by Bob Mitchell
“Die!” Jack says, partly because he believes it and partly to placate his father.
As they walk to Rod Laver Arena for Jack’s match, Ira is thinking about how big this major is and maybe just maybe how it is the first step in Jack’s journey to claim the number one spot all for himself and not to have to share it anymore with that deaf Italian kid and how he, Ira, is on the threshold of giving meaning, real meaning, to his life.
Jack is thinking about how much he wants to please his father, this man who has given him so much, who has wanted him to succeed so much, to whom he owes so much, but also about how this very same man has stifled him and frustrated him and prevented him from living a normal life and having a girlfriend and now he is thinking back on his entire existence and on all his missed opportunities and on what he hasn’t been allowed to do, like go to a regular school and date and have friends, and all that he has sacrificed because of his father’s obsessive insistence on his becoming the best tennis player in the history of the planet.
* * *
Festive is what Melbourne Park—formerly Flinders Park—is now, on this men’s semifinals day, despite the fact that this is the hottest January since 2028, checking in at 109 degrees and a sizzling 123 on court, which is so hot you could fry a googie on it.
But no problems, mite, this is the Strine Opn and Bloody Nora the capacity crowd of 14,958 in Rod Laver Arena is keen as mustard and the stands are a sea of floppy hats and cheeks painted with the red-white-and-blue Aussie flag with the Union Jack and the six stars and the national colors of green and gold are displayed on bare chests and T-shirts and flags and fans and banners and almost to a person the fans are cheering like bloody hell for their mite, countryman Lance Donald, who is surprising Jack Spade early on with his nearly flawless playing.
“So, mite, didja put the Jack-and-Jill in Donald’s Gytoryde?” Aussie drug dealer Malcolm Iagowicz whispers out of the left corner of his mouth to Odi Mondheim in their box seats.
“Now, just who do you think you’re dealing with here, Mal?” Odi whispers back, winking. “Of course I put the pill in his drink.”
“So just loik I toldja,” the Aussie continues, “when the stuff in the Jack-and-Jill dissolves and mixes with the electroloytes in the Gytoryde, it’ll produce feelings of nausea and disorientytion in Donald, but that’ll take a good and proper two hours’ toim to kick in. So your boy better keep her goin’ a bit.”
For the next two grueling hours, to everyone’s surprise and delight, Jack Spade’s semifinals opponent, third-seeded Aussie Lance Donald, forges a shocking lead of two sets to one.
And the crowd is going berko.
Lance has arrived at this heady point in the match largely thanks to his killer weapon, an abso-bloody-lutely crushing flat backhand, a stroke that most experts consider the third greatest backhand ever, right behind Don Budge’s heavy topspin bludgeon and Ken Rosewall’s precise underspin laser.
“Listen, you sonuvabitch,” Ira tells Jack courtside before the start of the fourth set, “you’re down now, but I’ll be goddamned if you lose to this frigging kangaroo. As you know, that pill is gonna kick in any time now, so all you gotta do is to keep the points going, you hear me?”
Jack hears him.
Lance Donald takes the last sip of his Gatorade and deposits the large empty jug on the ground next to his chair.
Leading 1-6, 7-5, 7-5, the gifted Australian is feeling good. Or is he? As he prepares to return Jack’s serve to start off the fourth set, he’s suddenly feeling woozy, not himself. His legs are getting heavy, and he’s a little light-headed. No worries, mite, this’ll pass, she’ll be apples, he thinks.
To the surprise of the crowd, Jack spins a serve in safely at about 85 mph, instead of his normal 160 mph lefty bomb down the middle. Lance drifts slowly to his left, on heavy legs, stomach grinding, head pounding, and, instead of drilling the sitting duck of a service for a clean cross-court signature backhand winner, he blocks the ball defensively right back to Jack, whose mouth is watering and eyes are flashing and fangs are gleaming.
The heavily pro-Aussie crowd begins to murmur.
Like a leopard that has cornered a baby gazelle and decides to toy with it before going in for the kill, Jack Spade keeps the ball in play, moving the progressively debilitated Aussie from side to side, resisting the urge to go for a clean winner to end the point and knowing full well that his opponent is an Aussie and will never give up and will run down every shot even if it kills him.
