by Otto Penzler
“They seem to be dealing with their fears,” Tommy said. “And wouldn’t that be brilliant strategy on my part? Get tossed out of a Grand Slam tournament in order to unnerve an official?”
“So it’s not calculated? In fact it’s not something subject to your control?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it? Are you getting help?”
“I’m working on it,” he said grimly. “It’s not that easy.”
• • •
“It’s rage,” he told Diane Sawyer. “I don’t know where it comes from. I know what triggers it, but that’s not necessarily the same thing.”
“A bad call.”
“That’s right.”
“Or a good call,” Sawyer said, “that you think is a bad call.”
Tommy shook his head ruefully. “It’s embarrassing enough to explode when the guy gets it wrong,” he said. “The incident I think you’re referring to, where the replay clearly showed he’d made the right call, well, I felt more ashamed of myself than ever. But even when I’m clearly right and the official’s clearly wrong, there’s no excuse for my behavior.”
“You realize that.”
“Of course I do. I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.”
“And if you are crazy, it’s temporary insanity. As I think our viewers can see, you’re perfectly sane when you don’t have a tennis racquet in your hand.”
“Well, they haven’t asked me to pose for any Mental Health posters,” he said with a grin. “But it’s true I don’t have to struggle to keep a lid on it. That only happens when I’m playing tennis.”
“The court’s where the struggle takes place.”
“Yes.”
“And when you honestly think a call has gone against you, that it’s a bad call…”
“Sometimes I can keep myself in check. But other times I just lose it. I go into a zone and, well, everybody knows what happens then.”
“And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Not really.”
“You’ve had professional help?”
“I’ve tried a few things,” he said. “Different kinds of therapy to help me develop more insight into myself. I think it’s been useful, I think I know myself a little better than I used to, but when some clown says one of my shots was out when I just plain know it was in—”
“You’re helpless.”
“Utterly,” he said. “Everything goes out the window, all the insight, all the coping techniques. The only thing that’s left is the rage.”
• • •
“You have a life most women would envy,” Barbara Walters told Jennifer Terhune. “You’re young, you’re beautiful, you’ve had success as a model and as an actress. And you’re the wife of an enormously talented and successful athlete.”
“I’ve been very fortunate.”
“What’s it like being married to a man like Tommy Terhune?”
“It’s wonderful.”
“The clothes, the travel, the VIP treatment…”
“That’s all nice,” Jennifer acknowledged, “but it’s, like, the least of it. Just being with Tommy, sharing his life, that’s what’s truly wonderful.”
“You love your husband.”
“Of course I do.”
“But I’m sure there are women in my audience,” Walters said, “who wonder if you might not be the least bit afraid of your husband.”
“Afraid of Tommy?”
Walters raised her eyebrows. “Mr. TNT? Terrible Tommy Terhune?”
“Oh, that.”
“ ‘Oh, that.’ You’re married to a man with the most famously explosive temper in the world. Don’t tell me you’re never afraid that something you might do or say will set him off.”
“Not really.”
“What makes you so confident, Jennifer?”
“Tommy has a problem with rage,” Jennifer said, “and I recognize it, and he recognizes it. He’s been working on it, trying a lot of different things, like, to help him cope with it. I just know he’ll be able to get a handle on it.”
“And I’m sure our hopes are with him,” Walters said, “but that doesn’t address the question, does it? What about you, Jennifer? How do you know that terrible temper, that legendary rage, won’t one day be aimed at you?”
“I’m not an umpire.”
“In other words…”
“In other words, the only time Tommy loses it, the only time his temper is the least bit of a problem, is when an official makes a bad call against him on the tennis court. He never gets mad at an opponent. He doesn’t go into the stands after fans who make insulting remarks, and I’ve heard some of them say some pretty outrageous things. But he takes that sort of thing in stride. It’s only bad calls that set him off.”
“And after an explosion?”
“He’s contrite. And ashamed of himself.”
“And angry?”
“Only during a match. Not afterward.”
“So it’s never directed at you?”
“Never.”
“He’s a perfect gentleman?”
“He’s thoughtful and gentle and funny and smart,” Jennifer said, “in addition to being the best tennis player in the world. I’m a lucky girl.”
Later, watching herself on television, Jennifer thought the interview had gone rather well. She sounded a little ditsy, saying like often enough to sound like a Valley Girl, but outside of that she’d done fine. Her hair, which had caused her some concern, wound up looking great on camera, and the dress she’d worn had proved a good choice.
And her comments seemed okay, too. The likes notwithstanding, she came across not as an airhead but as a concerned and supportive life partner and helpmate. And, she told herself, that was fair enough. Everything she’d said had been the truth.
Though not, she had to admit, the whole truth. Because how could she have sat there and told Barbara Walters that Tommy’s temper was one of the things that had attracted her to him in the first place? All of that intensity, when he served and volleyed and made impossible shots look easy, well, it was exciting enough. But all of that passion, when he roared and ranted and just plain lost it, was even more exciting. It stirred her up, it got her juices flowing. It made her, well, hot—and how could she say all that to Barbara Walters?
