Match Maker

by Alan Chin

  We spent the rest of the day and evening preparing for the semifinals: downing fluids, long stretching massages, carb-packing meals, and early to bed.

  Jared held me pressed to him through the night, not letting an inch come between us. He slept well. I know, because I didn’t sleep at a wink, nuzzled to him, listening to his deep, sonorous breathing.

  The next morning, the sky threatened showers, but by play time, the clouds had broken, and patches of blue were rapidly growing. There were only two matches on court central that Friday, and each of my boys was in one of them. The crowd seemed the same as at every other match: screaming in a dozen different languages, some faces contorted with hate while others lionized us. The gay fans all wanted to touch Jared, shrieking teens and hopeful men. Some even asked for my autograph.

  There is a sizable Asian population living in Paris as well as an equally large gay population. The Asians—mostly Chinese and Vietnamese—turned out to cheer Connor on just as the gay fans supported Jared.

  Jared’s match with McEwan was first up, and I watched with interest to see which of his two favorite rackets he would select, Thumper or Bambam. He chose Thumper.

  Jared came out of the blocks on fire. He ripped the cover off the ball with every stroke from behind the baseline. He dominated McEwan with monster forehands and teeth-jarring serves.

  To McEwan’s credit, he played a flawless retrieval game that was every bit as breathtaking as Jared’s attacking style. Almost every point turned into a twenty-ball rally. It was grueling for both the players and the fans.

  They kept everyone in the stadium biting their nails for five hours. The fans had sore necks from tracking the ball and sore hands from clapping at every point. The tension grew tighter with each game. In long matches, a player’s performance goes through peaks and valleys, but not this one. Both players executed flawless tennis, long, pounding rallies, pushing each other to come up with brilliant shot-making, until deep into the fifth set.

  Jared managed to break McEwan at five-all to serve for the match. They were both hurting. McEwan’s face was twisted into a grimace. Jared’s body was relaxed, but the pain made his eyes smolder and his mouth hang open, showing teeth like a parched jackal.

  A prickling sensation covered my scalp as the determination from both these gladiators awed me. This was Jared’s moment, and I watched him collect himself, push his pain aside, and become an animal running on pure instinct and heart. He won three out of the next four points, which gave him two match points.

  Cold chills washed through me as he wrung out every last drop of energy his body still held. He won match point by drawing McEwan into the net with a drop shot followed by a perfectly placed lob on the baseline. The entire stadium leaped to its feet. My body went limp with sweet relief. I hadn’t even realized how tense I had become until that moment of release.

  Jared pumped his fist as he jogged to the net and held his arm out to shake hands, but McEwan would not admit defeat. Joshua ran to stand in front of the linesman who called the ball good and began screaming in his face. He dashed over and pointed to a spot just outside the baseline and about a foot to the left of where the ball had landed. McEwan transformed into a wild man, screaming for a full minute with Jared still standing at the net with his arm extended like a kid waiting at the counter for the soda-jerk to hand over his root-beer float.

  I didn’t know what to think, but I knew that Jared had won, and that was all that mattered. The replay showing on the big screen confirmed the ball was good, but the French don’t use technology to overrule line-calls. Instead, the umpire climbed down to check the mark. He trotted to where McEwan still pointed. Meanwhile, the line judge who made the call ran out and pointed to the correct mark on the baseline.

  The crowd really heated up, stomping feet and yelling as only the French can.

  After checking both marks, the chair umpire pointed to the out mark that McEwan claimed was the mark and lifted one finger in the air, ruling that Jared’s winning shot was out. The crowd roared. Jared stood at the net, stunned. His extended arm dropped to his side. As the chair umpire shimmied back into his perch, realization of what happened hit Jared. He let out a scream and called the umpire a homophobic fuck, letting lose with a tirade of curses.

  The crowd booed and stomped, but it was not clear if their anger was directed at Jared, McEwan, or the chair.

