces like grass and cement. The “defensive” or “baseline” style is built around foot-speed, consistency, and groundstrokes accurate enough to hit effective passing shots against a serve-and-volleyer; this style is most effective on “slow” surfaces like clay and Har-Tru composite. John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg are probably the modern era’s greatest exponents of the offensive and defensive styles, respectively.
There is now a third way to play, and it tends to be called the “power-baseline” style. As far as I can determine, Jimmy Connors26 more or less invented the power-baseline game back in the ’70s, and in the ’80s Ivan Lendl raised it to a kind of brutal art. In the ’90s, the majority of young players on the ATP Tour now have a P.B.-type game. This game’s cornerstone is groundstrokes, but groundstrokes hit with incredible pace, such that winners from the baseline are not unusual.27 A power-baseliner’s net game tends to be solid but uninspired—a P.B.er is more apt to hit a winner on the approach shot and not need to volley at all. His serve is competent and reasonably forceful, but the really inspired part of a P.B.er’s game is usually his return of serve.28 He usually has incredible reflexes and can hit winners right off the return. The P.B.er’s game requires both the power and aggression of an offensive style and the speed and calculated patience of a defensive style. It is adjustable both to slick grass and to slow clay, but its most congenial surface is DecoTurf,29 the type of slow abrasive hard-court surface now used at the U.S. Open and at all the broiling North American tournaments leading up to it, including the Canadian Open.
Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg are contemporary examples of the classic offensive style. Serve-and-volleyers are often tall,30 and tall Americans like Pete Sampras and Todd Martin and David Wheaton are also offensive players. Michael Chang is an exponent of the pure defensive style, as are Mats Wilander, Carlos Costa, and a lot of the Tour’s Western Europeans and South Americans, many of whom grew up exclusively on clay and now stick primarily to the overseas clay-court circuits. Americans Jim Courier, Jimmy Arias, and Aaron Krickstein all play a power-baseline game. So does just about every young new male player on the Tour. But the style’s most famous and effective post-Lendl avatar is Andre Agassi, who on 1995’s summer circuit is simply kicking everyone’s ass.31
Michael Joyce’s style is power-baseline in the Agassi mold: Joyce is short and right-handed and has a two-handed backhand, a serve that’s just good enough to set up the baseline attack, and a great return of serve that’s the linchpin of his game. Like Agassi, Joyce takes the ball early, on the rise, so it always looks like he’s moving forward in the court even though he rarely comes to net. Joyce’s first serve usually comes in around 95 mph,32 and his second serve is in the low 80s, but it has so much spin on it that the ball turns weird shapes in the air and bounces high and wide to the first-round Canadian’s backhand. Brakus stretches for the ball and floats a slice return, the sort of weak return that a serve-and-volleyer’d be rushing up to the net to put away on the fly. Joyce does move up, but only to midcourt, right around his own service line, where he lets the floater land and bounce up all ripe, and he winds up his forehand and hits a winner crosscourt into the deuce corner, very flat and hard, so that the ball makes an emphatic sound as it hits the scarlet tarp behind Brakus’s end of the court. Ballboys move for the ball and reconfigure complexly as Joyce walks back to serve another point. The applause of the tiny crowd is so small and sad and shabby-sounding that it’d almost be better if people didn’t clap at all.
As with Lendl and Agassi and Courier and many P.B.ers, Joyce’s strongest shot is his forehand, a weapon of near-Wagnerian aggression and power. Joyce’s forehand is particularly lovely to watch. It’s more spare and textbook than Lendl’s whip-crack forehand or Borg’s great swooping loop; by way of decoration there’s only a small loop of flourish33 on the backswing. The stroke itself is completely horizontal, so Joyce can hit through the ball while it’s still well out in front of him. As with all great players, Joyce’s side is so emphatically to the net as the ball approaches that his posture is a classic contrapposto.
As Joyce on the forehand makes contact with the tennis ball, his left hand behind him opens up, as if he were releasing something, a decorative gesture that has nothing to do with the mechanics of the stroke. Michael Joyce doesn’t know that his left hand opens up at impact on forehands: it is unconscious, some aesthetic tic that started when he was a child and is now inextricably hardwired into a stroke that is itself unconscious for Joyce, now, at 22, after years of hitting more forehands over and over than anyone could ever count.34
Agassi, who is 25 (and of whom you have heard and then some), is kind of Michael Joyce’s hero. Just last week, at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic in Washington D.C., in wet-mitten heat that had players vomiting on-court and defaulting all over the place, Agassi beat Joyce in the third round of the main draw, 6–2 6–2. Every once in a while now during this Qualie match Joyce will look over at his coach next to me in the player-guest section of the Grandstand and grin and say something like “Agassi’d have killed me on that shot.” Joyce’s coach will adjust the set of his sunglasses and say nothing—coaches are forbidden to say anything to their players during a match. Joyce’s coach, Sam Aparicio,35 a protégé of Pancho Gonzalez, is based in Las Vegas, which is also Agassi’s home town, and Joyce has several times been flown to Las Vegas at Agassi’s request to practice with him, and is apparently regarded by Agassi as a friend and peer—these are facts Michael Joyce will mention with as much pride as he evinces in speaking of victories and world ranking.
There are big differences between Agassi’s and Joyce’s games, though. Though Joyce and Agassi both use the Western forehand grip and two-handed backhand that are distinctive of topspinners, Joyce’s ground-strokes are very “flat”—i.e. spinless, passing low over the net, driven rather than brushed—because the actual motion of his strokes is so levelly horizontal. Joyce’s balls actually look more like Jimmy Connors’s balls than like Agassi’s.36 Some of Joyce’s groundstrokes look like knuckleballs going over the net, and you can actually see the ball’s seams just hanging there, not spinning. Joyce also has a hitch in his backhand that makes it look stiff and slightly awkward, though his pace and placement are lethal off that side; Agassi’s own backhand is flowing and hitchless.37 And while Joyce is far from slow, he lacks Agassi’s otherworldly foot-speed. Agassi is every bit as fast as Michael Chang, and watch A.A. on TV sometime as he’s walking between points: he takes these tiny, violently pigeon-toed steps, the stride of a man whose feet weigh basically nothing.