Lance is struggling to get to each shot and the rally has lasted for over two minutes and the ball has crossed the net nearly 100 times and Lance is feeling groggier by the second and the on-court temperature of 125 degrees sure doesn’t help him one bloody bit and the crowd doesn’t have a clue about his condition and a hush falls over them as they witness firsthand the leopard toying with the gazelle and crikey it’s a pathetic sight to see and Jack the leopard is acutely aware of the energy and desire ebbing from the body and spirit of his helpless baby gazelle of an opponent and the leopard strikes every shot as if his claws were sinking deeper and deeper into the gazelle’s jugular and the lessons of his father and the lectures about Darwin and survival are once again driving him forward and with heavy legs and clouded mind the Aussie drags himself over to the deuce side of the court and desperately lunges to retrieve a forehand, his final stroke of the point and it turns out of the match, and continues toward his chair on the sidelines and plops into it, collapsing in a heap of fatigue and bewilderment.
The crowd lets out a collective gasp, and, after the trainer comes out and looks him over and is unable to find anything wrong, Lance Donald, still in a heap and out of it, has no choice but to default the match.
Lance is placed on a stretcher and escorted out of the stadium by two First-Aid Officers and the applause and cheers of nearly every fan in attendance, and as Jack Spade gathers up his gear and throws it into his Nike tennis bag, the knowledgeable pro-Aussie crowd, aware of the fact that the American and his father have been known to resort to nefarious tactics and to do anything they can to win, boos them lustily out of the arena.
Before he leaves the court, Ira Spade, by Jack’s side, turns around and looks into Jack’s friends’ box in the stands and locates Odi Mondeim, sitting there in the first row, and the two men flash demonic smiles to each other and Ira gives Odi a plump thumbs up for a job well done.
* * *
In his half of the semifinals draw, Ugo Bellezza is pitted against his Brit friend, Marc Kripptoid, a gifted and graceful player endowed with power and finesse and currently ranked number four in the world.
It is a set apiece and the match is hotly contested, and in the third, Krippsey spurts ahead with a dazzling display of shotmaking and Ugo, uncharacteristically, finds himself down, 5-2.
“Come stai?” Giglio asks his protégé during a changeover.
“Benissimo, I’m doing great,” Ugo signs back. “He’s just playing better than I am right now, but I know his great play will raise my game, so I’m not worried.”
A calm and pensive Giglio pauses while Ugo towels off and takes a few swigs from his jug of Krazy Kookaburra Energy Drink.
“I just thought of a quote from Leonardo’s Notebooks that you might find helpful at this point in the match,” Giglio signs. “The maestro once said, ‘Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.’ Because Marc is playing so well, I think you may be trying for too much, trying to hit too many difficult winners, trying to be too fancy, too superfluous, instead of sticking to basics and playing your usual controlled, intelligent game.”
Ugo smiles gratefully at Giglio. He knows how wise Leonardo was and that his words surely make sense now. He knows what to do.
Ugo Bellezza stops with the superfluous stuff and gets back to the basic strengths of his game—footwork, preparation, intelligence, anticipation, strategy—and pu
lls out the match with ease, 7-5, 5-7, 7-5, 6-0.
As the players and their coaches exit the court, the crowd rises as one and applauds, not only to reward the extraordinary exhibition of tennis and sportsmanship, but also to let Ugo know visually that the day after tomorrow they will be pulling for him to defeat the devious and odious Jack Spade.
* * *
“So, can we talk?” Giglio asks Gioconda.
Gioconda’s heart skips a beat, but you could never tell it from her placid smile.
The two are dining at The Pesky Platypus, one of Melbourne’s most popular pubs. Ugo and Antonella have just left, and mamma and coach are picking on the remains of their bangers and mash and enjoying the final sips of their pints of Piss Weak.
Giglio reaches across the table and gently caresses Gioconda’s hands with his.
“I think by now you know pretty much how I feel about you,” Giglio says.
Ugo’s mamma’s heart skips two beats.
“Allora, what I want to say is that…”
Gioconda’s heart stops beating altogether.
