I nodded.
Adam said, “Thirty and ninety and sixty. Anton-Atom-Bomb, I will have the PlayStation up and running in the suite in one-eighty.”
Something to look forward to. “I’ll be there,” I said.
Adam left to get stoned and find something to eat. He’d have several new friends by the time I next saw him. Could be a travelling business executive, a player’s parent or a homeless person. Adam didn’t judge others. He just liked people, all shapes, sizes, types. That’s also why he didn’t really judge himself, which has to be an easier way to go through life, if you’re okay with it. Adam was the person most receptive to help I’d ever seen. The help could be advice, narcotics, a free lunch. He was very accepting.
That day I practiced, stretched and got a massage, then played Adam in PlayStation back at the hotel. I walked to the suite window and looked down at the brownish-orange roof of the carport and the landscaping around the drive. Sprinklers rose from the mulching like submarine periscopes and began painting the shrubs with water. The next day was the same except instead of practicing ninety minutes, I won a match in less than sixty. Back in the hotel I walked to the suite window at exactly the same time and was able to confirm that the sprinklers were on a timer. Every day that week was the same until I won the tournament and we left.
Then we played more tournaments and I won those too. People were starting to know who I was even without the entourage.
More winning meant not only more tournaments on my schedule, but also more matches at every tournament. Instead of an early round loss, then a few days off, I won and played matches through the end of the week then flew off to play another.
There are impact workouts and non-impact workouts. Impact happens when you jam your feet to the hard court in order to stop and change direction. That kind of impact breaks down the body. Non-impact is riding a stationary bike. I could work myself to the bone with non-impact and still recover because I was a teenager. But even then, the impact was getting tough. I was taking on the rigor of a pro schedule and I could feel my body starting to break down, starving for recovery time.
It occurred to me in several tournaments that I could tank an early round match to get some rest but I knew my body would give out before my mind would. I was learning that one of the tests of a pro schedule was endurance over the long haul. The beating of an eleven-month tennis season. I would need a better plan.
CHAPTER
15
“Lie down on the table,” said Bobby. “I’ll get the ice.”
“It feels like someone jabbed a pitchfork through my lower back.”
“Just relax. Don’t move.”
“I don’t think I can move.” I was back in Florida where I played so many of my tournaments at that time. The muscles in my lower back had been quivering like the plucked string of a bow the entire third set with occasional seizures of sharp pain. I moved carefully, gingerly during the match. Swung my racket without aggression. It wasn’t enough and I lost in the second round. I had lost in the third round of the tournament before. Both my back and my shoulder had been giving me problems.
“I’m going to massage it out gently for a few minutes, then we’ll go to the ice.”
Bobby pressed his thumbs into the muscles along the sides of my spinal column and my back signaled maximum pain to my brain. “Too hard, too hard,” I yelled.
“Okay.” He pulled back his thumbs. My muscles were raw and angry. Bobby used the heel of his palms to rub up and down over my lower back which still hurt like hell. Then he draped a large plastic bag of ice directly over the skin of my back and I could feel the ice drinking in the intense heat from me.
The relief came fast but the idea of serving a tennis ball was outrageous, like the eighty-year-old man on a park bench watching the kids at play and wishing for just one more day of pain-free movement. Except I was a month before my eighteenth birthday. “My body’s breaking down, Bobby.”
“Yup,” he said.
“Ever since we stepped up my schedule, I can’t take it. I can’t recover enough to play well.”
“We’ll work it out,” he said.
I had started to think I didn’t have a pro body. They talked about it in the NBA all the time. So-and-so is built strong, has an NBA body, can take the pounding. “It’s not like I can train my way out of it. That’s just more abuse I’d have to recover from.”
“We’ll come up with a plan.”
“Should I take time off the tour? Train and try to get stronger, then come back? Maybe I’m too young for the schedule.”
“You’re not too young.”
“Well I’m not doing it. I’m not succeeding. This is just grinding me down to a nub and there’ll be nothing left of me.”
We were quiet for a while. The ice felt so good. All I had to do was lie there. Bobby massaged my calves and hamstrings and nobody spoke for five minutes. Then Bobby said, “The tennis tour is brutal. You get December off, then it’s an eleven-month season. Eleven straight months of pounding, hours a day, every day, tournament after tournament. Throw in a few flights, sometimes to Australia and around Europe.”
I hadn’t even done international travel for tournaments yet. “Brutal.”
“If a player could stay sharp with his game, not walk away from tournament conditioning, physically and mentally, but magically recover as though he’s had a month off, that would be a huge advantage.”
“Of course,” I said.
“You know what that sounds like, Anton?”
“What?”
“The Tour de France.”
“What do you mean? Doping?”
He said, “Given the schedule in the modern era of tennis, it is the most natural fit of all the sports for performance-enhancing drugs.”
“Tennis,” I said, not believing this. Dad had never mentioned steroids to me and Dad does his research and uses any and all advantage. He would have told me. Then it occurred to me that this conversation with Bobby was sanctioned by Dad.