  The umpire turned on his microphone and gave Jared a warning for audible abuse. The stadium went berserk, like a bomb exploding. I have never seen anything like it before or since. It sounded like the ending of the world. The umpire sat there looking down at Jared like nothing was wrong, like Jared was a clumsy ball kid that had just tripped and fallen at his feet.

  Jared put both hands on the net, just standing there, smoldering, glaring at McEwan while things quieted down, which took about ten minutes. Jared wasn’t moving a muscle, and McEwan had a little smirk on his lips.

  I felt angry that Jared had been cheated out of match point, but he still had another match point coming. This was no time for him to lose his cool. He needed to keep it together.

  Jared sauntered to the baseline to serve at 40-30 and lost the next point with a double-fault. McEwan’s call was still festering under his skin. He lost the next point as well, giving McEwan a break-back point to even the match. McEwan let go with a “COME ON!” He began windmilling his arms to pump up the volume of the frenzied crowd.

  Jared had obviously lost his composure, and I was afraid now he would lose the match as well. He gave me a cold stare, reading the thoughts that must have shown clearly on my face and becoming even more livid at my lack of faith. He walked, slowly and deliberately, to his seat, pulling Bambam out of his tennis bag and dropping Thumper on the dirt. He tested Bambam’s tension with the palm of his hand and walked back to the baseline to serve, quickly looping a ball deep in the box. When it floated back, he sliced a drop shot into the center of the court and followed it in.

  Even with McEwan’s tired legs, he managed to get to the ball but was only able to put up a weak lob. Jared backpedaled for the easy overhead. He had the whole court to hit into, and all he had to do was keep it in play. McEwan stood paralyzed at the net, Bambi in the high beams.

  I saw it happen in slow motion. Jared cocked his arm, and he swung with all his strength, letting out a chilling yell as he spanked the ball as hard as he could right at McEwan. The ball must have been traveling at over 150 miles per hour when it smashed into McEwan’s face, shattering the left side of his jaw. Teeth and blood and bits of flesh flew across the court, spraying a red trail across Jared’s white shirt.

  McEwan fell, knocked dumb, like a fighter who had taken too many jabs to the head. The fans grew silent. Jared stepped to the net, his eyes riveted on McEwan.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if he had purposely hit that drop shot to set up the smash, but the truth was, I really didn’t want to know. He had won the match rightfully minutes before, and they had robbed him, just as they had done earlier in his career. This time, he might have decided that all bets were off and he would win any way he could, but I hoped not. Regardless, I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt McEwan as badly as he did, but I also knew that all his pent-up frustration from years of bad line calls went into that overhead swing. I’m surprised the ball didn’t rip McEwan’s head clean off.

  The umpire called for the trainer and leaped out of his chair to help McEwan to the sideline bench, but it was clear that McEwan would not continue the match. The whole side of his face was badly damaged. It took the trainer only seconds to determine that Jared’s last strike of the ball was a knockout punch and that McEwan had lost. The umpire made the announcement, and the fans erupted again.

  Jared held his arms high in victory, and all around him, pandemonium ensued. Thousands of gay fans vaulted onto the court, lifted Jared onto someone’s shoulders, and paraded him around in a victory lap. They surged in behind Jared, as if his wake created an irresistible vacuum that sucked them along.r />
  Security guards swarmed onto the court to break up the riot, but the fans ignored them. All I could hear was the thrum of blood in my ears. Jared shouted at the jubilant crowd, but his words were drowned by the uproar.

  I believed that the crowd’s euphoria was spurred as much by seeing McEwan lose as by seeing Jared win. McEwan had been virulently anti-gay, but he had been belligerent as well, ill-mannered and foul-mouthed throughout the match. It was true that the weather had been excessively hot, the match grueling, and the stakes high, but Jared had played under the same conditions and managed to keep his dignity until he was cheated out of match point.

  The upside was that it would be a long time before McEwan’s mouth would be back in championship form.

  CONNOR’S semifinal against world number one Christopher Drake proved a different experience altogether. The paucity of long rallies and classic clay court grinding made the match go very fast, even though, like Connor’s previous matches, it went the distance.

