A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (55 page)

⁶⁰
This is inarguable, axiomatic. In fact what’s striking about most U.S. mystery and suspense and crime and horror films isn’t
these films’ escalating violence but their enduring and fanatical allegiance to moral verities that come right out of the
nursery: the virtuous heroine will not be serial-killed; the honest cop, who will not know his partner is corrupt until it’s
too late to keep the partner from getting the drop on him, will nevertheless somehow turn the tables and kill the partner
in a wrenching confrontation; the predator stalking the hero/hero’s family will, no matter how rational and ingenious he’s
been in his stalking tactics throughout the film, nevertheless turn into a raging lunatic at the end and will mount a suicidal
frontal assault; etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. The truth is that a major component of the felt suspense in contemporary U.S. suspense
movies concerns how the filmmaker is going to manipulate various plot and character elements in order to engineer the required
massage of our moral certainties. This is why the discomfort we feel at “suspense” movies is perceived as a pleasant discomfort.
And this is why, when a filmmaker fails to wrap his product up in the appropriate verity-confirming fashion, we feel not confusion
or even offense but anger, a sense of betrayal—we feel that an unspoken but very important covenant has been violated.

⁶¹
(not to mention for being (from various reviews) “overwrought,” “incoherent,” “
too much
”)

¹
Comprising Washington, Montreal, LA, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, New Haven, and Long Island, this is possibly the most grueling
part of the Association of Tennis Professionals’ yearly tour, with three-digit temperatures and the cement courts shimmering
like Moroccan horizons and everyone wearing a hat and even the spectators carrying sweat towels.

²
Joyce lost that final to Thomas Enqvist, now ranked in the ATP’s top twenty and a potential superstar and in high-profile
attendance here at Montreal.

³
Tarango, 27, who completed three years at Stanford, is regarded as something of a scholar by Joyce and the other young Americans
on tour. His little bio in the
1995 ATP Player Guide
lists his interests as including “philosophy, creative writing, and bridge,” and his slight build and receding hairline do
in fact make him look more like an academic or a tax attorney than a world-class tennis player. Also a native Californian,
Tarango’s a friend and something of a mentor to Michael Joyce, whom he practices with regularly and addresses as “Grasshopper.”
Joyce—who seems to like pretty much everybody—likes Jeff Tarango and won’t comment on his on-court explosion at Wimbledon
except to say that Tarango is “a very intense guy, very intellectual, that gets kind of paranoid sometimes.”

⁴
Title sponsors are as important to ATP tournaments as they are to collegiate bowl games. This year the Canadian Open is officially
called the “du Maurier Omnium Ltée.” But everybody still refers to it as the Canadian Open. There are all types and levels
of sponsors for big tennis tournaments—the levels of giving and of commensurate reward are somewhat similar to PBS fundraising
telethons. Names of sponsors are all over the Canadian Open’s site (with variations in size and placement corresponding to
levels of fiscal importance to the tournament), from the big FedEx signs over the practice courts to the RADO trademark on
the serve-speed radar display on the show courts. On the scarlet tarp and the box seats all around the Stadium and Grandstand
Courts are the names of other corporate sponsors: TANDEM COMPUTERS/APG INC., BELL SYGMA, BANQUE LAURENTIENNE, IMASCO LIMITÉE,
EVANS TECHNOLOGIES INC., MOBILIA, BELL CANADA, ARGO STEEL, etc.

⁵
Another way to be a sponsor: supply free stuff to the tournament and put your name on it in really big letters. All the courts’
tall umpire-chairs have a sign that says they’re supplied by TROPICANA; all the bins for fresh and unfresh towels say WAMSUTTA;
the drink coolers at courtside (the size of trash barrels, with clear plastic lids) say TROPICANA and EVIAN. The players who
don’t individually endorse a certain brand of drink tend as a rule to drink Evian, orange juice being a bit heavy for on-court
rehydration.

⁶
Most of the girlfriends have something indefinable about them that suggests extremely wealthy parents whom the girls are
trying to piss off by hooking up with an obscure professional tennis player.

