by Bob Mitchell
Sprez-za-tu-ra.
And Giglio is thinking, Sì! È il motivo per cui mio figlio gioca!, Yes, this is the reason why my son is playing!, and pride fills his heart for the boy-man whom he has taught how to create le belle cose, and boy, this drop shot was sure a thing of beauty and gosh, he suddenly realizes, this is the first time I’ve ever called Ugo mio figlio.
Ugo peers across the net at Tristan and gives him a look that needs no words to translate. It is not a mean, in-your-face, macho look, accompanied by yelp and fist pump, that is so endemic to today’s ultracompetitive game, but the same knowing Mona Lisa smile that his mother dispenses all the time. It is meant to express respect for his opponent, but in fact what it does is to break the spirit of his eighteen-year-old adversary because now he knows Ugo is in control and can execute this kind of shot at will.
Corbière is up 6-0, 6-1, but now it is deuce and he is no longer in control despite the lopsided score, as a result of this one shot, this ridiculously artful and tactically brilliant single shot, which has officially announced: a. I am not giving in, even an inch, ever! and b. This is the kind of tennis of which I am fully capable, and which from this point on I am fully intending to play.
And Ugo begins to play with more confidence and way beyond his years and he breaks Tristan’s serve just after breaking his will and a few moments later, as he walks back to the service line after a successful foray to the net culminated by another wondrous and surprising drop shot, he thinks of Gaudí and of pushing the envelope and not licking it and of creativity and beauty and what Giglio had told him about the tennis court being finite but also infinite and about expanding the lines and playing like they are there but not there and that is precisely what Ugo is feeling like now and trying to accomplish.
And early in this third set, at 2-1 Ugo’s, he discovers the key to making all this work. The resourceful Ugo figures out how to overcome Corbière’s disguising of his shots, in a way that is so simple and clean. Realizing that he is reacting too quickly to Tristan’s disguise and getting too early a jump without knowing precisely where the Frenchman is intending to guide the ball, he eliminates this confusion and flawed positioning simply by slowing down his split step just a speck, this split step that involves jumping off the ground slightly and landing on the balls of your feet while you are awaiting your opponent’s shot, allowing your weight to be centered and enabling you to run for a ball in any direction.
And Ugo employs this modified technique to blunt Corbière’s tactic of disguise with his improved anticipation and his more effective punishing groundies deep in the court that move the Breton back and forth on the court like a crazed and purposeless robot, or more precisely like one of those plastic grizzly bears at the amusement park shooting-gallery game with the glass porthole in his side that, when you shoot it in the porthole, howls and reverses direction abruptly and toddles off to the left instead of to the right until you hit him in the porthole again, in which case he howls and turns around abruptly and toddles off to the right again.
And Ugo does not relent his furious attack and his artful panoply of shots until the final point is over, yet another miraculous drop shot that leaves Tristan Corbière glued to the baseline and gasping for air and the crowd erupting in wild applause and deafening cheers.
The final score in favor of the Florentine maestro: 0-6, 1-6, 6-1, 6-0, 6-0.
The two combatants meet and shake hands at the net and Giglio is thinking what an amazing comeback and could there possibly be a better way to prepare, physically and mentally, for the Juniors Grand Slam coming up in Paris and that first, ballyhooed meeting with American Jack Spade?
After the awards ceremony, Giglio gets a call on his iMiniTelevideoPhone. It is from Gioconda, whose beaming face, smiling out from the apparatus, he has missed and whose sultry voice he is happy to be hearing again following a two-week absence.
“Ciao, carissima! Dove sei?” Giglio asks.
“Well, I’m right here up in the hills, in our favorite spot, you know? And I watched the entire match, every single, glorious point, right here on my TelevideoPhone. I could hardly wait to call you. Giglio, sono così orgogliosa, I am so proud of you, and of Ugo!”
“Grazie, cara. I’m so proud of him, too. Oh, Gioconda?”
“Sì?”
“Could you pick up some apples and pears for us?” Giglio says, holding aloft the glittering silver winner’s bowl.
Gioconda smiles into the phone that Mona Lisa smile. “Ti amo,” she says, but in a different way than ever before, Giglio is thinking, and with a slightly different look in her eyes, a look that says, he is imagining, Mi manchi tanto, I miss you so.