“Of course tennis, Anton.” He stopped massaging my legs and walked to the side of the table so we could see each other. “Look around the sport. There was a clinic in Spain that got busted for PEDs to the Spanish cycling team. They had a file on Nadal. On Ferrer too. Those files were burned later, by the way. And Djokovic? Here’s a guy who used to have a reputation for running out of gas in the fourth and fifth sets. He would blame it on a respiratory problem, say he had a problem with glutens. Suddenly he thrives taking matches deep into five sets because he’s faster and more fit than anyone. His fellow countryman had a positive test. These guys from the same country are all with the same trainers, doctors. It’s pervasive in tennis and has been for years.”
I was believing this now. It seemed so obvious in a flash. Getting the simple answer to the riddle that had eluded me.
Bobby said, “Andy Murray? He started flexing his biceps on the court after big points as though he’d never had a muscle before and can’t believe it himself. That was not subtle. Did you see Agassi win the Australian in 2003? Whenever does the old guy find the extra guns and extra tank to grind down the young guys? He dismantled people that year. He should have tanked a few games to make it look less obvious.”
I was moving from surprise to disappointment and anger. “Is everyone on it?”
“Maybe a few exceptions. A six-ten guy like Isner, that’s like serving out a second-story window. Or James Blake, naturally fast as hell. Both those guys never thought they were going pro. They finished high school, just looking to get some college scholarship money. And maybe not Federer. I’m not sure about Fed. Aside from that? Yes. Everyone. Everyone who can afford it and who has the potential to take it and break through to the top.”
“You have information on people?”
“Do a web search on the phrase ‘tennis has a steroid problem.’ A site will come up that collects all the information. Players deny it, of course.”
“Okay.”
“It’s a small c
ommunity of professionals in this business. I worked in baseball a lot of years. In my opinion, tennis players need the leg-up much more than baseball players, but there are far fewer players in tennis with enough money to get on a Cadillac program. Lots more money in baseball. So lots more steroids.”
“Jesus Christ.” I was a babe. Not yet eighteen. People around me were taking life-altering drugs to make a career, for world fame and millions of dollars. If I were still in school, I’d be studying for a history test, trying to figure out how to get a girl to take her pants off for me. Real kid problems. Not this.
“Sorry to tell it all to you this way, Anton. You’re going pro. It’s a conversation we knew was coming sooner or later.”
“Who’s we?”
“Gabe,” he said. “Your dad.”
I was too weak to nod. I just closed my eyes and lay motionless.
Bobby put his hand on my head. It was gentle. Surprisingly so, the way a bear is surprisingly gentle with cubs. I looked over at him in his too-small T-shirt, hair in a ponytail and his tan, meaty hand. He said, “It’s a sort of running joke in tennis that at the end of these tournaments it should be the doctor up on the podium, not the player. Which doctor came up with the best cocktail of recovery drugs.”
“I hadn’t heard that one,” I said.
“Yeah. Not such a good joke, I guess. Anyway, I know most of these guys. These doctors. Think about it.” He patted my head a couple times.
“My dad wants me to think about it? Gabe?”
He waited a moment to answer. “They do.” He sounded like a guilty man. “I’m sorry, Anton. It’s the way it is. All of life is a trade-off. You get to be famous, see the world, get the girls, make lots of money. But you have to put some crap in your body.” He took his hand back. “Not a terrible trade, really.”
CHAPTER
16
Dad kept on smacking the side of his wineglass with a fork long after the room had gone quiet. We were at a birthday dinner for Mom with our family and a dozen friends at Merion Cricket Club. The party was on the porch dining room overlooking the great lawn that was used for grass tennis and sometimes cricket matches. Built in the late 1800s, the club looked like an English country estate. Little had changed since the time umbrellas were called parasols and the members arrived by horse and carriage.
When Dad was certain all eyes were on him and there had been plenty of time for dramatic effect, he rose up above us and lifted his palms like an evangelical. “Welcome,” he said. He and Mom were one table over from Panos and me.
Everyone murmured something in response.
“What a day,” he said. “What a day.” More pause. More effect. He could have been one of the great dictators. It’s as though he studied old footage of Mussolini, making a short declarative statement then the silent, affirmative head nods as he scanned the audience back and forth, bathing in the triumph of the words. “My beautiful wife is fifty today.” He turned to her. “More beautiful today than ever.” He cupped his hand over her ear and the side of her head. “We’ve had such a beautiful life, such magic together.”
“Oh, barf,” said Panos in my ear.
I had to stare at my lap. Panos kept watching because he wasn’t close to laughter. He really was nauseated. Dad always made these over-the-top toasts that were total bullshit. No connection to anything that we are. It was plausible that he and Mom were negotiating a divorce settlement on the drive over and he’d have made the same toast. No matter what traumas or toxic events were happening in our lives, the toast cleared it away for him. So let it be toasted, so let it be written, so let it be real. If never mentioned by him, then it wasn’t official, not even acknowledged and didn’t count as a part of our family history. He dialed it up ten times more when people other than family were around.
I know his actual words were fine and I sound cynical, but you never had to live with him.
The toast went on too long and when it was over Panos said, “Let’s get a drink at the bar.”
