I don’t know why I went to the racquet club in Berwyn, Pa., that day. It was June, and the Middle States 18s and 16s sectional championships were being held there, but I wasn’t entered in them. I wasn’t even eligible for them, since I was only 13 or 14 at the time. But my grandmother lived nearby, and my dad and I must have come over to Berwyn, a Philadelphia suburb, just to watch. In those days, I was a bigger fan of my fellow junior players than I was the pros. Al Parker, who won the junior USTA Grand Slam as a 12-year-old and was close to my age, was a higher god to me than John McEnroe. That even trickled down to the guys in my section. I think I would rather have watched the top Middle States players in the age divisions above me than I would Ivan Lendl or Jose Luis Clerc.
Berwyn was the mecca of Middle States in those days. It wasn’t an old-line Main Line club, but it had tiers of hard courts that stretched out below a central viewing area, where the elite players from all over the section congregated. This was the gateway tournament to nationals, and had a full consolation draw. If you finished in the Top 5, you were eligible to go to the big summer events: Kalamazoo, the U.S. Clay Courts, the U.S. Hard Courts. All of these tournaments loomed in my mind like Wimbledon might for a journeyman pro. Maybe it was because I always sat just on the outside looking in at them. After slowly climbing the ranks over the years, I would finish 6th twice at Middle States championships in the 18s, but I never made it to nationals.
All that was still to come as I walked around Berwyn that day watching the older kids play. A bunch of them had been in my age division the year before. That season, they'd been the dominant older players; now they were the younger upstarts facing more experienced opponents. You wouldn’t think that a single year could make that much difference, but it does when you’re a teenager. Barring a special talent, it’s not easy for a 15-year-old to beat a 16-year-old.
The first match I watched was between a big, curly-haired kid named Mark, who was 15, and his older and more famous opponent, named Tim, who was 16 and had a high national ranking. Mark had shredded me a few times the year before. This was 1983, when the game was shifting toward the full-swing Western forehand and two-handed backhand that are still dominant today. Bollettieri’s was just gaining a national reputation, after the success of Jimmy Arias and Aaron Krickstein. Mark and the other kids a year older than me were all developing that style of play. They grunted, they took the ball on the rise, and they could hit the ball past you from the baseline. But, from my experience with them, they were also high-strung hotheads, prone to emotional meltdowns.
So as I stood on the patio looking down on this match, what surprised me most was how concentrated and mature Mark seemed now. This was a different brand of tennis from what I was playing in the 14s. These guys looked more like the pros than juniors: They kept their heads down, tried different tactics, and showed almost no emotion whatsoever—they couldn’t afford to waste the energy. There was an intensity to both of their efforts that frankly blew me away. What sport had I been playing? I could see why Mark needed to make this effort. Tim was a brutally consistent, awkward, and tenacious player who still used a wood racquet and never hit the same shot twice. His strokes could best be described as gnarled, but they were annoying and tricky—they worked. He countered Mark’s forehand drives with everything he had, and played with a hunched, desperate, inner-directed determination that I can still see in my mind today.
The same was true all over the grounds. There was a war on every court, as the young (the 15 year olds) challenged the old (the 16 year olds). There were occasional outbursts and lots of loud grunts, there was a symphony of sneaker squeaks and pounded tennis balls, but there was no whining, no slumped shoulders, no kids holding back tears the way they did in my age group. In an odd reversal, it was the young at Berwyn who were playing the bigger, more power-oriented, more modern game—the sport was changing seemingly by the month in those days. Diadoras, formerly the ultimate status symbol, were over; McEnroe-style blue swoosh Nike sneakers and Rossignol racquets were in. Shorts were still short, but the headband was gone. Bjorn Borg had officially left the building by 1983, and tennis was moving out of his titanic shadow and into the 80s as we would remember them. Some kids still carried their racquets in stacks individually, the way Borg and McEnroe did, but others had begun to show up with primitive versions of the space-age racquet bags that everyone carts around today. On changeovers, a few players, including Mark, sat back and blasted their Walkmans, something I’d never seen before, and which would never end up working for me. (One of those Walkman-blasters and ball-bashers was, I shudder to write now, a kid named Lyle Menendez—not exactly a ringing endorsement for the modern game.)
Mid-sized graphite racquets faced off against Jack Kramer wooden sticks. Some kids used one-handed backhands and served and volleyed; others, like Mark, swung as hard as they could at everything. That’s commonplace today, of course, but was pretty stunning then. The inside-out forehand had also begun to make its way into the junior game. It didn’t seem possible that Mark could range all the way over to the sideline on his backhand side and hit a forehand. We'd been taught never to leave that much court open. This looked reckless, almost unfair. I didn’t think the shot would last. I sided with the old school, and still believed consistency and a well-rounded game would win out. But by the end of the year it was becoming apparent that the new school would triumph, a fact that would be driven home to me at the U.S. Open, where I watched a 16-year-old Krickstein upset Vitas Gerulaitis in the Grandstand. Two years later, Boris Becker won Wimbledon and Lendl took over No. 1 from McEnroe. A year after that Andre Agassi made his debut, and the transition was complete.
Mark lost to Tim that day in three sets, but he’d challenged the older and higher-ranked player, and, in a small way, provided a glimpse of tennis's future—strength, speed, and power wouldn't be stopped by crafty, tricky determination forever. But I’d been affected by something else in that match, and in other matches. In my three years of playing tournaments, I’d made all of my shots consistent, acquired the right clothes and the right equipment—I would soon switch, along with my allegiances, from a Borg Donnay to a McEnroe Dunlop—and learned how to walk around a court with the distracted, I-know-I’m-the-center-of-attention-but-I-can’t-show-that-I-know-it arrogance of the stereotypical bratty tennis player. Leaving Berwyn that day, though,I knew I'd been missing something, and the knowledge inspired me. I still can’t quite define what it was, but I think it's part of the education of every young tennis player. The closest I can get is to say that I realized that, at 14, I had no guts—I was a kid, and suddenly tennis didn’t seem like child’s play. You couldn’t afford to mess around out there, and the sense of purpose that could give you had been thrilling to see up close. I wanted to feel it myself. Tennis, I knew now, was no fun, and that’s exactly what made it so exciting.
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Have a good weekend.