As Giglio walks back proudly to his beloved beat-up jalopy, Viola, he looks over at his Ugo. This lad who has, at this important Juniors tournament, accomplished a remarkable achievement: He has proven to the world, but more important to himself, that he is developing what might turn out to be the most beautiful game of tennis ever known to the human species and that he can, even this early on and under the direst of situations, play with extreme grace under extreme pressure and so, now, in the year of our Lord two thousand and forty-five, of all the players on the planet who are eighteen years old or less, he, Ugo Bellezza, a mere fifteen-year-old, is the best.
The best, that is, with the possible exception of Jack Spade.
6
Sinister
HAD CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS GROWN UP in south Florida instead of in Genoa, Italy, he might not have been so eager to conclude that the world is round.
The area in and around Palm Beach Gardens is flat. Mind-numbingly flat. So flat in fact that if you stand in the middle of PGA Blvd. on a moderately clear day and look east toward the horizon and really, really strain your eyes, you can see, way there in the distance, Genoa.
It is April 2045, and Jack Spade is fifteen, and Florida is being its usual muggy and buggy self. The Sunshine State is bulging with people, 59 million of them, metastasizing primarily from descending northern cells, mostly elderly ones, at an alarming rate of nearly two million a year. The average age in the state is now eighty-eight, paralleling the ever-growing American life expectancy figures, which are ninety-six for women and eighty for men. Accommodating the mostly doddering Floridians are endless shopping malls, replete with hair salons, gargantuan Publix markets, delis, travel agencies, jewlery (the local pronunciation) stores, plastic surgery parlors, and mortuaries.
This part of Florida hasn’t changed much in the past century, still featuring rows of pink stucco ranch-style houses, orange trees, mosquitoes, stooped and senescent drivers slunk down low in their seats in what appear to be driverless cars, kumquats, mosquitoes, early-bird specials, humidity, swamps, jogger-biting alligators, and mosquitoes.
In the northern section of the city, nestled between three bustling golfing communities, is the $31 million private estate of Ira Spade, all 20,000 acres of it, complete with three swimming pools, five saunas, a par-three golf course, and, the jewel in this sparkling crown, a tennis complex with four opulent and pristine courts: grass, hard, carpet, and red clay.
Ira has decided to keep Jack in Florida while Ugo Bellezza knocks his head against a brick wall, or rather a brick court, in Barcelona. He is carefully avoiding a first-ever, final-round meeting between the two phenoms until the Big Cassoulet, the French Open Juniors. He is milking this cash calf for all it’s worth.
Ira and Jack are in the middle of a grueling workout on the brand-new red clay court Ira has had built, specifically to train for the upcoming French Open Juniors. Through a shady contact of manager Odi Mondheim, he has had the thick, moist clay shipped from Provence, a facsimile of the same clay used at Roland Garros in Paris.
The two Spade males are engaged in a fiendish drill Ira has dreamed up, and that he has affectionately dubbed “To Hell and Back.” Ira is taking great pleasure in seeing his son work so hard and suffer so much, all for a good cause. The point is not to win rallies; the point is to run and run and run some mo
re. Ira is positioned at the T, hitting pinpoint drop shots and bringing Jack to the net, then hitting delicate lobs that send Jack scrambling back to the baseline. After a full hour, the sliding, diving, somersaulting young man—shorts, shirt, socks, sneakers, wristlet, and headband all smeared with clay—now resembles one of those crimson lobsters his father so enjoys boiling alive.
“Okay, let’s take a break. Oh, and nice job,” Ira says.
Unaccustomed to hearing such hysterically ebullient praise, an exhausted Jack Spade smiles appreciatively.
Father and son sit themselves down on expensive antique redwood Adirondack chairs. Ira, hardly having broken a sweat, is as fresh as a dandelion. Jack, after sixty minutes of forced labor in unbearable humidity, is as drenched as Gene Kelly’s shoes in that famous “umbrella” dance scene in Singin’ in the Rain. A swarm of ferocious mosquitoes buzzes above his head.