“…that I’m really sorry we haven’t spent more time together lately. It’s just that we’ve been playing lots of tournaments this year, to prepare for the majors, and doing all that traveling, and I haven’t spent too much time in Firenze and we do see each other when I come home and during majors but I just wish we could be together more.
Giglio pauses for another sip of his coldie. Gioconda wonders what else her beloved Giglio has to tell her.
“Carissima, I know you understand how important my work with Ugo is,” Giglio says, “and how much he and I and you want him to be the most perfect and most beautiful Ugo Bellezza he knows how to be. And a big part of that happens and keeps developing when he’s doing his thing on the tennis court. So until he tells me he doesn’t need me anymore—”
“You know very well that will never happen,” Gioconda interrupts. “He will no longer play tennis when he feels he needs to do other fine and wonderful things in his life or when he senses that he is too old or unfit to perform at his highest level. But he’ll always need you…”
Gioconda wants to say, “…like I’ll always need you,” but doesn’t. Instead, she drains the rest of her pint and lets her mind wander to the cheery thought of how someday her perfect little life could become even more perfect.
* * *
It is Sunday, January 29, 2052, and to no one’s surprise, the two greatest players in the world are meeting in the finals of the Strine Opn.
The first four sets are a testimony to the perfect jigsaw fit of the two combatants, to the old boxing saw that style makes fights.
Ugo Bellezza is playing his typically effortless tennis to such a high degree that he is forcing the real aficionados and amateur tennis historians in attendance not only to reminisce about his nonpareil predecessors in this category—Budge, Laver, Borg, Federer—but also to forget them momentarily. On the other side of the net, Jack is grinding away tirelessly—in the best teeth-clenching tradition of Cliff Richey, Jimmy Connors, Guillermo Vilas, Thomas Muster, and that Aussie grinder of all grinders, Lleyton Hewitt.
It is a beautiful thing to watch, this stark and dramatic contrast, especially under these conditions: Courtside it is a beastly 125 degrees, and in fact toward the end of the fourth set, Ms. Jean Pargeter, of 2346 Emerson Lane in Blackbutt, Queensland, faints way up there in the nosebleed section and must be removed from the stadium on a stretcher.
The crowd falls respectfully silent as she is carted away, then resumes its raucous cheering between points. Jack is soaking it up big-time, even reveling in the frequent and boisterous boos.
Ugo can’t hear a bloody thing.
After four grueling, hotly contested sets, the two wunderkinder are proving with yet another exclamation point that already they are playing the kind of tennis the likes of which has never been seen before nor will ever be seen again. And the observation that their games are at this point in history in a virtual dead heat is reflected in the score after these four sets, 7-6, 6-7, 7-6, 6-7. And the tallying of the total points won by each player.
Bellezza 124, Spade 124.
The fifth set, somehow, eclipses the first four. In a stunning torrent of scorching winners and spectacular shotmaking and hardly any unforced errors and uninterrupted grit and stamina and tactical creativity on both sides of the net, it has developed, even in its unfinished status, into the longest Aussie finals ever, and by far.
And it is now 7-6, 6-7, 7-6, 6-7, 37-38 in favor of Jack Spade with Ugo to serve and Jack, spurred on by coach Ira Spade’s insistence, has tried everything in the book up to this point, in addition to his fabulous talent and gritty persistence, to defeat his opponent, including bumping him in the shoulder during that changeover at 19-20 and spending five minutes arguing with the chair umpire over an unsportsmanlike conduct call against him at 30-31 in order to discombobulate Ugo’s rhythm and running over to Ugo’s side of the court to dispute a line call—a tactic not used since Martina Hingis tried it with disastrous consequences in her loss to Steffi Graf in the 1999 French Open women’s finals.
And Ugo is serving at 37-38 and the pro-Bellezza crowd is in a frenzy after Ugo wins the first two points with a scorching ace and a perfectly placed surprise forehand drop volley and they’re going berko and Ugo can’t hear them but he sees they’re standing and cheering for him between points and now he uncorks a gorgeous slice serve to Jack’s lefty backhand and Jack stings a perfect backhand at the feet of the hard-charging Ugo and somehow Ugo barely gets to it and half volleys it on a perfect cross-court angle but it nicks the tape and rolls perilously and sideways along the top of the net and dribbles sadly back onto his side of the court.