  The raucous afternoon crowd of 32,000 all cheered loudest for Connor, the underdog, even though he was on the receiving end of a righteous ass whipping.

  For two sets, Drake played nearly flawless tennis, pounding winners with uncanny precision. Connor repeatedly ran down balls that seemed to have already passed him. Clearly in his zone, Drake played like an impeccable champion, which was why he was number one. Watching his effortless footwork and awesome shot making, I not only assumed he would win, I began to fear for Jared’s chances in the final.

  But in the third set, almost imperceptibly, things began to swing Connor’s way. His groundstrokes began finding the lines, and Drake began to miss just enough to erode his supreme confidence. Connor had figured out exactly what Drake would do with each stroke. His acute sense of anticipation got him to each ball with remarkable efficiency, and by taking the ball early, he afforded Drake very little recovery time between shots.

  The crowd roared all through the third and fourth sets as Connor played flat-out, like a demon on fire, making an impressive comeback by winning both sets in tiebreakers. In the fifth set, his growing confidence allowed him to move forward, staying inside the baseline, where he could create sharp, oblique angles. He experienced a mental breakthrough during that comeback: going toe-to-toe in the fifth set with arguably the best player of all time, Connor glimpsed for the first time what he was capable of—and so did I.

  Unfortunately for Drake, he saw it too. For the number one player to go down to a rookie in a Grand Slam semifinal would be a devastating blow. I could see that thought worming its way into Drake’s head in that fifth set, making him tight and irritable, which made him aim closer to the lines and miss a few easy shots. He kept fighting, but he couldn’t derail Connor’s momentum.

  In the end, Connor beat the world number one by breaking him at love and, on his own serve, reeled off four aces in a row. Connor threw his racket spinning into the air and caught it by the handle with a wicked smile.

  The reigning king had fallen, queens and rooks and bishops had all been cast aside. Only my two pawns remained on the board. Game over, I won. It was impossible to describe that feeling: those first few minutes after I knew that both my boys had miraculously accomplished what we set out to do. I couldn’t form a single thought. I was reduced to simply feeling the glorious universe around me as it all aligned into one magnificent sea of tingling joy. I became bodiless, a feather of perception floating on the breeze.

  If I had thought about it, I would have admitted that getting to that moment was worth all the hardship, the discrimination, the shooting, the rehab, and the brief breakup with Jared. That journey I would make again, just to experience that supreme joy for a few heartbeats.

  I looked at the stunned faces around me, Carrie, Shar, Roy, J.D., Spencer, and Harman. A line from Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth floated up into my numb mind: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Yes, Agincourt: we had come to France to take what was rightfully ours, and through guts and guile and skill, we had humbled our contemptuous enemies.

  THE doubles final seemed more like an afterthought. After the women’s singles final on Saturday, my boys played the men’s doubles final. It was an America verses France affair, with Jared and Connor playing the team of Boyette and Seaborne, the number two doubles team in the world.

  Jared felt so confident after winning the coin toss that he asked Boyette if he’d rather receive serve or be broken. It turned into a tense match with my boys giving as good as they got. The opponents broke Connor’s serve late in the third set.

  The French team had already dismissed my boys when they went up 5-4, 40-30 in the third set. Serving at match point, Boyette had a questionable shot called out. The replay confirmed the out ball, but Philip Seaborne reacted badly, throwing a high-decibel tantrum worthy of a four-year-old, which progressed into a mental meltdown.

  Given a second life, Jared and Connor didn’t hesitate to pick up their game. They blew through the Frenchmen to win the next three points and the next two games to win the doubles championship.

  I glanced over at Roy. His eyes were wide and shining as the shock of it moved up from his chest to his head. Tears slid down J.D.’s cheeks. He kept dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief and laughing to himself.

  I was in less shock than everyone else. I had predicted my boys would win, even though they gave me a hell of a scare when Boyette served at match point. This is it, I thought. My boys are Grand Slam champions, and no one can ever take that away from them.