“You think this is tough?” Ira says. “Wait’ll you get to Paris. You’ll be wishing you were back here with the mosquitoes and the humidity and me running you ragged. Wait’ll you get there and it’s hot as hell and you’re down in that bowl of a stadium with those clay-court bastards from Argentina and Brazil and Spain and Italy jerking you around with their topspin drives deep into the corners and those sonuvabitch Frenchie fans screaming obscenities at you!”
Jack guzzles an entire bottle of Gatorade in one take and awaits the continuation of the diatribe he knows is coming.
“So listen up, you sonuvabitch,” Ira says with his gravelly Vince Lombardi voice.
“This Bellezza kid, he’s deaf. Do you know what that means?”
“That he can’t hear?”
“No, Einstein. That’s what any simpleton would think. But you’re Jack Spade, future numero uno in the world, and for you, it means that your principal rival for your entire tennis life…has a weakness.”
The last three words are enunciated slowly, three little words that, for Ira Spade, are his version of I love you.
“Listen, I’ve told you a zillion times, this is something any self-respecting predator dreams of, an opponent with a weakness, remember? A shark smells blood. A lion goes for the wounded. And Bellezza’s weakness is he can’t friggin’ hear! So we can smell the blood, but what do we do about it?”
Jack Spade shrugs.
“Well, I’ll tell you first of all what we’re not gonna do. In Barcelona, you heard how that Frenchie sap Corbière got soft on him after he had him down. That’s what’s been wrong with his opponents. They get soft in the belly, all weepy and teary-eyed, and they go, ‘Oh, how sad. I feel so terrible for this poor kid.’ And before they know it, they’re dead meat, 6-0, 6-1, 6-0. And so he tried to disguise his shots, but how long did that brilliant ploy last? Nope, this kid Bellezza is too goddam good and too goddam smart for that one, and he figured it out.”
Jack gives his father that goofy confused doggie look.
“No, we have to be better and smarter if we’re gonna jump on his weakness, his Achilles ear. We gotta do it by…visual disruption and distraction.”
Jack is now a Doberman who has just heard a prowler.
“For starters,” Ira continues, “Odi did some research, and he discovered that the most distracting visual thing your opponent can be looking at is your racquet strings. So I had Odi do some more research, and he found out that the most distracting strings are multicolored. So for the French Open, I’m having all your racquets strung with the colors of the rainbow!”
Ira makes the thumbs-up sign. The Doberman does, too.
“And I also had Odi consult an optical designer, who has made you a really rad, funky pair of sunglasses that you’re gonna wear when you play this guy. They are constructed in such a way that they reflect glints of light right in the eyes of the person looking at ’em,” Ira says, eyeing his son diabolically.
Fido gets his drift.
“Plus, Nike is designing for you an all-black outfit that you’ll be debuting at the French. So let’s see how smart you are: Why black?”
Rover thinks it over but, clueless, shrugs again.
“Well, I’ll tell you why. Black is powerful. Black is intimidating. Black is a color our old friend Charlie Darwin would have approved of for a tennis survivor. Because if you wear black, you have a leg up. You are telling your opponent that you are strong, you are b-b-b-bad to the bone. That it is you who will survive in the jungle. It’s like those animals I always tell you about that appear bigger than they are. The frog that blows up its throat. The grouse that puffs up its chest. The iguana that raises its dewlap. The Jack Spade dressed all in black, get it? Plus, black absorbs the heat and makes you more uncomfortable, and that’s how we like it! It’s gonna toughen you up even more, especially when it’s beastly hot and humid like it is now.”
Jack has nearly recovered his breath from the workout and would kill for a cold shower, but he can feel the next tidal wave of his father’s rant approaching.
“Now, do you know the meaning of the word sinister?”
Jack thinks he does but declines to have the floor.
“Well, I’ll tell you. In Latin, it means left.”
Ira waits for a reaction from his son, but to no avail.
“Left, as in lefty?”
Nada.
“You see, lefties have always been and always will be seen as sinister characters, as devious and to be feared. As opposed to righties, who, from the Latin word dexter, are dexterous and to be trusted. Now, on the tennis court, it’s far better to be feared and sinister because it gives you the upper hand. And since, as I’ve always told you, tennis is a game where what separates the great from the good is the mental aspect of it, the strength of mind, you’re looking for any psychological advantage you can gain over your opponent, however you can get it, even if it’s the simple fact that you are a lefty, a sinister, shady character to be feared!”
