With the pro season lulling a bit, here's a junior rec opus to fill the gap; it's a bit longer than intended, I admit. I'll be back Monday to talk about Stuttgart and all other relevant tennis happenings.
The end of this year’s playing season, which is upon us in the Northeast, has brought to mind my days as a skinny warrior in the junior-tennis ranks. The memories began to unearth themselves this past weekend, when I was cleaning a few artifacts out of my parents’ place in Pennsylvania. Among the relics were half a dozen mysterious tennis trophies. Apparently I finished second in the 14-and-unders in a tournament in Altoona, Pa., in 1982. Who I beat or lost to along the way, I have no recollection—but I’ll take it.
My junior career went on exclusively in the USTA’s Middle States section, which comprises Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the rural half of New Jersey. I probably don’t need to tell you that this has never been a hotbed of tennis talent. The two most famous Middle States players of my era didn’t make it as pros—they went to jail for life. No, this isn’t a story about the gruesome twosome, Lyle and Erik Menendez. I’m assuming you know as much about them as you need to know. Besides, I didn’t see the Menendezes and their red Alfa Romeo Spider (that’s what Lyle drove to tournaments as a 16-year-old) too often in those days. They were from Princeton, N.J.; I played most of my junior ball in Central Pennsylvania.
James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, described the politics of my home state this way: “Philadelphia on one side, Pittsburgh on the other, Alabama in between.” Each summer, two or three kids from my hometown and I joined a mini junior tennis circuit through this “in between” part of the state and its rusty railroad and mining towns. Our parents loaded us into long green station wagons and drove to tournaments played on public hard courts in the sharp hills around Bloomsburg, Hazelton, Wilkes-Barre, Altoona, State College, Williamsport, Jersey Shore—yes, there’s a town in the middle of Pennsylvania called Jersey Shore. It never seemed odd to us.
We also traveled farther south, to the low-slung Pennsylvania Dutch country near Lancaster, York, and Hanover. For some never-explained reason there were slow, red-clay courts hidden in the backcountry here; I had more than a few three-hour moonball wars on them with other bony 13-year-olds. These could be nerve-wracking tournaments. The caliber of opponents was higher—we had moved a couple hours closer to civilization—and the long trek gave you more time to get nervous. Twenty years later, I took a drive from Central PA down to Washington, D.C., using a route that wound through the farmland at the southern edge of the state. I began to feel butterflies at one point, but had no idea why. A few minutes later I passed a sign that read “Hanover, next right.” My nerves had recognized the place before my brain did.
As competitive as these weekend events were, they were really small-town rehearsals for the finale of the summer Middle States season. This was a boys’ tournament held at the end of August at the Philmont Country Club, on the northern border of Philadelphia. (“Philmont” stands for the two PA counties it straddles, Philadelphia and Montgomery.) I had heard word of this far away event when I was 11 or 12, but it seemed beyond my ability or ambition. This was the Philly suburbs, a land of intimidating wealth, talent, and special training—I would have called it entitlement if I’d known the word. Then an older friend from my hometown decided to make the four-hour drive to play Philmont. It was an unprecedented leap out of the sticks and into the Eastern Corridor; kids came from New York to play this tournament. I was awed when my friend eked out his first-round match.
Over the next few years I started making regular trips out of “Alabama” to play in Pittsburgh and Philly. I was ranked in the Top 15 in Middle States and regularly seeded at tournaments. To the section’s junior in-crowd, I remained a slightly marginal and unlikely character—“What town are you from?”—but they acknowledged my existence and let me play video games with them.
I returned the favor by copying everything they did. I got a shiny, navy-blue warm-up suit, a universal sign that you were an opponent to be reckoned with; anything less and you were clearly a hopeless local destined for a speedy drubbing. No matter what I wore, though, I was put in my place often enough by the big guns from the burbs. You haven’t felt humiliation on a tennis court until your highly favored, and much taller, opponent spends the entire warm-up chomping on a Danish, then beats you like a drum in 40 minutes.
