A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (57 page)

¹²
(pronounced KRY-chek)

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

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

And they drink enormous amounts of water, staggering amounts. I thought I was seeing things at first, watching matches, as players seemed to go through one of those skinny half-liter Evian bottles every second side-change, but Michael Joyce confirmed it. Pro-grade tennis players seem to have evolved a metabolic system that allows rapid absorption of water and its transformation into sweat. I myself—who am not pro-grade, but do sweat like a pig—drink a lot of water a couple hours before I play but don’t drink anything during a match. This is because a couple swallows of water usually just makes me want more, and if I drink as much as I want I end up with a protruding tummy and a sloshing sound when I run.

(Most players I spoke with confirm, by the way, that Gatorade and All-Sport and Boost and all those pricey electrolytic sports drinks are mostly bullshit, that salt and carbs at table and small lakes of daily H2O are the way to go. The players who didn’t confirm this turned out to be players who had endorsement deals with some pricey-sports-drink manufacturer, but I personally saw at least one such player dumping out his bottle’s pricey electrolytic contents and replacing them with good old water, for his match.)

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The taller you are, the harder you can serve (get a protractor and figure it out), but the less able to bend and reverse direction you are. Tall guys tend to be serve-and-volleyers, and they live and die by their serves. Bill Tilden, Stan Smith, Arthur Ashe, Roscoe Tanner, and Goran Ivanisevic were/are all tall guys with serve-dependent games.

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This is mind-bogglingly hard to do when the ball’s hit hard. If we can assume you’ve played Little League or sandlot ball or something, imagine the hardest-hit grounder of all time coming at you at shortstop, and then you not standing waiting to try to knock it down but actually of your own free will running forward
toward
the grounder, then trying not just to catch it in a big soft glove but to strike it hard and reverse its direction and send it someplace frightfully specific and far away.

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Something else that’s hotly debated by tennis authorities is the trend of players going pro at younger and younger ages and skipping college and college tennis and plunging into the stress and peripatetic loneliness of the Tour, etc. Michael Joyce skipped college and went directly onto the pro tour because at 18 he’d just won the U.S. National Juniors, and this created a set of overwhelming inducements to turn pro. The winner at the National 18-and-Under Singles automatically gets a wild card into the U.S. Opens main draw for that year. In addition, a year’s top junior comes to the powerful but notoriously fickle and temporary attention of major clothing and racquet companies. Joyce’s victory over the 128-man National field at Kalamazoo MI in 1991 resulted in endorsement offers from Fila and Yonex worth around $100,000. $100,000 is about what it takes to finance three years on the Tour for a very young player who can’t reasonably expect to earn a whole lot of prize-money.

Joyce could have turned down that offer of a three-year subsidy and gone to college, but if he’d gone to college it would have been primarily to play tennis. Coaches at major universities apparently offered Joyce inducements to come play for them so literally outrageous and incredible that I wouldn’t repeat them here even if Joyce hadn’t asked me not to.

The reason why Michael Joyce would have gone to college primarily to play tennis is that the academic and social aspects of collegiate life interest him about as much as hitting 2500 crosscourt forehands while a coach yells at you in foreign languages would interest you. Tennis is what Michael Joyce loves and lives for and
is
. He sees little point in telling anybody anything different. It’s the only thing he’s devoted himself to, and he’s given massive amounts of himself to it, and as far as he understands it it’s all he wants to do or be. Because he started playing at age two and competing at age seven, however, and had the first half-dozen years of his career directed rather shall we say
forcefully
and
enthusiastically
by his father (who Joyce estimates spent probably around $250,000 on lessons and court-time and equipment and travel during Michael’s junior career), it seemed reasonable to ask Joyce to what extent he
“chose
” to devote himself to tennis. Can you
“choose
” something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours?

Joyce’s response to this line of inquiry strikes me as both unsatisfactory and marvelous. Because of course the question is unanswerable, at least it’s unanswerable by a person who’s already—as far as he understands it—
“chosen
” Joyce’s answer is that it doesn’t really matter much to him whether he originally
“chose
” serious tennis or not; all he knows is that he loves it. He tries to explain his feelings at the Nationals in 1991: “You get there and look at the draw, it’s a 128 draw, there’s so many guys you have to beat. And then it’s all over and you’ve won, you’re the National Champion—there’s nothing like it. I get chills even talking about it.” Or how it was just the previous week in Washington: “I’m playing Agassi, and it’s great tennis, and there’s like thousands of fans going nuts. I can’t describe the feeling. Where else could I get that?”

What he says aloud is understandable, but it’s not the marvelous part. The marvelous part is the way Joyce’s face looks when he talks about what tennis means to him. He loves it; you can see this in his face when he talks about it: his eyes normally have a kind of Asiatic cast because of the slight epicanthic fold common to ethnic Irishmen, but when he speaks of tennis and his career the eyes get round and the pupils dilate and the look in them is one of love. The love is not the love one feels for a job or a lover or any of the loci of intensity that most of us choose to say we love. It’s the sort of love you see in the eyes of really old people who’ve been happily married for an incredibly long time, or in religious people who are so religious they’ve devoted their lives to religious stuff: it’s the sort of love whose measure is what it has cost, what one’s given up for it. Whether there’s
“choice
” involved is, at a certain point, of no interest… since it’s the very surrender of choice and self that informs the love in the first place.

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(aka serve-and-volley; see Note 22)

²⁶
I don’t know whether you know this, but Connors had one of the most eccentric games in the history of tennis—he was an aggressive “power” player who rarely came to net, had the serve of an ectomorphic girl, and hit everything totally spinless and flat (which is inadvisable on groundstrokes because the absence of spin makes the ball so hard to control). His game was all the stranger because the racquet he generated all his firepower from the baseline with was a Wilson T2000, a weird steel thing that’s one of the single shittiest tennis racquets ever made and is regarded by most serious players as useful only for home defense or prying large rocks out of your backyard or something. Connors was addicted to this racquet and kept using it even after Wilson stopped making it, forfeiting millions in potential endorsement money by doing so. Connors was eccentric (and kind of repulsive) in lots of other ways, too, none of which are germane to this article.