In fact, when you came right down to it, she was a little disappointed that Tommy never lost it except on the tennis court. It was a pity, in a way, that he never brought that famous temper home with him, that he never lost it in the bedroom.
Sometimes—and she would never admit this to anyone, on or off camera—sometimes she tried to provoke him. Sometimes she tried to make him mad. Even if he were to get physical, even if he were to slap her around a little, well, maybe it was kinky of her, but she thought she might like that.
But it was hopeless. On the court, with a racquet in his hand and an official to argue with, he was Mr. TNT, the notorious Terrible Tommy Terhune. At home, even in the bedchamber, he was what she’d said he was, the perfect gentleman.
Darn it…
• • •
“So we begin to make progress,” the psychoanalyst said. “The need to win your father’s approval. The approval sometimes granted, other times withheld, for reasons having nothing to do with your own behavior.”
“It wasn’t fair,” Tommy said.
“And that is what so infuriates you about a bad call on the tennis court, is it not so? The unfairness of it all. You have done everything you were supposed to do, everything within your power, and still the approval of the man in authority is denied to you. Instead he sits high above you, remote and unreachable, and punishes you.”
“That’s exactly what happens.”
“And it is unfair.”
“Damn right it is.”
“And you explode in rage, the rage you never let yourself feel as a child. But now you know its source. It’s not the official, who of course cannot be expected to be right every time.”
<
br /> “They’re only human.”
“Exactly. It’s your father you’re truly enraged at, and he’s dead, and out of reach of your anger, no longer available to approve or disapprove, to applaud or punish.”
“That’s it, all right.”
“And now, armed with the insight you’ve developed here, you’ll be able to master your rage, to dispel it, to rise above it.”
“You know something?” Tommy said. “I feel better already.”
• • •
In a first-round match two weeks later, an unreturnable passing shot by his unseeded opponent fell just outside the sideline marker. The umpire called it in.
“You blind bastard!” Tommy screamed. “How much are they paying you to steal the match from me?”
• • •
“With every breath,” the little man in the loincloth intoned, “you draw the anger up from the third chakra. Up up up, past the heart chakra, past the throat chakra, to the third eye. Then, as you breathe out, you let the anger flow in a stream out through the third eye, transformed into peaceful energizing white light. Breathe in and the anger is drawn upward from the solar plexus where it is stored. Breathe out and you release it as white light. With every breath, your reserve of rage grows less and less.”
“Om,” Tommy said.
• • •
In his next tournament, the Virginia Slims Equal Opportunity Challenge (dubbed Men Deserve Cancer Too by one commentator), Tommy waltzed through the early rounds, breathing in and breathing out. Then, in the quarterfinals, he smashed his racquet after a service double fault.
He had a replacement racquet, and it wasn’t until midway through the next game that he snapped it over his knee.
• • •
“Why put you on the couch for ten or twelve years,” the doctor said, “when I can give you a little pill that’ll fix what’s wrong with you? If you had high blood pressure, you wouldn’t probe your psyche to uncover the underlying reasons for it, would you? You might stroke out while you were still trying to remember your childhood. No, you’d take your medication. If you had diabetes, you’d watch your diet and take your insulin. I’m going to write you a prescription for a new tranquilizer, and I want you to take one first thing every morning. And you won’t have to master your anger, or figure out where it comes from. Because it’ll be gone.”
“Neat,” said Tommy.
• • •
“There’s something curiously listless about Terhune’s play,” the television announcer reported. “He’s performing well enough to win his early matches, but we’re used to seeing him rush the net more often, and his reflexes seem the tiniest bit less sharp. We’ve heard rumors that he’s been taking medication to help him with his emotional difficulties, and it looks to me as though whatever he’s taking is slowing him down.”
“But his temper’s in check, Jim. When that call went against him in the first set, he barely noticed it.”
“Oh, he noticed it. He stared over at the official, and he looked puzzled. But he didn’t seem to care very much, and he lifted his racquet and played the next point without incident.”
“If he’s on something, it does seem to be working…. Oh, what’s this?”
“He thought Beckheim’s return was out.”
“But it was clearly in, Jim.”
“Not the way Terhune saw it. Oh, there he goes. Oh, my.”
• • •
“Your eyelids are very heavy,” the hypnotist said. “You cannot keep them open. You are sleeping, you are in a deep sleep. From now on, you will be completely calm and unruffled on the tennis court. Nothing will disturb your composure. If anything upsetting occurs, you will stop what you are doing and count slowly to ten. When you reach the count of ten, all tension and anger will vanish, and you will once again be calm and unruffled. Now how will you be when you play tennis?”
“Calm,” Tommy mumbled. “Calm and unruffled.”
“And what will you do if something upsetting occurs?”
“Count to ten.”
“And how will you feel when you reach the count of ten?”
“Calm and unruffled.”