At 14, I entered the rarefied air grounds of the Philmont CC. Most Middle States tournaments, as I said, were held on public-park courts or at indoor racquet clubs that had sprung up a decade earlier. To drive out of the chaotic Philly suburbs and onto the grounds at Philmont was to travel deeper into the sport’s upper-crust past. I seem to remember the club having a guard station at its entrance. If you passed muster there, you traveled up a driveway that wound through a colossal, beautifully maintained golf course. I can’t say for sure how colossal I would find it today, 24 years later, but the place smelled like money to me at the time.
On this first visit—and every one after—my dad and I drove toward the center of the club, where the tennis courts were situated. The noisy highways and strip malls we’d passed minutes earlier were replaced by the sound of tennis balls thudding off racquets (some wood, some graphite; this was 1983, the time of the Great Transition)—punctuated by an occasional cry of teen anguish that I knew well. The tennis clubhouse, a medium-sized white building, sat at the top of a hill. Just behind it was a rectangular courtyard where players and parents gathered to dish dirt and exhaustively analyze the draws.
A dozen or so Har-Tru courts were arranged in sets of two in various directions down the hill—the layout was quaint and deluxe at the same time. On the opening day of the tournament, I could look out and see friends and rivals running, hitting, fist-pumping, and whining all over the grounds. Their names and faces come back to me more easily than my high school classmates’: Mark Freitag, Chris Emkey, Richie Redick, Steve Lesko, Greg Halacy, Steve Maleson, Matt Quigley, Joe Sutherland, Oliver Merrill, Paul Maben, Ken and Robby Rothkoff, Bruce Ellis, Bobby Boyle, Jeff Green, Drew Stockmall, and a dozen others. It was a clique that spanned three states.
By the time I started at Philmont, the top three or four players in Middle States no longer bothered with it. Dave DiLucia, who would go on to have a decent pro career as a doubles specialist, was ranked No. 1 in the section and saw no reason to jeopardize that ranking—and his trips to nationals—with an unnecessary loss. Still, the place attracted everyone else who mattered. My first memory of the tournament was watching a kid from northern New Jersey, an invader from the Eastern section named Jason Gould, play on one of the two show courts next to the clubhouse. He had a national reputation and was the top seed. Everyone gathered to get a look. We saw something perplexing: a small kid with black curly hair—hardly a grade-A jock—who sliced the ball with two hands off both sides and grunted not only when he hit the ball, but when his opponent hit it. In the end, Gould fit my PA stereotype of a New York tennis player to a T: He was competitive to the point of eccentricity. He won with attitude.
I can’t remember exactly how that first trip ended, but apparently it happened in the quarterfinals. Among the trophies I found in my bedroom last weekend was a 2-inch-by-2-inch, fake-marble cube with the club’s coat of arms on it. Carved into one of its sides, with dignified simplicity, was this: “Philmont Quarterfinals 1983.” It’s still the only tournament I’ve played that gave an award for making the quarters.
The tournament became an annual August ritual for my dad and I. We’d stay at one of my grandparents’ houses, both of which were on the other side of Philly, and make the trip to the tournament through the city on I-95, a road I liked for its big-city velocity and chaos. Because of the wicked late-summer humidity in the area, Philmont was played at a leisurely pace—one singles and one doubles match a day, max, which meant that it stretched into a week-long affair. The matches were also scheduled early in the morning; if I won, we’d be back at my grandparents’ place by the afternoon.
I can remember lying on one of their couches and trying to read some teen tome—Brave New World, maybe—while my mind kept wandering back to the match I’d just finished, and forward to the one coming up. To play in a tennis tournament is to be taken to emotional extremes on a daily basis. After a win, you’re satisfied, relieved, happy—any positive feeling you can name applies. (If nothing else, winning a tennis match teaches you that relief may be the most powerful emotion involved in competition.) But with each hour, thoughts of the next match creep in, and your sense of satisfaction creeps out. By the time you go to bed, you’re a walking anxiety. It only gets worse when you wake up. Every morning of every junior match I ever played began with one profound hope: That my opponent would default.
