by Bob Mitchell
He also realizes that he can’t use his grunting as an intimidating weapon against this particular opponent.
Through the first two sets, the match is as exciting as advertised, with flashes of the greatest all-time strokes filling the red court. A Rosewall backhand. A Roche volley. A Borg lob. A Becker diving get. A Sampras overhead. A Federer retrieval. The mind is boggled when it tries to imagine how good these two will be at sixteen, twenty…twenty-three!
As injustice would have it, although each player has been identically brilliant, won the same number of points, and hit the same number of winners, Ugo Bellezza is comfortably ahead of his American counterpart, 7-6 (18), 7-6 (22).
Such is tennis, such is life.
“You sonuvabitch!” Ira Spade roars at his only child during the break between sets, his left eye twitching like the dickens. “Okay, enough of Mister Nice Guy. We are gonna pull out all the stops now! Remember what I told you about Darwin and adaptation and survival? If you stick with a losing game, you’re history! Now go out there and adapt, goddammit!”
On Ugo’s side of the net, no words are required.
At 5-4 in the third, as he crosses Ugo’s path on the way to his chair, Jack perpetrates a dirty trick that would have made Donald Segretti and his sidekick Karl Rove grin crookedly. On instructions and goading from his father and despite the slightest hint of an internal hesitation, he looks Ugo Bellezza straight in the eyes and makes the deaf sign for stupid, internally invoking the Nuremberg Defense, Befehl ist Befehl, “an order is an order.” Jack is only fifteen after all and, yes, he has a burning desire to be number one and his father has made it clear that Ugo and Ugo alone is in the way but, yes also, Jack is an almost-man who is almost capable of deciding for himself and should he have done that dirty deed or is winning, as he has been raised to believe, all that matters?
Meanwhile, the French fans are not stupid, in fact they are quite bright actually, most of them having been able to quote the great playwright Molière by heart in the third grade, thank you very much, and they are noticing the obscene gesture and are understanding, intuitively, that Jack is, well, just m-m-m-mauvais to the bone.
And there follows, subsequent to Jack’s foul hand gesture, an aural wave of disgust that echoes through the stands, a collective Gallic groan that deposits behind each ripple snippets of linguistic disgust spewed at the guilty party: espèce de cretin, then petit con, then gros con, followed by connard, then salaud, whence abruti, on the heels of débile, punctuated by trouduc, and then the pièce de résistance, fils de pute.
Ira smiles, knowing that this fire-fueling will only intensify the match, build up a hubbub, work in Jack’s favor.
Jack smiles, too.
Jack, for one, is invigorated by this scorn and rancor and digs deep within himself and somehow overcomes the power and finesse of Ugo’s game to mount a mighty comeback, scrapping and scraping and taking unbelievable sets three and four by the ludicrously thread-thin margins of 7-6 (12) and 7-6 (19). Once again, as in the initial two sets, despite Jack’s victories, there is no meaningful difference between the performances of the two opponents.
In all major championships now, Juniors and men’s alike, there is no fifth-set tie-break, and this match proves why. It won’t depend on a bounce here or there or the timing of one or two points. No, au contraire, one of the two combatants will have to gut it out and break serve, no matter how long it might take.
During the changeover before the beginning of the fifth set, Ira is whispering tenderly in Jack’s ear about how now is the time to impose his will on this Italiano runt and to break his spirit and to dictate the points, dictate them in the manner of the world’s greatest dictators, Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin.
On Ugo’s side, Giglio is talking to Ugo about respect and the fact that despite the obvious tricks Jack has played on him, and maybe because of them, Jack is actually making him play better, and so he must forgive Jack for his human weakness and his extreme behavior and accept him for what he is and focus on the tennis.
Just before it is time to resume play, Giglio reaches into his pocket and pulls out an old, tattered black-and-white photo.
“Know who this guy is?” Giglio signs to Ugo.
“No.”