Michael Joyce also—in his own coach’s opinion —doesn’t “see” the ball in the same magical way that Andre Agassi does, and so Joyce can’t take the ball as early or generate quite the same amount of pace off his groundstrokes. This business of “seeing” is important enough to explain. Except for the serve, power in tennis is a matter not of strength but of timing. This is one reason why so few top tennis players are muscular.38 Any normal adult male can hit a tennis ball with pro pace; the trick is being able to hit the ball both hard and accurately. If you can get your body in just the right position and time your stroke so you hit the ball in just the right spot—waist-level, just slightly out in front of you, with your weight moving from your back leg to your front leg as you make contact—you can both cream the ball and direct it. And since “... just the right...” is a matter of millimeters and microseconds, a certain kind of vision is crucial.39 Agassi’s vision is literally one in a billion, and it allows him to hit his groundstrokes as hard as he can just about every time. Joyce, whose hand-eye coordination is superlative, in the top 1% of all athletes everywhere (he’s been exhaustively tested), still has to take some incremental bit of steam off most of his groundstrokes if he wants to direct them.
I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is,40 and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that strange mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high- level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. Given a net that’s three feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) a fixed position, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is itself determined by still other variables—for example, a shot’s depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball’s height over the net itself determined by the player’s body position, grip on the racquet, degree of backswing, angle of racquet face, and the 3-D coordinates through which the racquet face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings. The tree of variables and determinants branches out, on and on, and then on even farther when the opponent’s own positions and predilections and the ballistic features of the ball he’s sent you to hit are factored in.41 No CPU yet existent could compute the expansion of variables for even a single exchange —smoke would come out of the mainframe. The sort of thinking involved is the sort that can be done only by a living and highly conscious entity, and then only unconsciously, i.e. by combining talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of art.
If you’ve played tennis at least a little, you probably think you have some idea of how hard a game it is to play really well. I submit to you that you really have no idea at all. I know I didn’t. And television doesn’t really allow us to appreciate what real top-level players can do—how hard they’re actually hitting the ball, and with what control and tactical imagination and artistry. I got to watch Michael Joyce practice several times, right up close, like six feet and a chain-link fence away. This is a man who, at full run, can hit a fast-moving tennis ball into a one-foot-square area 78 feet away over a yard- high net, hard. He can do this something over 90% of the time. And this is the world’s 79th-best player, one who has to play the Montreal Qualies. It’s not just the athletic artistry that compels interest in tennis at the professional level. It’s also what this level requires—what it’s taken for the l00th-ranked player in the world to get there, what it takes to stay, what it would take to rise even higher against other men who’ve paid the same price he’s paid.
Bismarck’s epigram about diplomacy and sausage applies also to the way we Americans seem to feel about professional athletes. We revere athletic excellence, competitive success. And it’s more than attention we pay; we vote with our wallets. We’ll spend large sums to watch a truly great athlete; we’ll reward him with celebrity and adulation and will even go so far as to buy products and services he endorses.
But we prefer not to countenance the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so good at one particular thing. Oh, we’ll pay lip service to these sacrifices—we’ll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the privations, the prefight celibacy, etc. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews, or to imagine what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think in the simplistic way great athletes seem to think. Note the way “up-close and personal profiles” of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life—outside interests and activities, charities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one pursuit. An almost ascetic focus.42 A sub-sumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small. Playing two professional singles matches on the same day is unheard of, except in Qualies.43 Michael Joyce’s second qualifying round is at 7:30 Saturday night. He’s playing an Austrian named Julian Knowle, a tall and cadaverous guy with pointy Kafkan ears. Knowle uses two hands off both sides44 and throws his racquet when he’s mad. The match takes place on Stade Jarry’s Grandstand Court, which seems more like a theater than an arena because it has seats and bleachers only on the east side. But the Grandstand’s also more intimate: the box seats start just a few yards from the court surface, and you’re close enough to see a wen on Joyce’s cheek or the abacus of sweat on Herr Knowle’s forehead. It’s not as hot here at night, but it’s humid, and the high-power lights all have those curious rainbow globes of diffraction around them, plus orbiting bugs. The Grandstand can hold maybe 1500 people, and tonight there are exactly four human beings in the audience as Michael Joyce basically beats the everliving shit out of Julian Knowle, who will be at the Montreal airport tonight at 1:30 to board the red-eye for a kind of minor-league clay tournament in Poznan, Poland.
During this afternoon’s match Joyce wore a white Fila shirt with two different-colored sleeves. Onto his sleeve was sewn a patch that says POWERBAR; Joyce is paid $1000 each time he wears this patch in play. Plus, this afternoon, a hat—in the afternoon sun, pretty much all the players in the Qualies wear hats. For tonight’s match Joyce wears a pinstripe Jim Courier-model Fila shirt with one red sleeve and one blue sleeve. The patch is on the blue sleeve. He has a red bandanna around his head, and as he begins to perspire in the humidity his face turns the same color as the bandanna. It is hard not to find this endearing. Julian Knowle has an abstract pastel shirt whose brand is unrecognizable. He has very tall hair, Knowle does, that towers over his head at near-Beavis altitude and doesn’t diminish or lose its gelled integrity as he perspires.45 Knowle’s shirt, too, has sleeves of different colors. This seems to be the fashion constant this year among the qualifiers: sleeve-color asymmetry.