Jack nods and, knowing his father, awaits the final wave of the diatribe.
“And finally,” Ira says, dotting the last i, “no one likes to play a lefty. No one. Because lefties are smart and lefties are clever and lefties are crafty and cunning and dangerous and devious. Just think of past tennis champions like Drobny, Fraser, Laver, Leconte, Connors, Vilas, Korda, and Nadal. Nobody in their right mind enjoyed playing these guys. In baseball, they used to call certain pitchers ‘cute’ lefties, because they were wily and sneaky and, well, cute: Roe, Podres, Shantz, Haddix, Glavine, Pettitte…”
Ira and Jack get back to work for another ten minutes. While Jack scraps, digs, gets dirty, and sacrifices his body for the greater good, his father chews his mental cud.
As he runs his son silly, Ira Spade is in his own little thought balloon cogitating about how he’s got this tennis tiger by the tail and he’ll never ever let go and how great this talent is and how much greater he’s gonna get and how he knows in his gut that this kid is gonna be better than Tilden and Budge and Vines and Kramer and Gonzalez and Hoad and Laver and Borg and Connors and McEnroe and Sampras and Federer and Nadal and both Agassis and anyone else before and the sky’s the limit and how he gets to shape the kid and mold him and now he sees images of himself, Ira Spade, his own head with the Groucho-Nose-and-Specs mask pasted onto Jack’s body, this middle-aged man’s head stuck onto the strong, young, lithe, fit body that was the fruit of his loins when his loins produced fruit, and Ira’s head on top of Jack’s body is running opponents ragged and hoisting trophies aloft and appearing on nighttime TV shows and breaking bread with presidents and premiers and prime ministers and…kings!
* * *
Short, fat, bald, chinless Odi Mondheim is seated across from Ira Spade in a booth in TooJay’s gourmet deli on PGA Blvd. His lips are wrapped around two slices of soft, gorgeous seedless Jewish rye inside of which are piled a full 4.6 inches of an oversize, overstuffed sandwich interior comprised of equal heapings of thinly cut, lean pastrami and spicy corned beef.
Odi’s ghastly yellow teeth take an acquisitive chomp out of the savory mélange, t
he savage thrust leaving behind it an awesome wake that includes a sliver of pastrami dangling from the left corner of his mouth and a dollop of mustard smudging his left cheek.
“Ymmmm…mis samich z fugn Xslnt!” Odi mumbles mid chew.
“Mmmmm,” Ira agrees, biting deeply into his Reuben. “I wuv cumnere.”
Odi licks a small clump of Gulden’s spicy brown mustard off his pudgy thumb, and, washing down the mouthful of lipid ambrosia with a swig of Dr. Brown’s Celray Tonic, he contorts his moist lips into a Dick Cheney sneer.
“Ira, listen up,” Odi begins, parking his sandwich on his plate and rubbing his hands together in an unctuous Uriah Heep gesture. “I been thinking about a possible new deal with Nike.”
Ira Spade’s left eye twitches furiously.
“They love your kid, y’know. So I’m gonna meet with them next week and present a whole PR program that’ll knock their socks off. We’re gonna call it ‘Operation Net Profits.’”
Ira contorts his own moist lips into a Dick Cheney sneer.
“I been thinking about this night and day, 24/7,” Odi says. “I’m sure that, with some creativity and elbow grease, we could make ourselves another sweetheart of a deal that would whip up plenty more excitement around Jack and his persona.”
Uriah rubs his hands together again.
“Fr’instance?” Ira asks.
“Fr’instance, we’ll make Jack as intimidating as possible. Their marketing people’ll love that. Dress him all in black, as we’ve discussed. Start a line of clothes we’ll call ‘Nike Black Jack Apparel.’ Start a blog called ‘Black Jack Smack.’ Maybe even design a black cape for him to wear into matches, like some heavyweight boxers do on their way to the ring?”
Odi Mondheim takes a second chomp out of his sandwich, mustard oozing from within the mass of meat and into his cup of coleslaw. Ira Spade bites into his sour pickle, salty juice squirting onto his lap.