“Well, his name is Roland Garros. Yes, the guy after whom this very tournament and venue were named. Know who he was?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. He was a wonderful aviator and probably the first real fighter pilot ever. During World War I, on September 23, 1913, he became the first man to fly a plane over the Mediterranean Sea. And do you know who he resembles exactly, physically?”
“No.”
“Albert Einstein! The great genius, and maybe the possessor of the most powerful and creative imagination of all time!”
Ugo Bellezza gets it. Totally.
It is 5-5 in the final set and Jack is flying all over the court tracking shots down and Ugo is sliding gracefully into balls few others could reach and the spectacle and the drama, Juniors match or no, is beyond all expectations and is drawing comparisons, stated or imagined, from tennis aficionados with this century’s other blockbuster of a match, the 2008 Wimbledon gentleman’s final between lefty Nadal and righty Federer.
Time flies when you’re having fun, and before the mesmerized fans realize it, it is 20-21 with Jack serving, and this match has become one of the, no, the greatest match ever, Juniors or not, in the long history of the French championships.
Two fifteen-year-olds at a major in the forty-second game of the fifth set!
Walking back to the service line, Jack Spade does his usual metamorphosing-into-Mr.-Hyde thing, pumps himself up with a violent thwack on the thigh, throws his opponent a quick little sneer, bounces the ball ten times on the red clay, and lets ’er rip.
The good news for Jack is that it is his fastest serve of the match, clocked at a ludicrous 148 mph, and not only that, but it also hits the T, causing chalk to fly and oohs to escape lips. The bad news is that, having observed the angle of Jack’s racquet head, the height of his toss, and the arch of his back, Ugo pivots to his left like a jackrabbit virtually as racquet meets ball, intercepts the missile perfectly, and clubs a vicious backhand return with nearly the same pace as the serve itself, back not merely in the court but just inside both sideline and baseline, the ball whizzing past the stunned server, whose mouth and eyes are frozen open, recalling the existential protagonist’s in Edvard Munch’s classic painting The Scream.
Love-fifteen.
Ugo looks up in the stands, and 15,165 of the fans present are invisible to him and the only one he sees is Antonella Cazzaro, who is sitting up there with her mother, Pia, sitting and waving down at him. And her face is beaming with a great big smile, not because she made it as a fifteen-year-old into the main draw of the Juniors and reached the third round before losing to the number 3 seed, the New Jersey phenom, Judith Nesyulb. No, her cheeks are bulging and her mouth is stretched wide and her teeth are gleaming and her gorgeous periwinkle eyes are flashing for quite a different reason, and he is down there three points away from the grandest victory of his young life.
And now Ugo Bellezza sees the rest of the crowd, sees them cheering, sees them clapping, sees them enjoying, sees them whipped into a frenzy by the passion of the spectacle.
And hears nothing.
Jack Spade trudges to the service line and looks over to his father sitting in the courtside chair and sees him muttering sonuvabitch under his breath and Ira’s left eye is twitching like there’s no tomorrow.
And as he goes through his pre-serve bouncing and sneering routine, Jack experiences a spontaneous and unexpected moment of admiration for this extraordinary opponent. How can a deaf person possibly play this game? And on top of that, play it so incredibly well? If I were in his shoes, would I be able to do what he is doing? Then again, I better not lose to this sonuvabitch!
Jack is out of his zone of focus and intensity, as something decent and emp
athetic from deep within him that has been beaten to a pulp since birth by his father has been suddenly awakened during this crucial point of the match, and Ira of course notices his momentary lapse, and how, and is fuming like crazy on the sidelines and Jack sees it and instantly reverts to being mean, lean Mr. Hyde.
The game’s second point is a carbon copy of the first, and so is the third, and now it is love-forty and Ugo is on fire and Jack is in shock and one point away from a tongue-lashing from his father he won’t soon forget, despite his noble effort.
Every tank of gas, no matter how full at the outset, eventually lands on E and Jack’s tank has now reached that point after all the running and sliding and diving and all he can muster is a big high kicker serve right into Ugo’s forehand wheelhouse and Ugo lines it up and drills a screamer down the line and out of reach of Jack’s backhand and once again just inside the confluence of baseline and sideline and had there been a Chianti bottle sitting right at that spot it would have been reduced to a pile of smithereens.