The Joyce-Knowle match takes slightly more than an hour. This is including delays caused when Knowle throws his racquet and has to go retrieve it or when he walks around in aimless circles muttering blackly to himself in some High-German dialect. Knowle’s tantrums seem a little contrived and insincere to me, though, because he rarely loses a point as a result of doing anything particularly wrong. Here’s a typical point in this match: it’s 1–4 and 15–30 in the sixth game. Knowle hits a 110-mph slice serve to Joyce’s forehand; Joyce hits a very flat and penetrating drive crosscourt, so that Knowle has to stretch and hit his forehand on the run, something that’s not particularly easy to do with a two-handed forehand. Knowle gets to the forehand and hits a thoroughly respectable shot, loopy with topspin and landing maybe only a little bit short, a few feet behind the service line, whereupon he reverses direction and starts scrambling back to get in the middle of the baseline to get ready for his next shot. Joyce, as is SOP, has moved in on the slightly short ball and takes the ball on the rise just after it’s bounced, driving a backhand even flatter and harder into the exact same place he hit his last shot, the spot Knowle is scrambling away from. Knowle is now forced to reverse direction and get back to where he was.46 This he does, and he gets his racquet on the ball, but only barely, and sends back a weak little USDA Prime loblet that Joyce, now in the actual vicinity of the net, has little trouble blocking into the open court for a winner. The four people clap, Knowle’s racquet goes spinning into the blood-colored tarp, and Joyce walks expressionlessly back to the deuce court to receive again whenever Knowle gets around to serving. Knowle has slightly more firepower than the first round’s Brakus: his groundstrokes are formidable, probably even lethal if he has sufficient time to get to the ball and get set up. Joyce simply denies him that time. Joyce will later admit that he wasn’t working all that hard in this match, and he doesn’t need to. He hits few spectacular winners, but he also makes very few unforced errors, and his shots are designed to make the somewhat clumsy Knowle move a lot and to deny him the time and the peace ever to set up his game. This strategy is one that Knowle cannot solve or interdict: he hasn’t got the tools for it. This may be one reason why Joyce is unaffronted by having to play the Qualies for Montreal: barring some kind of injury or neurological dysfunction, he’s not going to lose to somebody like Austria’s Julian Knowle—Joyce is simply on a different plateau from the mass of these Qualie players.
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 Joyce47 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 Canada52 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 Cards55 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.
If the mood for more serious consumption strikes, you can walk due east of the Stadium complex to the Promenade du Sportif, a kind of canvas strip mall selling every product even remotely associated with the Canadian Open: Prince, Wilson, Nike, Head, Boost® Vitamin/Energy Drink (free samples available), Swatch, Nature Valley Granola Bars,56 Sony, and DecoTurf Inc.
And at this tournament you can (U.S. readers may want to sit down for this part) actually buy du Maurier- brand cigarettes—by the carton or broad flat Europack —from a special red and black booth right outside the main entrance to the Stadium Court.57 People in Quebec smoke—heavily—and this booth does serious business. No part of Stade Jarry is nonsmoking, and at matches so many spectators are chain-smoking du Maurier cigarettes that at times a slight breeze will carry the crowd’s exhaled cloud of smoke out over the court, transforming the players into nacreous silhouettes for a moment before the cloud ascends. And, in truth, accredited media don’t even have to buy the du Mauriers; Press Box employees will give packs out free to journalists, though they don’t announce this or make a big big deal of it.
It’s the little things like public smoking that remind you that Canada’s not home. Or e.g. Francophone ads, and these ads’ lack of even a pretense of coy subtlety—someplace between the Radisson des Gouverneurs and Stade Jarry is a huge billboard for some kind of Quebecois ice cream. It’s a huge photo of an ice cream cone poised at a phallic 45°, jutting, the dome of ice cream unabashedly glansular, and underneath is the pitch: “Donnez-moi ta bouche.”58 The brand’s own trademark slogan, at the bottom, is that it’s “La glace du lait plus lechée.” One of the nice things Michael Joyce and his coach do is usually let me ride with them in their courtesy car59 between the hotel and Jarry, to sort of lurk and soak up atmosphere, etc. We pass this billboard several times a day. Finally one time I point up at the glistening phallic ad and ask Joyce whether the ad strikes him as a little heavy, overt, uncoy. Joyce looks up at the billboard—maybe for the first time, because in the car he’s usually staring commuterishly straight ahead, either gathering himself into a prematch focus or exiting gradually from same —and turns to me and says in all earnestness that he’s tried this particular brand of Canadian ice cream and it’s not all that good. Plus, of course, once the main draw starts, you get to look up close and live at name tennis players you’re used to seeing only as arrays of pixels. One of the highlights of Tuesday’s second round of the main draw is getting to watch Agassi play MaliVai Washington. Washington, the most successful black American on the Tour since Ashe, is unseeded at the Canadian Open but has been ranked as high as #11 in the world, and is dangerous, and since I loathe Agassi with a passion it’s an exciting match. Agassi looks scrawny and faggy and, with his shaved skull and beretish hat and black shoes and socks and patchy goatee, like somebody just released from reform school (a look you can tell he’s carefully decided on with the help of various paid image-consultants, and now cultivates). Washington, who’s in dark-green shorts and a red shirt with dark-green sleeves, was a couple of years ago voted by People one of the 50 Prettiest Human Beings or something, and on TV is indeed real pretty but in person is awesome. From twenty yards away he looks less like a human being than like a Michelangelo anatomy sketch: his upper body the V of serious weight lifting, his leg-muscles standing out even in repose, his biceps little cannonballs of fierce-looking veins. He’s beautiful but doomed, because the slowness of the Stadium Court makes it impractical for anybody except a world-class net man to rush the net against Agassi, and Washington is not a net man but a power-baseliner. He stays back and trades groundstrokes with Agassi, and even though the first set goes to a tiebreaker you can tell it’s a mismatch. Agassi has less mass and flat-out speed than Washington, but he has vision and timing that give his groundstrokes way more pace. He can stay back and hit nuclear groundstrokes and force Washington until Washington eventually makes a fatal error. There are two ways to make a fatal error against Agassi: the first is the standard way, hitting it out or into the net or something; the second is to hit anything shorter than a couple feet inside the baseline, because anything that Agassi can move up on he can hit for a winner. Agassi’s facial expression is the slightly smug self- aware one of somebody who’s used to being looked at and automatically assumes the minute he shows up anywhere that everybody’s looking at him. He’s incredible to see play in person, but his domination of Washington doesn’t make me like him any better; it’s more like it chills me, as if I’m watching the devil play.
Television tends to level everybody out and make them seem kind of blandly handsome, but at Montreal it turns out that a lot of the pros and stars are interesting- or even downright funny-looking. Jim Courier, former #1 but now waning and seeded tenth here,60 looks like Howdy Doody in a hat on TV, but here he turns out to be a very big boy—the “Guide Média” lists him at 175 pounds but he’s way more than that, with large smooth muscles and the gait and expression of a Mafia enforcer. Michael Chang, 23 and #5 in the world, sort of looks like two different people stitched crudely together: a normal upper body perched atop hugely muscular and totally hairless legs. He has a mushroom-shaped head, ink-black hair, and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as I’ve ever seen outside a Graduate Writing Program.61 P. Sampras, in person, is mostly teeth and eyebrows, and he’s got unbelievably hairy legs and forearms, hair in the sort of abundance that allows me confidently to bet that he has hair on his back and is thus at least not 100% blessed and graced by the universe. Goran Ivanisevic is large and tan and surprisingly good-looking—at least for a Croat; I always imagine Croats looking ravaged and katexic and like somebody out of a Munch lithograph—except for an incongruous and wholly absurd bowl haircut that makes him look like somebody in a Beatles tribute band. It is Ivanisevic who will beat Joyce in three sets in the main draw’s second round. Czech former top-ten Petr Korda is another clastic-looking mismatch: at 6′3′′ and 160, he has the body of an upright greyhound and the face of—eerily, uncannily —a fresh-hatched chicken (plus soulless eyes that reflect no light and seem to “see” only in the way that fish’s and birds’ eyes “see”).