Nobody ever checked ID at the club, especially when parents were around. We gave Mom and Dad a wink and a wave, two brothers off to do wholesome, brotherly things. They smiled back and we walked to the Cricket Bar, dim with a low fire, dark wood panels, dark carpets, soft lighting. It felt like the quarters on a ship of a nineteenth-century monarch. The bar was empty except for the bartender so we sat and got two beers.
“When do you leave for the ski trip?” I said to Panos.
“The twenty-second,” he said.
I nodded, said nothing.
“Wish you could come,” he said.
There was no prohibitive reason. Except Dad. Panos got to go to high school, go to college, take ski trips where he might twist his knee or bruise his shoulder. He even got to play tennis. He played doubles on his college team, one of the kids I might have hustled for $500 five years earlier. He went to Pepperdine, a gorgeous college campus in California, far from Main Line Philadelphia. “Me too,” I said.
“You’re knocking on the door now, Anton. All the work you put in, even if it doesn’t turn into something big, it’s an experience you have that you can tuck away and you’re still a teenager. But it looks like it’s going to turn into something.”
“It’s going alright,” I said. I wondered if Panos knew anything about the steroids. I hadn’t yet taken any at that time. I was still in the period of thinking it over. It was like standing on the edge of the thirty-foot high dive and feeling there was no way to will myself over. I sipped my beer which tasted like crap to me as all alcohol did then and I said to Panos, “Did you know Dad wants me to start taking stuff? Performance-enhancing drugs?”
Panos didn’t look at me and didn’t say anything so I knew the answer before he said it and thank God he was honest. “I know.”
We were both silent, looking straight ahead.
We went on like that for a while until Panos said, “We could take off.”
“Take off?” I said.
“Sure.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know exactly, but leave. We’ve got the money, we’ll get you tickets for the ski trip for starters. Then come live with me at college. At least for a while.”
“You’re nuts.”
“No, we could.” He was excited and turned his stool to face me. “You can call home from a blocked number, they’ll know you’re fine, won’t call the cops. You can say you need time out and you’re taking it.”
I laughed.
“Anton, I’m serious.”
“Hey, I’d love to go skiing for a week.”
“Then come live with me at school. College with no classes. And I’ll cover for you with Mom and Dad. Tell them we’ve been in touch but I don’t know where you are.”
“I suppose it could work.”
“It could work for a while,” he said. “It could give you a break.”
It already felt good just talking about it. I felt empowered discussing it like a real option. I remembered sneaking away with Panos as a kid when my young perspective turned a small adventure into a whole world. When I was eight or nine, Dad had screamed at me in frustration that I was giving a lazy practice session and not moving my feet, then he stormed off our home court. Panos sneaked on the court and helped me move the tennis ball machine into the yard where he angled it into the air and shot a hundred balls upward like mortar fire, landing most in the swimming pool in a mock World War Two invasion. One hundred balls were ruined, a small expense for Dad but it was the principle and a major act of defiance, which we paid for, and it was worth it. It was something I knew we’d retell as old men.
I imagined sleeping on the floor of Panos’s room after a party with girls and grain alcohol punch. Waking up to get a breakfast of crappy fried cafeteria food then napping off the hangover, exercising once or twice a week but only as a means to liven myself up, like taking a shower. Since Liz, I’d had no one to share moments of imagined rebellion. “I could use a break.”
“Of course,” he said.
We were quiet for a moment which was a mistake. The silence left room for reality to sneak back in. The momentum we had built wasn’t enough to carry even thirty seconds of dead air. “You think it might work?” I said.
“Sure.” Much weaker voice than before. I heard the difference. He heard it too. We both knew Dad would stalk us, hunt us down, bring us back to a life worse than before.
“Yeah,” I said. We wouldn’t do it. That was obvious, but it felt good to be loved for something other than being a tennis player. Panos loved me not as a tennis player, just as a brother who might come live with him in his dorm room.
Quiet again. We’d just been on the same up and down fantasy ride and were catching our breath. Panos said, “What are you going to do? About the drugs?”
“I don’t know. They’re telling me I can’t do it without the drugs. Lately my body is telling me the same thing, but I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry, brother.”
“Thanks, Panos.” It would be worse without him.
CHAPTER
17
In March I entered the Miami Open where four of the top-ten players in the world were in the draw, including the world’s number one player. One of my earliest memories as a toddler was visiting this tournament back when it was called the Sony Ericsson. Spectators, reporters, camera crews moving around a complex of dozens of courts and vendors selling T-shirts, drinks and hot dogs. Now people were coming to watch me and I was playing great against the best. Of course now I was taking the drugs. Nothing with needles. Just oral supplements and I never asked for details about what. Plausible deniability. It was only with a wink and a nod that I knew they were steroids at all. But I knew.
Because it was Miami there was a little more star power in the crowds. Who knew Jay Z liked tennis? That gave us something to talk about.
My first-round match was against the eighth seed who was ranked twenty-two in the world. I pummeled him. My serve was clicking, my ground strokes were heavy and locked in, I was focused, anticipating his shots and moving fast and always forward. He was stunned and shaken after the match. He knew that he didn’t just have an off day or that I had a fluke day. He was routed by a better player and that put a new and lower ceiling on his career.
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