And at long last, after a grueling seven hours and forty-three minutes—easily the longest major singles match of all time, Juniors or no—Ugo prevails, 7-6 (18), 7-6 (22), 6-7 (12), 6-7 (19), 22-20. His astonishing performance of beauty and balance, of power and finesse, of strategy and footwork, of intelligence and variety and lobs and drop shots and disguise is now being appreciated by the grateful crowd, as is Jack’s heroic refusal to give up and doggedness and guts and bulldogishness. It is a compelling match for the ages, especially for their ages of fifteen and fifteen, just the tip of a budding iceberg of a rivalry the likes of which no one has ever witnessed in the grand and distinguished history of the sport.
After the final point, Giglio—he of the encyclopedic tennis mind—is appreciating an extraordinary factoid that adds a historic exclamation point to a match that is already part of history. It was, he realizes, in the very first tourney held on the clay in Barcelona in 1953 (then called the Conde de Godó) that the great American Vic Seixas beat the Argentine Enrique Morea in the finals, 6-3, 6-4…22-20!
Everyone in the stadium is standing—the two opponents at the net, the cheering crowd in the stands, ball boys and ball girls and a beaming Giglio on the sidelines, even the umpire, standing precariously on his chair ten feet up in the air.
Everyone, that is, except for Ira Spade, who is sitting in his little chair to the side of the net, sitting and fuming and stewing in his own private juice of anger, frustration, and bile, his lips pursed so hard that his cheeks are aching, his hands wringing each other violently and itching to tan a certain someone’s hide.
* * *
At a primo second-floor table in La Bastide Odéon on the Rue Corneille in the sixth arrondissement, Gioconda and Ugo Bellezza, Giglio Marotti, and Antonella and Pia Cazzaro are celebrating Ugo’s triumph in style. Meticulously presented plates of tuna, chicken, lamb, and Hereford prime steak adorn the table, along with a dishful of artichoke hearts and baskets of sliced baguettes and a couple of bottles of Saint-Émilion and a nice Veuve Clicquot chilling in a silver bucket of ice.
Giglio removes from his pants pocket a pen and a scrap of paper with names he has mentioned often to Ugo, names that represent the clay genius of European players, the history and tradition that preceded his protégé. And at the very end of the long list of European players’ names, he adds another, in script: Bellezza.
Sitting to Giglio’s immediate right is a blushing Ugo Bellezza, who gets it. And to Ugo’s right, a beaming Gioconda gives her son a prideful look and then another, different look to Giglio Marotti, a look that shouts to him that he is way more to her than just her son’s coach and mentor.
And across from Gioconda, Antonella Cazzaro’s gorgeous periwinkle eyes flash a message of pride and affection to Ugo, and her hands flash another message in a series of signs. First, the middle finger taps the chest. Next, the left hand indicates a cup and the right hand indicates the top of the cup.
My heart is full.
And Ugo is trying to figure out how someone like him, someone who has been deprived of the basic privilege and joy of hearing, can possibly feel so privileged and so joyous.
* * *
“Sonuvabitch!” Ira shouts in his son’s ear the morning after the big match, back in their hotel room. “How could you let that Italian punk beat you, especially after you came back to win sets three and four?
The rhetorical question goes unanswered, its only responses being a shake of the head from Odi Mondheim and a hangdog look from Jack Spade.
“Well,” Ira continues, “it’s back to the drawing board for you. I’ve spent too much goddam time and money trying to make you the greatest champion ever to see it all flushed right down the toilet. Do you hear me, boy?”
Jack hears him. Boy, does he hear him.
“But it isn’t fair…”
Ira is the bull to the red cape of Jack’s reply.