And Wilander is here—Mats Wilander, Borg’s heir, top-ten at age eighteen, #1 at 24, now 30 and unranked and trying a comeback after years off the Tour, here cast in the role of the wily old mariner, winning on smarts. Tuesday’s best big-name match is between Wilander and Stefan Edberg,62 28 and Wilander’s own heir63 and now married to Annette Olson, Wilander’s S.O. during his own glory days, which adds a delicious personal cast to the match, which Wilander wins 6–4 in the third. Wilander ends up getting all the way to the semifinals before Agassi beats him as badly as I have ever seen one professional beat another professional, the score being 6–0 6–2 and the match not nearly as close as the score would indicate.
Even more illuminating than watching pro tennis live is watching it with Sam Aparicio, Joyce’s coach, who knows as much about tennis as anybody I’ve talked to and isn’t obnoxious about it. Sam watches a lot of pro matches, scouting stuff for Michael. Watching tennis with him is like watching a movie with somebody who knows a lot about the technical aspects of film: he helps you see things you can’t see alone. It turns out, for example, that there are whole geometric sublevels of strategy in a power-baseline game, all dictated by various P.B.ers’ strengths and weaknesses. A P.B.er depends on being able to hit winners from the baseline. But, as Sam teaches me to see, Michael Chang can usually hit winners only at an acute angle, from either corner. An “inside-out” player like Jim Courier, on the other hand, can hit winners only at obtuse angles, from the center out. Hence canny and well-coached players tend to play Chang “down the middle” and Courier “out wide.” One of the things that makes Agassi so good is that he’s capable of hitting winners from anywhere on the court—he has no geometric restriction. Joyce, too, according to Sam, can hit a winner at any angle. He just doesn’t do it quite as well as Agassi, or as often.
Michael Joyce in close-up person, like eating supper or riding in a courtesy car, looks slighter and younger than he does on-court. From close up he looks his age, which to me is basically a fetus. He’s about 5′9′′ and 160; he’s muscular but quietly so, without much definition. He likes to wear old T-shirts and a backwards cap. His hairline is receding in a subtle young-man way that makes his forehead look a little high. I forget whether he wore an earring. Michael Joyce’s interests outside tennis consist mostly of big- budget movies and genre novels of the commercial paperback sort that one reads on planes. In other words, he really has no interests outside tennis. He has a tight and long-standing group of friends back home in LA, but one senses that most of his personal connections have been made via tennis. He’s dated some. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s a virgin. It seems staggering and impossible, but my sense is he might be. Then again, I tended to idealize and distort him, I know, because of how I felt about what he could do on the court. His most revealing sexual comment is made in the context of explaining the odd type of confidence that keeps him from freezing up in a match in front of large crowds or choking on a point when there’s lots of money at stake.64 Joyce, who usually needs to pause about five beats to think before he answers a question, thinks the confidence is partly a matter of temperament and partly a function of hard work:
“If I’m in like a bar, and there’s a really good- looking girl, I might be kind of nervous. But if there’s like a thousand gorgeous girls in the stands when I’m playing, it’s a different story. I’m not nervous then, when I play, because I know what I’m doing. I know what to do out there.” Maybe it’s good to let these be his last quoted words.
Whether or not he ends up in the top ten and a name anybody will know, Michael Joyce will remain a figure of enduring and paradoxical fascination for me. The restrictions on his life have been, in my opinion, grotesque; and in certain ways Joyce himself is a grotesque. But the radical compression of his attention and self has allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of an art—something few of us get to be. It’s allowed him to visit and test parts of his psyche that most of us do not even know for sure we have, to manifest in concrete form virtues like courage, persistence in the face of pain or exhaustion, performance under wilting scrutiny and pressure.
Michael Joyce is, in other words, a complete man (though in a grotesquely limited way). But he wants more. Not more completeness; he doesn’t think in terms of virtues or transcendence. He wants to be the best, to have his name known, to hold professional trophies over his head as he patiently turns in all four directions for the media. He is an American and he wants to win. He wants this, and he will pay to have it —will pay just to pursue it, let it define him—and will pay with the regretless cheer of a man for whom issues of choice became irrelevant long ago. Already, for Joyce, at 22, it’s too late for anything else: he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and un-. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.
1995
1 Comprising Washington, Montreal, LA, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, New Haven, and Long Island, this is possibly the most grueling part of the Association of Tennis Professionals’ yearly tour, with three-digit temperatures and the cement courts shimmering like Moroccan horizons and everyone wearing a hat and even the spectators carrying sweat towels.
2 Joyce lost that final to Thomas Enqvist, now ranked in the ATP’s top twenty and a potential superstar and in high-profile attendance here at Montreal.
3 Tarango, 27, who completed three years at Stanford, is regarded as something of a scholar by Joyce and the other young Americans on tour. His little bio in the 1995 ATP Player Guide lists his interests as including “philosophy, creative writing, and bridge,” and his slight build and receding hairline do in fact make him look more like an academic or a tax attorney than a world- class tennis player. Also a native Californian, Tarango’s a friend and something of a mentor to Michael Joyce, whom he practices with regularly and addresses as “Grasshopper.” Joyce—who seems to like pretty much everybody—likes Jeff Tarango and won’t comment on his on-court explosion at Wimbledon except to say that Tarango is “a very intense guy, very intellectual, that gets kind of paranoid sometimes.”