⁷
The term “seeding” comes from British horticulture and is pretty straightforward. A player seeded First is expected statistically
to win, Second to reach the finals, Third and Fourth the semis, etc. A player who reaches the round his seed designates is
said to have “justified his seed,” a term that seems far more rich in implications and entendres. Serious tennis is full of
these multisemiotic terms—“love,” “hold” and “break,” “fault,” “let” as a noun, “heat,” “moon,” “spank,” “coming in,” “playing
unconscious,” and so on.

⁸
Except for the four Grand Slams, no tournament draws all the top players, although every tournament would obviously like
to, since the more top players are entered, the better the paid attendance and the more media exposure the tournament gets
for itself and its sponsors. Players ranked in the world’s top twenty or so, though, tend to play a comparatively light schedule
of tournaments, taking time off not only for rest and training but to compete in wildly lucrative exhibitions that don’t affect
ATP ranking. (We’re talking
wildly
lucrative, like millions of dollars per annum for the top stars.) Given the sharp divergence of interests between tournaments
and players, it’s not surprising that there are Kafkanly complex rules for how many ATP tournaments a player must enter each
year to avoid financial or ranking-related penalties, and commensurately complex and crafty ways players have for getting
around these rules and doing pretty much what they want. These will be passed over. The thing to realize is that players of
Michael Joyce’s station tend to take way less time off; they try to play just about every tournament they can squeeze in unless
they’re forced by injury or exhaustion to sit out a couple weeks. They play so much because they need to, not just financially
but because the ATP’s (very complex) set of algorithms for determining ranking tends to reward players for entering as many
tournaments as they can.

And so even though several of the North American hard-court circuit’s tournaments are Super 9’s,
a fair number of top players skip them, especially European clay-court players, who hate Deco Turf and tend to stick to their
own summer clay-court circuit, which is European and comprises smaller and less lucrative tournaments (like the Dutch Open,
which is concurrent with the Canadian and has four of the world’s top twenty entered this year). The clay-courters tend to
pay the price for this at the U.S. Open, which is played on hard sizzling Deco Turf courts.

⁹
There is here no qualifying tournament for the Qualies itself, though some particularly huge tournaments have meta-Qualies.
The Qualies also have tons of wild-card berths, most of whom here are given to Canadian players, e.g. the collegian that Michael
Joyce is beating up on right now in the first round.

¹⁰
These slots are usually placed right near the top seeds, which is the reason why in the televised first rounds of major tournaments
you often see Agassi or Sampras smearing some totally obscure guy—that guy’s usually a qualifier. It’s also part of why
it’s so hard for somebody low-ranked enough to have to play the Qualies of tournaments to move up in the rankings enough so
that he doesn’t have to play Qualies anymore—he usually meets a high-ranked player in the very first round and gets smeared.

¹¹
Which is another reason why qualifiers usually get smeared by the top players they face in the early rounds—the qualifier
is playing his fourth or fifth match in three days, while the top players usually have had a couple days with their masseur
and creative-visualization consultant to get ready for the first round. If asked, Michael Joyce will detail all these asymmetries
and stacked odds the same way a farmer will speak of poor weather, with an absence of emotion that seems deep instead of blank.

¹²
(pronounced KRY-chek)

¹³
At a certain point this summer his ranking will be as high as 62.

¹⁴
It turns out that a portion of the talent required to survive in the trenches of the ATP Tour is emotional: Joyce is able
to keep from getting upset about stuff that struck me as hard not to get upset about. When he points out that there’s “no
point” getting exercised about unfairnesses you can’t control, I think what he’s really saying is that you either learn how
not to get upset about it or you disappear from the Tour. The temperamental behavior of many of the game’s top players—which
gives the public the distorted idea that most pro players are oversensitive brats—is on a qualifier’s view easily explainable:
top players are temperamental because they can afford to be.