And it is 30-15 and Mr. Hyde has fire in his eyes and isn’t gonna let this game get away from him, noway, nohow, and Ira Spade is pumping his fat little fist in the air and muttering under his breath for Jack to beat this little Italian sonuvabitch and his left eye is twitching like gangbusters and Jack sees him and grits his teeth even harder and Ugo crashes a humongous serve down the middle of the court, again to Jack’s backhand, and Jack cracks the same blistering return, again at the feet of the hard-charging Ugo, and Ugo executes the same gorgeous cross-court half volley and once again, the ball ticks the netcord and rolls sideways along the top and falls on his side of the court and it’s 30-all and the crowd is booing Jack and cheering Ugo now more than ever.
Ira Spade is thinking how he is now two points away from barely poking his and Jack’s noses slightly ahead of the Italian kid’s in terms of major titles won, giving them a slim 11-10 lead, and the two players will still admittedly be neck and neck with scarcely a beam of daylight between them but hey it’s a start anyway.
Jack Spade is thinking, just for a split second, about how incredible it is for the deaf Ugo even to be playing tennis, much less playing like this, and then inevitably his mind comes back to everything coach Ira has ever taught him about Darwin and survival and the jugular and Woody Hayes and Vince Lombardi and the American Way and win or die and win or tie and how he’s gonna bear down now and somehow beat this sonuvabitch on the other side of the net.
Ugo Bellezza is thinking about how blessed he is to be playing in such a beautiful match and is silently thanking his opponent over there for raising the level of his game to such a lofty height.
At 30-all, Ugo hits a serve that is not quite dominating enough to allow him to rush the net, so he stays back and 102 times the ball is struck by these two superstars and precisely at the moment of the 103rd strike, a bead of perspiration rolls into the corner of Ugo’s right eye and blurs his vision just enough to distract him and he hits a forehand drive a skosh late and his racquet angles the ball toward the ad-court sideline and it is a centimeter wide and it is now 30-40 and championship point for Jack and Ira is going berserk and Jack’s heart is pumping like a hummingbird’s wings and Giglio has not lost faith in his protégé and flashes him a confident smile and Ugo calmly ret
urns to the baseline and prepares to serve.
Sometimes in life, the end comes shockingly suddenly and this is one of those times and Ugo serves a scorcher down the middle and Jack times it perfectly and just rips a perfect cross-court backhand, low and smoking and not even one as quick and reflexively gifted as Ugo Bellezza is able to reach it and it hums past his outstretched racquet and it is all over now and Jack Spade is the 2051 Strine Opn men’s champion by the outrageous score of 7-6, 6-7, 7-6, 6-7, 39-37.
Ugo trots to the net to acknowledge Jack’s extraordinary play and extends his hand to the American, and Jack gives him a cold fish shake and the hint of a sneer, his signature greeting inculcated in him by coach Ira.
Ugo and Giglio hug and smile and pack up all the gear and walk off the court proudly to thunderous applause while Jack is still fist-pumping to all four corners of the arena before fist-bumping with coach Ira.
As the Spades leave the court, the knowledgeable, respectful, fair-minded Strine Opn fans boo the bloody hell out of them, and the razzing—which is even louder and more boisterous than the reception the reviled old N.Y. Giants pitcher Sal Maglie used to get in Ebbetts Field from the venomous Brooklyn Dodgers fans—can be heard all the way to Warrnambool.
* * *
“No reason to hang your head,” Giglio signs to Ugo in a far corner of the men’s locker room.
Ugo looks at his mentor with sad eyes and does not respond.
“There’s a saying,” Giglio continues, “that goes, Non c’è rosa senza spine, ‘there is no rose without thorns.’ This is just another bump in the road, and like all the other bumps, you will get over it and be stronger for it, you’ll see.”
“No, that’s not it at all, it’s not the fact that I lost that’s making me sad,” Ugo signs, his eyes becoming moist. “It’s that…”
Giglio knows his pupil as if he were his own son, so he senses what is coming.