4 Title sponsors are as important to ATP tournaments as they are to collegiate bowl games. This year the Canadian Open is officially called the “du Maurier Omnium Ltée.” But everybody still refers to it as the Canadian Open. There are all types and levels of sponsors for big tennis tournaments—the levels of giving and of commensurate reward are somewhat similar to PBS fundraising telethons. Names of sponsors are all over the Canadian Open’s site (with variations in size and placement corresponding to levels of fiscal importance to the tournament), from the big FedEx signs over the practice courts to the RADO trademark on the serve-speed radar display on the show courts. On the scarlet tarp and the box seats all around the Stadium and Grandstand Courts are the names of other corporate sponsors: TANDEM COMPUTERS/APG INC., BELL SYGMA, BANQUE LAURENTIENNE, IMASCO LIMITÉE, EVANS TECHNOLOGIES INC., MOBILIA, BELL CANADA, ARGO STEEL, etc.
5 Another way to be a sponsor: supply free stuff to the tournament and put your name on it in really big letters. All the courts’ tall umpire-chairs have a sign that says they’re supplied by TROPICANA; all the bins for fresh and unfresh towels say WAMSUTTA; the drink coolers at courtside (the size of trash barrels, with clear plastic lids) say TROPICANA and EVIAN. The players who don’t individually endorse a certain brand of drink tend as a rule to drink Evian, orange juice being a bit heavy for on-court rehydration.
6 Most of the girlfriends have something indefinable about them that suggests extremely wealthy parents whom the girls are trying to piss off by hooking up with an obscure professional tennis player.
7 The term “seeding” comes from British horticulture and is pretty straightforward. A player seeded First is expected statistically to win, Second to reach the finals, Third and Fourth the semis, etc. A player who reaches the round his seed designates is said to have “justified his seed,” a term that seems far more rich in implications and entendres. Serious tennis is full of these multisemiotic terms—“love,” “hold” and “break,” “fault,” “let” as a noun, “heat,” “moon,” “spank,” “coming in,” “playing unconscious,” and so on.
8 Except for the four Grand Slams, no tournament draws all the top players, although every tournament would obviously like to, since the more top players are entered, the better the paid attendance and the more media exposure the tournament gets for itself and its sponsors. Players ranked in the world’s top twenty or so, though, tend to play a comparatively light schedule of tournaments, taking time off not only for rest and training but to compete in wildly lucrative exhibitions that don’t affect ATP ranking. (We’re talking wildly lucrative, like millions of dollars per annum for the top stars.) Given the sharp divergence of interests between tournaments and players, it’s not surprising that there are Kafkanly complex rules for how many ATP tournaments a player must enter each year to avoid financial or ranking-related penalties, and commensurately complex and crafty ways players have for getting around these rules and doing pretty much what they want. These will be passed over. The thing to realize is that players of Michael Joyce’s station tend to take way less time off; they try to play just about every tournament they can squeeze in unless they’re forced by injury or exhaustion to sit out a couple weeks. They play so much because they need to, not just financially but because the ATP’s (very complex) set of algorithms for determining ranking tends to reward players for entering as many tournaments as they can. And so even though several of the North American hard-court circuit’s tournaments are Super 9’s, a fair number of top players skip them, especially European clay-court players, who hate Deco Turf and tend to stick to their own summer clay-court circuit, which is European and comprises smaller and less lucrative tournaments (like the Dutch Open, which is concurrent with the Canadian and has four of the world’s top twenty entered this year). The clay-courters tend to pay the price for this at the U.S. Open, which is played on hard sizzling Deco Turf courts.
9 There is here no qualifying tournament for the Qualies itself, though some particularly huge tournaments have meta-Qualies. The Qualies also have tons of wild-card berths, most of whom here are given to Canadian players, e.g. the collegian that Michael Joyce is beating up on right now in the first round.
10 These slots are usually placed right near the top seeds, which is the reason why in the televised first rounds of major tournaments you often see Agassi or Sampras smearing some totally obscure guy—that guy’s usually a qualifier. It’s also part of why it’s so hard for somebody low-ranked enough to have to play the Qualies of tournaments to move up in the rankings enough so that he doesn’t have to play Qualies anymore—he usually meets a high-ranked player in the very first round and gets smeared.
11 Which is another reason why qualifiers usually get smeared by the top players they face in the early rounds—the qualifier is playing his fourth or fifth match in three days, while the top players usually have had a couple days with their masseur and creative- visualization consultant to get ready for the first round. If asked, Michael Joyce will detail all these asymmetries and stacked odds the same way a farmer will speak of poor weather, with an absence of emotion that seems deep instead of blank.
12 (pronounced KRY-chek)
13 At a certain point this summer his ranking will be as high as 62.
14 It turns out that a portion of the talent required to survive in the trenches of the ATP Tour is emotional: Joyce is able to keep from getting upset about stuff that struck me as hard not to get upset about. When he points out that there’s “no point” getting exercised about unfairnesses you can’t control, I think what he’s really saying is that you either learn how not to get upset about it or you disappear from the Tour. The temperamental behavior of many of the game’s top players—which gives the public the distorted idea that most pro players are oversensitive brats—is on a qualifier’s view easily explainable: top players are temperamental because they can afford to be.
15 The really top players not only have their expenses comped but often get paid outright for agreeing to enter a tournament. These fees are called “guarantees” and are technically advances against prize money: in effect, an Agassi/Sampras/Becker will receive a “guarantee” of the champion’s prize money (usually a couple hundred thousand) just for competing, whether he wins the tournament or not. This means that if top seed Agassi wins the Canadian Open, he wins $254,000 U.S., but if he loses, he gets the money anyway. (This is another reason why tournaments tend to hate upsets, and, some qualifiers complain, why all sorts of intangibles from match scheduling to close line-calls tend to go the stars’ way.) Not all tournaments have guarantees —the Grand Slams don’t, because the top players will show up for Wimbledon and the French, Australian, and U.S. Opens on their own incentive—but most have them, and the less established and prestigious a tournament, the more it needs to guarantee money to get the top players to come and attract spectators and media (which is what the tournament’s title sponsor wants, very much). Guarantees used to be against ATP rules and were under the table; they’ve been legal since the early ’90s. There’s great debate among tennis pundits about whether legal guarantees have helped the game by making the finances less shady or have hurt the game by widening the psychological gap between the stars and all the other players and by upping the pressure on tournaments to make it as likely as possible that the stars don’t get upset by an unknown. It is impossible to get Michael Joyce to give a straight answer on whether he thinks guarantees are good or bad—it’s not like Joyce is muddled or Nixonianly evasive about it, but rather that he can’t afford to think in good/bad terms, to nurture resentment or bitterness or frustration. My guess is that he avoids these feelings because they make it even harder to play against Agassi and the rest, and he cares less about what’s “right” in the grand scheme than he does about maximizing his own psychological chances against other players. This seems totally understandable, though I’m kind of awed by Joyce’s evident ability to shut down lines of thinking that aren’t to his advantage.