“What? What did you say? Fair? You think just because you made a comeback you deserved to win, huh? You think just because you’re better than that little twerp you’re gonna get victory served to you on a silver platter? Listen to me, you sonuvabitch! And listen good. There is no such thing as fair! There is no woulda, shoulda, or coulda, in tennis or in life. Just results. Just winning counts. You can want to win and think you deserve to win all you want, but at the end of the day, you gotta come up with the goods, you gotta go for the goddam jugular. Do you hear me?”
A tear begins to form in the corner of Jack’s eye, and it is only the fierceness of his will that is able to hold it back, away from the sight of his father.
“And one more thing I think you should know before we get the hell outta Paris. And I want you to think about this for a good long time and never forget it.”
Jack nods.
“Do you really want to win every match you play and be the best player ever?”
A second nod.
“Well, if you do, I have a little news for you. A few days ago, I learned the meaning of the French expression terre battue. Terre battue means ‘clay.’ But literally, it means ‘beaten earth.’ Do you get my drift?”
Jack nods a third time.
“Do you see the humor in that? Well, I think it’s pretty funny. Because the court you just played on was battu, beaten….just like you!”
Jack’s face flushes the color of French clay.
“Now, I hope you never forget this day as long as you live, and let this be a lesson to you. Because the next time you are beaten, you’ll have me to answer to. Do I make myself clear?”
Jack nods yet again and directs his basset-hound eyes toward the floor.
Outside the hotel room, the morning is gray, depressing, heavy, melancholy, with that steady and familiar sprinkle of fine Parisian urine descending. It is a morning during which no one in his right mind would wish to be outdoors. Un jour noir plus triste que les nuits, “A black day sadder than nights,” as the French poet Charles Baudelaire put it.
And at this moment, in his hotel room with his father and Odi Mondheim, young Jack Spade is thinking that being outdoors is looking like a pretty attractive option.
8
Please Advise
IT SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE that Giocomo Casanova, that prolific king of lovers and symbol of amatory seduction and conquest, called Venice his home.
In point of fact, there is nothing that is not romantic about this unique city of 118 tiny islands set in and around a marshy lagoon (the word conjures up images of Dorothy Lamour and Brooke Shields but was actually invented in Venice), 150 winding canals, 400 charming bridges, and not a single automobile belching stinky fumes.
It is a city where even getting lost is romantic. Where walking down a dark, narrow calle, or street, is not a harrowing experience but an exciting adventure (Marco Polo also called Venice home), the pedestrian never knowing what to expect around the corner, then discovering this quaint bridge or that charming square or perhaps a sleek gondola silently slicing through the ripples of a
tranquil canal and wiping his or her imaginary screen that is projecting the film titled Venice Is for Lovers.
Ugo Bellezza and hometown girl Antonella Cazzaro, seventeen and very much in a love that is more than just a puppy, have cameo roles in this timeless movie. They are here, this August of 2047—with Giglio, Gioconda, Antonella’s mamma, Pia, and Lorenza Sceneggiatrice, Antonella’s coach and hitting partner—training for the upcoming U.S. Open in a brand-new hard-surface tennis complex on the nearby glassblowing island of Murano.
The group has rented two courts at the spiffy Sporting Club della Isola di Murano for the four players and two spectators, and at 9:30 A.M. are on their way in a rented motorboat.
As they cruise to the north of the city through the Canale delle Navi and past the small island of San Michele that is dominated by a cemetery and a church, the sun shines brilliantly down on the sextet, warming their cockles, while a salty sprinkly spray from the canale bedews their faces.
Laughter fills the Canale degli Angeli in Murano as the lone vessel approaches the tennis club, located on the Calle del Cristo.
The laughter stops when the practice starts.
On one court, Coach Lorenza is putting Antonella through her paces: alternating backhand and forehand groundies, bringing her up to net, backing her up for overhead smashes, then back again to the baseline.
On the adjacent court, Ugo is a 78 rpm record to Antonella’s 45. Giglio is as impressed by Ugo’s speed, quickness, endurance, and court savvy as when his charge first began taking lessons as a ten-year-old. Multiplied by about three thousand.