David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

In fact, as unrevealing of character as its press-release tone and generic-myth structure make this memoir, it’s the narrator’s cluelessness that permits us our only glimpses of anything like a real and faceted life. That is, relief from the book’s skewed loyalties can be found only in those places where the author seems unwittingly to betray them. She protests, for instance, repeatedly and with an almost Gertrudian fervor, that her mother “did not force” her into tennis at age three, it apparently never occurring to Tracy Austin that a three-year-old hasn’t got enough awareness of choices to require any forcing. This was the child of a mom who’d spent the evening before Tracy’s birth hitting tennis balls to the family’s other four children, three of whom also ended up playing pro tennis. Many of the memoir’s recollections of Mrs. Austin seem almost Viennese in their repression—“My mother always made sure I behaved on court, but I never even considered acting up”—and downright creepy are some of the details Austin chooses in order to evince “how nonintense my tennis background really was”:

Everyone thinks every young tennis player is very one-dimensional, which just wasn’t true in my case. Until I was fourteen, I never played tennis on Monday…. My mother made sure I never put in seven straight days on the court. She didn’t go to the club on Mondays, so we never went there.

It gets weirder. Later in the book’s childhood section, Austin discusses her “wonderful friendship” with a man from their country club who “set up … matches for me against unsuspecting foes in later years and … won a lot of money from his friends” and, as a token of friendship, “bought me a necklace with a T hanging on it. The T had fourteen diamonds on it.” She was apparently ten at this point. As the book’s now fully adult Austin analyzes the relationship, “He was a very wealthy criminal lawyer, and I didn’t have very much money. With all his gifts for me, he made me feel special.” What a guy. Regarding her de facto employment in what is technically known as sports hustling: “It was all in good fun.”

In the subsequent section, Austin recalls a 1978 pro tournament in Japan that she hadn’t much wanted to enter:

It was just too far from home and I was tired from the travel grind. They kept offering me more and more money for an appearance fee — well over a hundred thousand dollars — but I said no. Finally, they offered to fly my whole family over. That did it. We went, and I won easily.

Besides displaying an odd financial sense (she won’t come for $100,000+, but will come if they add a couple thousand in airfare?), Tracy Austin seems here unaware of the fact that, in the late Seventies, any player who accepted a guaranteed payment just for entering a tournament was in violation of a serious tour rule. The backstory here is that both genders’ player associations had outlawed these payments because they threatened both the real and the perceived integrity of pro tennis. A tournament that has paid some star player a hefty guarantee — wanting her in the draw because her celebrity will help increase ticket sales, corporate sponsorships, TV revenues, etc. — thereafter has an obvious stake in that player’s survival in the tournament, and so has an equally obvious interest in keeping her from getting upset by some lesser-known player in the early rounds, which, since matches’ linesmen and umpires are employed by the tournament, can lead to shady officiating. And has so led. Far stranger things than a marquee player’s receiving a suspicious number of favorable line calls have happened … though apparently somehow not in Tracy Austin’s experience.

The naïveté on display throughout this memoir is doubly confusing. On the one hand, there’s little sign in this narrator of anything like the frontal-lobe activity required for outright deception. On the other, Austin’s ignorance of her sport’s grittier realities seems literally incredible. Random examples. When she sees a player “tank” a 1988 tournament match to make time for a lucrative appearance in a TV ad, Tracy “couldn’t believe it…. I had never played with anyone who threw a match before, so it took me a set and a half to realize what was happening.” This even though match-tanking had been widely and publicly reported as a dark consequence of skyrocketing exhibition and endorsement fees for at least the eleven years Austin had been in pro tennis. Or, drugswise, although problems with everything up to cocaine and heroin in pro tennis had been not only acknowledged but written about in the 1980s, * Austin manages to move the reader to both scorn and pity with pronouncements like “I assume players were experimenting with marijuana and certainly were drinking alcohol, but I don’t know who or when or where. I wasn’t invited to those parties, if they were happening at all. And I’m very glad I wasn’t.” And so on and so on.

Ultimately, though, what makes Beyond Center Court so especially disappointing is that it could have been much more than just another I-was-born-to-play sports memoir. The facts of Tracy Austin’s life and its trajectory are almost classically tragic. She was the first of tennis’s now-ubiquitous nymphet prodigies, and her rise was meteoric. Picked out of the crowd as a toddler by coaching guru Vic Braden, Austin was on the cover of World Tennis magazine at age four. She played her first junior tournament at seven, and by ten she had won the national girls’ twelve-and-under championship both indoors and out- and was being invited to play public exhibitions. At thirteen she had won national titles in most junior age-groups, been drafted as a professional by World Team Tennis, and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated under the teaser “A Star Is Born.” At fourteen, having chewed up every female in US juniors, she entered the preliminary qualifiers for her first professional tournament and proceeded to win not just the qualifying event but the whole tourney — a feat roughly equivalent to someone who was ineligible for a DMV learner’s permit winning the Indianapolis 500. She played Wimbledon at fourteen, turned pro as a ninth-grader, won the US Open at sixteen, and was ranked number one in the world at just seventeen, in 1980. This was the same year her body started to fall apart. She spent the next four years effectively crippled by injuries and bizarre accidents, playing sporadically and watching her ranking plummet, and was for all practical purposes retired from tennis at age twenty-one. In 1989, her one serious attempt at a comeback ended on the way to the US Open, when a speeder ran a red light and nearly killed her. She is now, as of this writing, a professional former sports star, running celebrity clinics for corporate sponsors and doing sad little bits of color commentary on some of the same cable channels I’d first seen her play on.

What’s nearly Greek about her career’s arc is that Tracy Austin’s most conspicuous virtue, a relentless workaholic perfectionism that combined with raw talent to make her such a prodigious success, turned out to be also her flaw and bane. She was, even after puberty, a tiny person, and her obsessive practice regimen and uncompromising effort in every last match began to afflict her with what sports MDs now know to be simple consequences of hypertrophy and chronic wear: hamstring and hip flexor pulls, sciatica, scoliosis, tendinitis, stress fractures, plantar fasciitis. Then too, since woe classically breeds more woe, she was freak-accident-prone: coaches who fall on her while ice-skating and break her ankle, psychotic chiropractors who pull her spine out of alignment, waiters who splash her with scalding water, color-blind speeders on the JFK Parkway.

A successful Tracy Austin autobiography, then, could have afforded us plain old plumbers and accountants more than just access to the unquestioned genius of an athletic savant or her high-speed ascent to the top of a univocal, mathematically computed hierarchy. This book could actually have helped us to countenance the sports myth’s dark side. The only thing Tracy Austin had ever known how to do, her art — what the tragic-savvy Greeks would have called her techne?248–175? that state in which Austin’s mastery of craft facilitated a communion with the gods themselves — was removed from her at an age when most of us are just starting to think seriously about committing ourselves to some pursuit. This memoir could have been about both the seductive immortality of competitive success and the less seductive but way more significant fragility and impermanence of all the competitive venues in which mortal humans chase immortality. Austin’s story could, since the predicament of a dedicated athletic prodigy washed up at twenty-one differs in nothing more than degree from that of a dedicated CPA and family man dying at sixty-two, have been profound. The book could, since having it all at seventeen and then losing it all by twenty-one because of stuff outside your control is just like death except you have to go on living afterward, have been truly inspirational. And the publisher’s flap copy promises just this: “The inspirational story of Tracy Austin’s long struggle to find a life beyond championship tennis.”