16 ( pronounced YAkob hLAsick)
17 It took forever to get there from the hotel because I didn’t yet know that press can, with some wangling, get rides in the courtesy cars with the players, if there’s room. Tennis journalism is apparently its own special world, and it takes a little while to learn the ins and outs of how media can finagle access to some of the services the tournament provides: courtesy cars, VIP treatment in terms of restaurant reservations, even free laundry service at the hotel. Most of this stuff I learned about just as I was getting ready to come home.
18 Joyce is even more impressive, but I hadn’t seen Joyce yet. And Enqvist is even more impressive than Joyce, and Agassi live is even more impressive than Enqvist. After the week was over, I truly understand why Charlton Heston looks gray and ravaged on his descent from Sinai: past a certain point, impressiveness is corrosive to the psyche.
19 During his two daily one-hour practice sessions he wears the hat backwards, and also wears boxy plaid shorts that look for all the world like swimtrunks. His favorite practice T-shirt has FEAR: THE ENEMY OF DREAMS on the chest. He laughs a lot when he practices. You can tell just by looking at him out there that he’s totally likable and cool.
20 If you’ve played only casually, it is probably hard to understand how physically demanding really serious tennis is. Realizing that these pros can move one another from one end of the 27′ baseline to the other pretty much at will, and that they hardly ever end a point early by making an unforced error, might stimulate your imagination. A close best-of-three-set match is probably equivalent in its demands to a couple hours of basketball, but we’re talking full-court basketball.
21 Something else you don’t get a good sense of on television: tennis is a very sweaty game. On ESPN or whatever, when you see a player walk over to the ballboy after a point and request a towel and quickly wipe off his arm and hand and toss the wet towel back to the (rather luckless) ballboy, most of the time the towel thing isn’t a stall or a meditative pause—it’s because sweat is running down the inside of the player’s arm in such volume that it’s getting all over his hand and making the racquet slippery. Especially on the sizzling North American summer junket, players sweat through their shirts early on, and sometimes also their shorts. (Sampras always wears light-blue shorts that sweat through everyplace but his jockstrap, which looks funny and kind of endearing, like he’s an incontinent child—Sampras is surprisingly childlike and cute on the court, in person, in contrast to Agassi, who’s about as cute as a Port Authority whore.) And they drink enormous amounts of water, staggering amounts. I thought I was seeing things at first, watching matches, as players seemed to go through one of those skinny half-liter Evian bottles every second side-change, but Michael Joyce confirmed it. Pro-grade tennis players seem to have evolved a metabolic system that allows rapid absorption of water and its transformation into sweat. I myself—who am not pro-grade, but do sweat like a pig —drink a lot of water a couple hours before I play but don’t drink anything during a match. This is because a couple swallows of water usually just makes me want more, and if I drink as much as I want I end up with a protruding tummy and a sloshing sound when I run. (Most players I spoke with confirm, by the way, that Gatorade and All-Sport and Boost and all those pricey electrolytic sports drinks are mostly bullshit, that salt and carbs at table and small lakes of daily H2O are the way to go. The players who didn’t confirm this turned out to be players who had endorsement deals with some pricey-sports-drink manufacturer, but I personally saw at least one such player dumping out his bottle’s pricey electrolytic contents and replacing them with good old water, for his match.)
22 The taller you are, the harder you can serve (get a protractor and figure it out), but the less able to bend and reverse direction you are. Tall guys tend to be serve-and-volleyers, and they live and die by their serves. Bill Tilden, Stan Smith, Arthur Ashe, Roscoe Tanner, and Goran Ivanisevic were/are all tall guys with serve-dependent games.
23 This is mind-bogglingly hard to do when the ball’s hit hard. If we can assume you’ve played Little League or sandlot ball or something, imagine the hardest-hit grounder of all time coming at you at shortstop, and then you not standing waiting to try to knock it down but actually of your own free will running forward toward the grounder, then trying not just to catch it in a big soft glove but to strike it hard and reverse its direction and send it someplace frightfully specific and far away.
24 Something else that’s hotly debated by tennis authorities is the trend of players going pro at younger and younger ages and skipping college and college tennis and plunging into the stress and peripatetic loneliness of the Tour, etc. Michael Joyce skipped college and went directly onto the pro tour because at 18 he’d just won the U.S. National Juniors, and this created a set of overwhelming inducements to turn pro. The winner at the National 18-and-Under Singles automatically gets a wild card into the U.S. Opens main draw for that year. In addition, a year’s top junior comes to the powerful but notoriously fickle and temporary attention of major clothing and racquet companies. Joyce’s victory over the 128-man National field at Kalamazoo MI in 1991 resulted in endorsement offers from Fila and Yonex worth around $100,000. $100,000 is about what it takes to finance three years on the Tour for a very young player who can’t reasonably expect to earn a whole lot of prize-money.
Joyce could have turned down that offer of a three- year subsidy and gone to college, but if he’d gone to college it would have been primarily to play tennis. Coaches at major universities apparently offered Joyce inducements to come play for them so literally outrageous and incredible that I wouldn’t repeat them here even if Joyce hadn’t asked me not to.
The reason why Michael Joyce would have gone to college primarily to play tennis is that the academic and social aspects of collegiate life interest him about as much as hitting 2500 crosscourt forehands while a coach yells at you in foreign languages would interest you. Tennis is what Michael Joyce loves and lives for and is. He sees little point in telling anybody anything different. It’s the only thing he’s devoted himself to, and he’s given massive amounts of himself to it, and as far as he understands it it’s all he wants to do or be. Because he started playing at age two and competing at age seven, however, and had the first half-dozen years of his career directed rather shall we say forcefully and enthusiastically by his father (who Joyce estimates spent probably around $250,000 on lessons and court-time and equipment and travel during Michael’s junior career), it seemed reasonable to ask Joyce to what extent he “chose” to devote himself to tennis. Can you “choose” something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours?