¹⁵
The really top players not only have their expenses comped but often get paid outright for agreeing to enter a tournament.
These fees are called “guarantees” and are technically advances against prize money: in effect, an Agassi/Sampras/Becker will
receive a “guarantee” of the champion’s prize money (usually a couple hundred thousand) just for competing, whether he wins
the tournament or not. This means that if top seed Agassi wins the Canadian Open, he wins $254,000 U.S., but if he loses,
he gets the money anyway. (This is another reason why tournaments tend to hate upsets, and, some qualifiers complain, why
all sorts of intangibles from match scheduling to close line-calls tend to go the stars’ way.) Not all tournaments have guarantees
—the Grand Slams don’t, because the top players will show up for Wimbledon and the French, Australian, and U.S. Opens on
their own incentive—but most have them, and the less established and prestigious a tournament, the more it needs to guarantee
money to get the top players to come and attract spectators and media (which is what the tournament’s title sponsor wants,
very much).

Guarantees used to be against ATP rules and were under the table; they’ve been legal since the early ’90s.
There’s great debate among tennis pundits about whether legal guarantees have helped the game by making the finances less
shady or have hurt the game by widening the psychological gap between the stars and all the other players and by upping the
pressure on tournaments to make it as likely as possible that the stars don’t get upset by an unknown. It is impossible to
get Michael Joyce to give a straight answer on whether he thinks guarantees are good or bad—it’s not like Joyce is muddled
or Nixonianly evasive about it, but rather that he can’t afford to think in good/bad terms, to nurture resentment or bitterness
or frustration. My guess is that he avoids these feelings because they make it even harder to play against Agassi and the
rest, and he cares less about what’s “right” in the grand scheme than he does about maximizing his own psychological chances
against other players. This seems totally understandable, though I’m kind of awed by Joyce’s evident ability to shut down
lines of thinking that aren’t to his advantage.

¹⁶
( pronounced YAkob hLAsick)

¹⁷
It took forever to get there from the hotel because I didn’t yet know that press can, with some wangling, get rides in the
courtesy cars with the players, if there’s room. Tennis journalism is apparently its own special world, and it takes a little
while to learn the ins and outs of how media can finagle access to some of the services the tournament provides: courtesy
cars, VIP treatment in terms of restaurant reservations, even free laundry service at the hotel. Most of this stuff I learned
about just as I was getting ready to come home.

¹⁸
Joyce is even more impressive, but I hadn’t seen Joyce yet. And Enqvist is even more impressive than Joyce, and Agassi live
is even more impressive than Enqvist. After the week was over, I truly understand why Charlton Heston looks gray and ravaged
on his descent from Sinai: past a certain point, impressiveness is corrosive to the psyche.

¹⁹
During his two daily one-hour practice sessions he wears the hat backwards, and also wears boxy plaid shorts that look for
all the world like swimtrunks. His favorite practice T-shirt has FEAR: THE ENEMY OF DREAMS on the chest. He laughs a lot when
he practices. You can tell just by looking at him out there that he’s totally likable and cool.

²⁰
If you’ve played only casually, it is probably hard to understand how physically demanding really serious tennis is. Realizing
that these pros can move one another from one end of the 27′ baseline to the other pretty much at will, and that they hardly
ever end a point early by making an unforced error, might stimulate your imagination. A close best-of-three-set match is probably
equivalent in its demands to a couple hours of basketball, but we’re talking full-court basketball.

²¹
Something else you don’t get a good sense of on television: tennis is a very sweaty game. On ESPN or whatever, when you see
a player walk over to the ballboy after a point and request a towel and quickly wipe off his arm and hand and toss the wet
towel back to the (rather luckless) ballboy, most of the time the towel thing isn’t a stall or a meditative pause—it’s because
sweat is running down the inside of the player’s arm in such volume that it’s getting all over his hand and making the racquet
slippery. Especially on the sizzling North American summer junket, players sweat through their shirts early on, and sometimes
also their shorts. (Sampras always wears light-blue shorts that sweat through everyplace but his jockstrap, which looks funny
and kind of endearing, like he’s an incontinent child—Sampras is surprisingly childlike and cute on the court, in person,
in contrast to Agassi, who’s about as cute as a Port Authority whore.)