Nerves or not, I continued to have success at Philmont; the Har-Tru courts fit my baseline game. Each summer brought a memorable moment. My second year there, I played a long-running rival of mine on one of the show courts. While I had pusher-like tendencies at the time, this guy was a pusher extraordinaire. The combination led to multiple three-hour matches over the years and moonball rallies that could last into the 40-50-60-shot range.
On this day we were playing next to two highly ranked 18-year-olds who had attracted a big crowd. Late in our match, one of their balls rolled onto our court, behind me. Our point kept going—and going. It lasted long enough for a second ball of theirs to roll onto our court, this time near the fence behind my opponent. This brought their match to a halt; they were down to one ball. Out of the corner of my eye, as I moved toward the back fence to launch another high-arcing topspin bloop, I could see that both players, as well as every spectator in the club, were now watching us. And watching . . . and watching . . . and watching: Our rally went on interminably, until I finally tripped on the ball that was behind me and sent my next shot long. The bleachers exploded—not in cheers, but loud laughter.
The following year, rain backed up the tournament schedule, which forced the club’s officials to abandon the one-match-a-day tradition. It didn’t take long to find out why they had instituted it in the first place. On a brutally humid day, we trooped out for our second matches under a scalding mid-afternoon sun. Only a few of us came back. There was mass cramping all over the grounds; every 15 minutes or so, a cry of pain went up and a body went down. I got sick in the second set of my match, but my opponent got sicker, and I hobbled off with a win.
I reached the semis in my final year at Philmont. I had collected a few little marble cubes over the years, but never bagged the tall winner’s trophy. In my last singles match in the 18-and-unders, my moonballing nemesis from earlier years reappeared and beat me in one final three-hour marathon. The doubles was my last chance.
Junior doubles is a social event as much as a competitive one. Your status is based on who you can get to play with you; long-term relationships develop, then break down; new friendships and cliques form on the court. At this tournament, I was playing with Paul Maben, a glasses-wearing comedian from the Philly suburbs. It was new ground for both of us—I’d lost to Paul and his regular partner, Joe Sutherland, with a couple different partners of my own in the past, but we’d never been on the same side of the net. This was Nixon goes to China, Middle States-style.
We made a good team. Paul liked doubles and had good instincts around the net. I had a good lefty serve, return, and topspin lob, but I was frozen in place once I got inside the service line. I think I stayed back even on my first serves. We played one of our early matches on a court right next to the clubhouse. It was against a big guy and a little guy. The big guy was dangerous—not outstanding, but always a threat. The little guy was, naturally, scrappy.
There were arguments from the beginning. Somebody hit somebody else in the chest with a ball, and the other team retaliated in the same manner (we must have had good aim). Then our opponents made what we thought was a bad call. Paul called the next ball they hit out, even though it had been clearly in. They erupted and asked me if I agreed with him. I told them, with a sort of sheepish defiance, that I “didn’t see it.” (Paul may remember this somewhat differently, I imagine; I know he’s read this blog in the past.)
The four of us ended up at the net together, unhappy. The match had drawn a disapproving crowd. We called for the tournament director, a cool dude with longish hair named Jimmy Nigro. He walked down to the net and looked us over from behind his sunglasses. Each side pleaded its case. Nigro looked at all of us again and said: “I don’t know what happened, but if you guys don’t cut it out, I’m going to beat the s--- out of all of you.”
None of us had a response. I think we all looked straight down and walked back to play as fast as we could. Nigro headed back through the small crowd of parents and spectators, who seemed impressed with the speed with which he had resolved the crisis. None of them knew what he had said. None of them knew that four teenagers had just been rightfully and brilliantly shamed.
Paul and I went on to win the tournament. In the final, we came back from a deep deficit to finish off the third set 6-1. By the end of the match, I had gotten my serve hooking so severely into the ad court that I could hear the kid returning it say, as I tossed the ball, “Lefty serve out wide again.” It was a voice of miserable resignation.
I picked up my first winner’s trophy from Philmont and started to leave the club for the last time. On our way out, Jimmy Nigro rolled up alongside in a golf cart. I told him we’d won and he said, with cool, gravelly enthusiasm, “All right!” and rolled away. The season was over; it couldn't have ended any better than that.