  That night, we all wanted to celebrate, but because Jared and Connor had their singles final the next day, we opted for an early dinner in the hotel dining room with a bottle of Dom Perignon and two tins of Beluga Caviar. I limited my boys to only one flute of champagne each.

  It was a happy gathering, the kind of joyful party a group of close-knit passengers have on the last night of a dream voyage. Laughter vaulted to the chandeliers and undulated back through the glittering room. I didn’t even know what I ate. It didn’t matter. We raised our glasses to the future. Today and tomorrow were stair steps to greatness, to legend. Nothing could stop us.

  At nine o’clock, we put the party on hold until the bigger celebration tomorrow. People left the table in twos and threes to go back to their rooms until there was only Grandfather Lin, Connor, and myself left sitting at one end of the long table. I poured myself another flute of champagne, and Connor poured his grandfather a cup of green tea.

  Grandfather cleared his throat and stared into Connor’s eyes. “I am not a greedy man,” he said, speaking so softly I had to lean closer to hear. “I desire nothing further in this life for myself. Nor do I have any wish to see you wallow in wealth and fame, but if that is what you desire in your heart, I will raise no objections. From the depths of my being, I believe that medicine is the noblest profession. Had I had an education, I would have studied medical science myself, but I’m an ignorant man, and I was not even gifted enough to ensure that my own children became doctors. If tennis is what brings you joy, however, then you have my blessings. But for many years now I have believed that what is in your heart is a genuine desire to heal people, to comfort the sick. If that is true, it pains me to see you going down this other path.”

  Grandfather Lin took hold of Connor’s hand. “But I have a confession I want to make to you, something that I have told no one ever before, and I ask you to listen carefully to what I am about to tell you.” He sat staring into Connor’s eyes for a minute, as if trying to gauge exactly how much the boy could handle, before he continued.

  The old man told of how he, with his mother and father, had taken refuge in a cave during the Japanese occupation of his country, becoming prisoners in that secret cave for over a year.

  “For most of that time, we did nothing but lie on stone beds, cringing in the murky light filtering through the mouth of the cave, breathing an evil stench and letting our minds wander.

  “Every night I sneaked out to scour the village for foo
d, but there was none. Anything that was edible had already been eaten by the soldiers. I gathered grass, an occasional rat, insects, even meat from corpses.”

  It took no time at all for his family’s flesh to waste away, leaving them little more than skeletons with eyes protruding from their skulls. He described how, at night, his heartbeat sounded loud in his head, pounding with an offbeat and desperate rhythm.

  He began hearing a voice that echoed in the pit of his stomach and reverberated through his entire body. It was almost as if the sound of his own heartbeat began saying words, but it had such an intimate and fatherly tone that he at first assumed that it was his own father talking.

  “The funny thing was,” Grandfather Lin said, “that the voice was so friendly and my father had always been so stern, so I quickly realized that it couldn’t be my father. My father had been a doctor, a professional, and respected in the town, and that made him proud and demanding. For my father to suddenly address me so warmly was too shocking, and I soon realized it was my own heart speaking to me. And what it said was, ‘After the war, take your family to America, the Golden Mountain, where they will all have the opportunities to follow their dreams’.”

  At first, he said, that fatherly voice only spoke when he was feeling delirious, but after a few months, the voice became constant, retelling stories that he had heard growing up, gossip about family members long gone—and always reminding him that he must take his family to America.

  The voice spurred on his nightly forays into the town. Soon he began to stay out longer each night, loath to return without something of value that would help achieve his dream after the war. At times he became so depressed that he thought about killing himself, walking out into the river and letting the current take him, but fulfilling this dream kept him from it.

  One night during his wanderings, as the eastern sky paled, he climbed down into a ravine to drink from a stream when he noticed movement on the far bank. He stealthily crossed the water and found a girl, dirty and shivering, but still beautiful with the blush of ripeness. Her name was Chew-Gen—Autumn Pearl. He took her to the cave and made her his wife.