Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

Yours,

Maximilian Gross

Dearest Mr. Wilcox,

I am writing you from the veranda at the Escondido, which is filled with players and parents and coaches, much of South Florida’s tennis aristocracy. Lee is one of four Academy players entered in the tournament, and from where I sit I can see him rallying with a junior player from Taiwan.

I’m happy to report that Pete Sampras is indeed staying at the Escondido and was seen this morning at the breakfast buffet with his movie-star wife and their two sons. It is hard to see Sampras eating his eggs and oatmeal and sausages and not think of how many times on the brink of a Grand Slam he flamed out so impotently in the French. There is nothing sadder than seeing a big hitter stumble and struggle on slow clay.

I wonder how much of you is in Lee, and whether in your early days with the All-City Orchestra and later with Stan Kenton and Lionel Hampton you were equally intense and abstracted. I must say that I’ve always loved your work. Lee told me yesterday about the first time he saw you perform, when he was eleven and you were in Montreal. I now own a dozen of your CDs and I play them in the morning when I awake and drink my coffee.

In the evenings Lee goes boogie boarding with Vivi, which I think is perfectly healthy, though I know some coaches might discourage such activities. In Lee’s case I think we should welcome any broadening of his interests — moments in which he can be a kid, if you will.

As for our reason for being here, Lee did as well as we could have hoped. We played him up an age group, in the 18s, and he won his first three matches before losing to the second seed. Sampras watched four or five games of Lee’s defeat and said — these are his exact words—“This kid is pretty good.” I wish you could have been there to hear this, but I hope you can imagine yourself where I was, hearing such a career-making compliment!

I was thinking of you, Mr. Wilcox, and what you might have done in this instance, how you would have responded. I was channeling the moment in the Frankfurt documentary where you take that pretentious journalist to task.

“You bet your fucking ass,” he is, I said, though it is far from my nature to use that sort of language, and certainly not in front of the greatest champion in our sport. I may have said some other things to the hotel staff there, who warned me to be quiet. I was escorted to my room and asked to leave first thing in the morning.

The fuck I will, I thought.

I watched the end of Lee’s match from my room. I thought the last match might go on forever. Do you know those rallies where each of you digs to the bottom and reaches his racket out and manages the strength to knock the ball across again, and then sprints on strained calves and cramping stomach back to the center of the court for more? Was it like that on those late nights when you played one last set at Birdland?

From where does genius arise?

When he lost, Lee shook the other boy’s hand and then went down to the beach and watched the ocean for an hour or so. I joined him there and took him to one of the restaurants inside where I bought him a fish dinner, which he ate without a word.

“Would it be okay if I stopped playing for a while?” he asked me afterward.

“Why would you stop playing?”

“I feel tired,” he said.

“Are we talking a few days? A week?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe more than a week.”

“Whatever you need,” I said. And then he collapsed.

There was a doctor in the hotel who said it was simply heat exhaustion and cramps. They told him to rest with a cold washcloth on his forehead, and to drink electrolytes. At around eleven he went downstairs with the Danish girl. They sat by the pool with their feet in the water. I watched them for a while and then went to bed.

In the morning Lee was on the court, hitting with Pete Sampras as though none of this had happened. I stood on the veranda with my suitcase packed, waiting for a taxi to come and take me to another hotel. Sampras kept staring over at me, unsmiling. May I say here that the champ has not aged terribly well? Not in his face anyhow. The sun has been particularly unkind to him, giving him the deep lines of an aging lifeguard. Nor has his hairline held up as he must have hoped.

When they’d concluded their workout, Sampras told me I should stay away from Lee and that Lee would be traveling with Pete as his practice partner.

My face felt hot, and my jaw tightened.

“But you don’t play tournaments anymore,” I said.

And he said, “I know a bad situation when I see one.”

An argument ensued, and I probably handled it badly, though I think the staff at the Escondido was equally to blame. As a result, my continued employment at the Academy is under discussion, and I have not seen or heard from Lee since then. While Pete Sampras is a well-known celebrity, I do not know if it is in your wishes for your son to be the hitting partner of a washed-up balding husband of a second-rate Hollywood starlet. I told him he would need your permission for us to let Lee go anywhere, and he said, “It’s been handled,” without explaining what that meant.

I believe great things are in the future for all of us provided we sort out these complications. Would you be able to come soon to Florida, or might you be able to meet with me where you are to discuss strategies? If you hear from Lee, can you tell him that we still have work to do?

I am waiting for your reply,

Maximilian Gross

Venerable Mr. Wilcox,

There is not much these days to say for loyalty, or for all the careers I’ve nurtured, or for the reputation I’ve developed over decades of playing and teaching and learning about the game. Around ten of the players stood up for me, as well as a few of the cafeteria staff, and Antonio from the pro shop. But then there were lies spoken by a few of the least reliable, those most likely to profit from my expulsion, those who would turn the Academy into nothing more than a way station to the pros. Gone would be any learning, or staring up at the sky, or listening to music such as your own. Gone would be the role of the imagination, so much larger in the life of a great athlete than most educators ever recognize. Go study the neurochemistry of Nastase and Panatta and Budge, and certainly Federer and the great McEnroe, and you will see so much of what you might see in the brains of Mozart or Degas or, from your world, Miles Davis. What if this side of those brains had never developed? It was my job, I always believed, to link the physical and the metaphysical. Now it will be repetitive drills and weight training.

I saw Lee after he’d cleared out of his dormitory suite. I had the sinking feeling one has when one has been lied about. At the same time he seemed as though he wanted something from me, something he couldn’t articulate. Tropical storm clouds gathered above us.

Neither of us knew then about my impending dismissal, and I said nothing to him of my talk with the director. I gave him a signed copy of Brad Gilbert’s book on match strategy, and enough string to last him through the summer.

“Did you steal this?” he asked me.

“Of course not. It’s yours,” I said.

“I’m all set on equipment,” he said, the sky darkening. “But thanks for the book.”

On the title page I’d written a warning about Sampras that I now wished I could erase: Big serves are like big bustlines. Nice to look at, but no guarantee of a person’s character.

Nothing else was said, because it started to pour. I wondered what one does here — shake hands, embrace? In some measurable way my heart was breaking. We stood across from each other awkwardly and then he walked away.

The Danish girl has quit the Academy and has accompanied me on my trip north to see you. She is crazy about Lee, she says, and wants to meet you. I am devoting myself now to her training and believe she has it in her to make a splash at the Australian this year. I am not fond of the way people look at us while we’re on the road, and so for now we are pretending to be father and daughter, like James Mason and Sue Lyon. There is nothing untoward about our interactions, though on one occasion Vivi, frustrated I believe by her inability to contact Lee, pressed her not unremarkably soft lips against mine, something that startled me and that I told her definitively could not happen again.