Joyce’s response to this line of inquiry strikes me as both unsatisfactory and marvelous. Because of course the question is unanswerable, at least it’s unanswerable by a person who’s already—as far as he understands it—“chosen” Joyce’s answer is that it doesn’t really matter much to him whether he originally “chose” serious tennis or not; all he knows is that he loves it. He tries to explain his feelings at the Nationals in 1991: “You get there and look at the draw, it’s a 128 draw, there’s so many guys you have to beat. And then it’s all over and you’ve won, you’re the National Champion—there’s nothing like it. I get chills even talking about it.” Or how it was just the previous week in Washington: “I’m playing Agassi, and it’s great tennis, and there’s like thousands of fans going nuts. I can’t describe the feeling. Where else could I get that?”
What he says aloud is understandable, but it’s not the marvelous part. The marvelous part is the way Joyce’s face looks when he talks about what tennis means to him. He loves it; you can see this in his face when he talks about it: his eyes normally have a kind of Asiatic cast because of the slight epicanthic fold common to ethnic Irishmen, but when he speaks of tennis and his career the eyes get round and the pupils dilate and the look in them is one of love. The love is not the love one feels for a job or a lover or any of the loci of intensity that most of us choose to say we love. It’s the sort of love you see in the eyes of really old people who’ve been happily married for an incredibly long time, or in religious people who are so religious they’ve devoted their lives to religious stuff: it’s the sort of love whose measure is what it has cost, what one’s given up for it. Whether there’s “choice” involved is, at a certain point, of no interest... since it’s the very surrender of choice and self that informs the love in the first place.
25 (aka serve-and-volley; see Note 22)
26 I don’t know whether you know this, but Connors had one of the most eccentric games in the history of tennis —he was an aggressive “power” player who rarely came to net, had the serve of an ectomorphic girl, and hit everything totally spinless and flat (which is inadvisable on groundstrokes because the absence of spin makes the ball so hard to control). His game was all the stranger because the racquet he generated all his firepower from the baseline with was a Wilson T2000, a weird steel thing that’s one of the single shittiest tennis racquets ever made and is regarded by most serious players as useful only for home defense or prying large rocks out of your backyard or something. Connors was addicted to this racquet and kept using it even after Wilson stopped making it, forfeiting millions in potential endorsement money by doing so. Connors was eccentric (and kind of repulsive) in lots of other ways, too, none of which are germane to this article.
27 In the yore days before wide-body ceramic racquets and scientific strength-training, the only two venues for hitting winners used to be the volley—where your decreased distance from the net allowed for greatly increased angle (get that protractor out)—and the defensive passing shot... i.e., in the tactical language of boxing, “punch” v. “counterpunch.” The new power- baseline game allows a player, in effect, to punch his opponent all the way from his stool in the corner; it changes absolutely everything, and the analytic geometry of these changes would look like the worst calculus final you ever had in your life.
28 This is why the phenomenon of “breaking serve” in a set is so much less important when a match involves power-baseliners. It is one reason why so many older players and fans no longer like to watch pro tennis as much: the structural tactics of the game are now wholly different from when they played.
29 © Wichita KS’s Koch Materials Company, “A Leader in Asphalt-Emulsions Technology.”
30 John McEnroe wasn’t all that tall, and he was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived —the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad.
31 One answer to why public interest in mens tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thuggishness about the power-baseline style that’s come to dominate the Tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime—for so small a man and so great a player, he’s amazingly devoid of finesse, with movements that look more like a Heavy Metal musician’s than an athlete’s.
The power-baseline game itself has been compared to Metal or Grunge. But what a top P.B.er really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It’s awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty.
32 (compare Ivanisevic’s at 130 mph or Sampras’s at 125, or even this Brakus kid’s at 118).
33 The loop in a pro’s backswing is kind of the trademark flourish of excellence and consciousness of same, not unlike the five-star chef’s quick kiss of his own fingertips as he presents a pièce or the magician’s hand making a French curl in the air as he directs our attention to his vanished assistant.
34 All serious players have these little extraneous tics, stylistic fingerprints, and the pros even more so because of years of repetition and ingraining. Pros’ tics have always been fun to note and chart, even just e.g. on the serve. Watch the way Sampras’s lead foot rises from the heel on his toss, as if his left foot’s toes got suddenly hot. The odd Tourettic way Gerulaitis used to whip his head from side to side while bouncing the ball before his toss, as if he were having a small seizure. McEnroe’s weird splayed stiff-armed service stance, both feet parallel to the baseline and his side so severely to the net that he looked like a figure on an Egyptian frieze. The odd sudden shrug Lendl gives before releasing his toss. The way Agassi shifts his weight several times from foot to foot as he prepares for the toss like he needs desperately to pee. Or, here at the Canadian Open, the way the young star Thomas Enqvist’s body bends queerly back as he tosses, limboing back away from the toss, as if for a moment the ball smelled very bad—this tic derives from Enqvist’s predecessor Edberg’s own weird spinal arch and twist on the toss. Edberg also has this strange sudden way of switching his hold on the racquet in mid- toss, changing from an Eastern forehand to an extreme backhand grip, as if the racquet were a skillet.
35 Who looks rather like a Hispanic Dustin Hoffman and is an almost unbelievably nice guy, with the sort of inward self-sufficiency of truly great teachers and coaches everywhere, the Zen-like blend of focus and calm developed by people who have to spend enormous amounts of time sitting in one place watching closely while somebody else does something. Sam gets 10% of Joyce’s gross revenues and spends his downtime reading dense tomes on Mayan architecture and is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met either inside the tennis world or outside it (so cool I’m kind of scared of him and haven’t called him once since the assignment ended, if that makes sense). In return for his 10%, Sam travels with Joyce, rooms with him, coaches him, supervises his training, analyzes his matches, and attends him in practice, even to the extent of picking up errant balls so that Joyce doesn’t have to spend any of his tightly organized practice time picking up errant balls. The stress and weird loneliness of pro tennis—where everybody’s in the same community, sees each other every week, but is constantly on the diasporic move, and is each other’s rival, with enormous amounts of money at stake and life essentially a montage of airports and bland hotels and non-home-cooked food and nagging injuries and staggering long-distance bills, and people’s families back home tending to be wackos, since only wackos will make the financial and temporal sacrifices necessary to let their offspring become good enough at something to turn pro at it —all this means that most players lean heavily on their coaches for emotional support and friendship as well as technical counsel. Sam’s role with Joyce looks to me to approximate what in the latter century was called that of “companion,” one of those older ladies who traveled with nubile women when they went abroad, etc.
36 Agassi’s balls look more like Borg’s balls would have looked if Borg had been on a year-long regimen of both steroids and methamphetamines and was hitting every single nicking ball just as hard as he could —Agassi hits his groundstrokes as hard as anybody who’s ever played tennis, so hard you almost can’t believe it if you’re right there by the court.
37 But Agassi does have this exaggerated follow- through where he keeps both hands on the racquet and follows through almost like a hitter in baseball, which causes his shirtfront to lift and his hairy tummy to be exposed to public view—in Montreal I find this repellent, though the females in the stands around me seem ready to live and die for a glimpse of Agassi’s tummy. Agassi’s S.O. Brooke Shields is in Montreal, by the way, and will end up highly visible in the player- guest box for all Agassi’s matches, wearing big sunglasses and what look to be multiple hats. This may be the place to insert that Brooke Shields is rather a lot taller than Agassi, and considerably less hairy, and that seeing them standing together in person is rather like seeing Sigourney Weaver on the arm of Danny DeVito. The effect is especially surreal when Brooke is wearing one of the plain classy sundresses that make her look like a deb summering in the Hamptons and Agassi’s wearing his new Nike on-court ensemble, a blue-black horizontally striped outfit that together with his black sneakers make him look like somebody’s idea of a French Resistance fighter.
38 (Though note that very few of them wear eyeglasses, either.)
39 A whole other kind of vision—the kind attributed to Larry Bird in basketball, sometimes, when he made those incredible surgical passes to people who nobody else could even see were open—is required when you’re hitting: this involves seeing the other side of the court, i.e. where your opponent is and which direction he’s moving in and what possible angles are open to you in consequence of where he’s going. The schizoid thing about tennis is that you have to use both kinds of vision — ball and court—at the same time.
40 Basketball comes close, but it’s a team sport and lacks tennis’s primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close — at least at the lighter weight- divisions—but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful: a level of abstraction and formality (i.e. “play”) is probably necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).
41 For those of you into business stats, the calculus of a shot in tennis would be rather like establishing a running compound-interest expansion in a case where not only is the rate of interest itself variable, and not only are the determinants of that rate variable, and not only is the interval in which the determinants influence the interest rate variable, but the principal itself is variable.
42 Sex- and substance-issues notwithstanding, professional athletes are in many ways our culture’s holy men: they give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to perfection that we admire and reward (the monk’s begging bowl, the RBI-gurus eight-figure contract) and love to watch even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words they do it “for” us, sacrifice themselves for our (we imagine) redemption.
43 In the Qualies for Grand Slams like Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, players sometimes have to play two three-out-of-five-set matches in one day; it is little wonder that the surviving qualifiers often look like concentration-camp survivors by the time they get to the main draw and you see them getting annihilated by a healthy and rested top seed in the televised first round.
44 Meaning a two-handed forehand, whose pioneer was a South African named Frew McMillan and whose most famous practitioner today is Monica Seles.
45 The idea of what it would be like to perspire heavily with large amounts of gel in your hair is sufficiently horrific to me that I approached Knowle after the match to ask him about it, only to discover that neither he nor his coach spoke enough English or even French to be able to determine who I was, and the whole sweat-and- gel issue will, I’m afraid, remain a matter for your own imagination.
46 What Joyce has done is known as “wrong-footing” his opponent, though the intransigent Francophone press here keep calling the tactic a “contre-pied.”
47 Who is clearly such a fundamentally nice guy that he would probably hit around with me for a little while just out of politeness, since for him it would be at worst somewhat dull. For me, though, it would be obscene.
48 The example of Michael Joyce’s own childhood, though, shows that my friends and I were comparative sluggards, dilettantes. He describes his daily schedule thusly: “I’d be in school till 2:00. Then, after, I’d go [driven by father] to the [West End Tennis] Club [in Torrance CA] and have a lesson with [legendary, wildly expensive, and unbelievably hard-ass Robert] Lansdorp [former childhood coach of, among others, Tracy Austin] from 3:00 to 4:00. Then I’d have drills from 4:00 to 6:00, then we’d drive all the way home —it’s like half an hour—and I’m like, ‘Thank God, I can watch TV or go up and talk with [friends] on the phone or something,’ but Dad is like, ‘You didn’t practice your serve yet.’ At twelve or thirteen [years old], you’re not going to want to do it. [No lie, since two hours of serious drills alone were usually enough to put your correspondent in a fetal position for the rest of the day.] You need somebody to make you do it. [This is one way of looking at it.] But then, after like a hundred or so serves, I start to get into [standing by himself out on the Joyces’ tennis court in their backyard with a huge bucket of balls and hitting serve after serve to no one in what must by then have been the gathering twilight], I like it, I’m glad I’m doing it.”
49 An important variable I’m skipping is that children are (not surprisingly) immature and tend to get angry with themselves when they screw up, and so a key part of my strategy involved putting the opponent in a position where he made a lot of unforced errors and got madder and madder at himself, which would ruin his game. Feelings of self-disgust at his errors, or (even better for me) bitter grievance at the universe for making him have “bad luck” or an “offday” would mount until usually by sometime in the second set he’d sink into a kind of enraged torpor and expect to miss, or occasionally he’d even have a kind of grand Learesque tantrum, complete with racquet-hurling and screamed obscenities and sometimes tears. This happened less and less as I got older and opponents got more mature, and by the time I was in college only genuine head-cases could be counted on to get so mad that they’d basically make themselves lose to an inferior player (viz. me). It’s something of a shock, then, to watch Joyce do to his third-round Qualies opponent what I used to do to twelve-year-old rich kids, which is essentially to retrieve and avoid errors and wait for this opponent to have a temper tantrum. Because Sunday was a rainout, Joyce’s third round is played Monday at 10:00 A.M., at the same time that some of the main draw’s first rounds are beginning. Joyce’s opponent is a guy named Mark Knowles, 25, the 1986 U.S. Junior Indoor Champion, a native of the Bahamas, now known primarily as a doubles player but still a serious opponent, ranked in the world’s top 200, somebody on Joyce’s plateau.
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.