“Very good. When I reach the count of five, you will wake up feeling curiously refreshed, with no conscious recollection of this experience. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. How do you feel, Tommy?”
“Calm and unruffled,” he said. “And curiously refreshed.”
• • •
Looking neither calm nor unruffled, Tommy stalked over to where the official was perched. “One,” he said, and swung his racquet at the platform. “Two,” he said, and he continued his count, punctuating each number with a hammer blow to the base of the platform. The racquet shattered on the count of six, but he continued counting all the way to ten as he marched off the court.
• • •
“You have the chicken?” Atuele said. “Perfect white chicken. No dark feather, no blemish. Very good.” He placed the chicken on the little altar, placed his hands gently on the bird, and gazed thoughtfully at it. After a long moment the chicken fell over and lay on its side.
“What happened to the chicken?” Tommy asked.
“It is dead.”
“But, uh, how did it die?”
“As it was supposed to,” Atuele said.
Tommy looked around. He was in a compound about a third the size of a football field, just a batch of mud huts strung around an open area that faced the altar, where the chicken was apparently still dead. He’d flown Air Afrique from New York to Dakar, then transferred to Air Gabon, whatever that was, for a harrowing flight to Lomé, the capital of Togo, wherever that was. He’d been granted an audience with this Sorbonne-educated witch doctor, who’d sent him off to buy a chicken. And now the chicken was dead, and he felt like an idiot. What did any of this have to do with tennis? What could it possibly have to do with Thomas Norton Terhune?
“I don’t know what this guy does,” a friend had told him, “and you feel like the world’s prize jackass while he’s doing it, but it’s magic. And it works.”
“Maybe if you believe in it…”
“Hell, I didn’t believe in it. I thought it was pure-Dee ooga-booga horseshit. But it worked anyway. You want to know something? I still think it was ooga-booga horseshit. But now I believe in it.”
How, he wondered, could you believe in something while still believing it to be horseshit? And how could it possibly work? And—
“You need a spirit,” Atuele told him. “A spirit who will live within you, and who will have the job of keeping you serene while you are playing tennis.”
“A spirit,” Tommy said hollowly.
“A spirit. In order to give you this spirit, you require a ceremony. Go to your hotel. Return at sunset. And you must bring something.”
“Another chicken?”
“No, not another chicken. A bottle of scotch whiskey and a box of cigars.”
“That’s easy enough. What are we going to do, get drunk and smoke cigars together?”
“No, they are for me. And bring five thousand dollars.”
“Five thousand dollars?”
“For the ceremony,” Atuele explained.
The ceremony turned out to be ridiculous. Six half-naked men pounded on drums, while two dozen young women danced around, heads thrown back, eyes rolling. Atuele broke an egg in a bowl, poured it onto Tommy’s head, rubbed it into his scalp. He gave him a ball of ground-up grass and told him to eat it, then left him to sit in the circle, and eventually to shuffle around on the dance floor. After an hour or so of this Tommy got a taxi back to his hotel and went to bed.
In the morning he showered, packed, and went to the airport, knowing he’d wasted his money, hoping only that nothing had leaked to the press, that the world would never know the lengths to which he’d been driven or how utterly he’d been made a fool of. He flew to Dakar and on to JFK, then caught another flight to Phoenix for the Scottsdale Open.
Jennifer met him at the airpo
rt. “Waste of time,” he told her. She knew only that he’d heard about a secret treatment, not where you went for it or what it consisted of, and he didn’t feel like filling her in. “Lots of mumbo jumbo,” he said. “It won’t work.”
But it did.
• • •
At Scottsdale, Tommy Terhune reached the final round of the tournament, losing to Roger MacReady in four sets. He used the same racquet for the entire tournament, and never used it to hit anything but the ball. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t once curse himself, his opponents, the largely hostile audience, or the officials, who made their share of inaccurate calls. He was, that is to say, a perfect gentleman.
And he managed all this with no effort whatsoever. He didn’t take a pill, didn’t count to ten, didn’t clamp a lid on his anger, didn’t chant or meditate. All he did was play tennis, and the moment he stepped onto the court each day, a curious calm settled over him. He still took notice when a call went unfairly against him, but he didn’t mind, didn’t take it personally. He stayed focused on his game, and his game had never been better.
Of course, he told himself, one tournament didn’t necessarily prove anything. He’d gone through whole tournaments before without treating the crowd to a display of the famous Terhune temper, only to lose it a week or a month down the line. How could he be sure that wouldn’t happen?
Somehow, though, he knew it wouldn’t. Somehow he could tell that something had happened within that circle of mud huts in Togo. According to Atuele, he now had a spirit invested inside of him, a spirit who took control of his temper the moment he picked up a racquet and stepped onto a court. And that’s just how it felt. One way or another, he’d morphed into a person who didn’t have to control himself because he didn’t experience any anger to begin with. He played his matches, won or lost, and went home feeling fine either way.
Calm and unruffled, you might say.
• • •
Tommy played brilliantly in his next tournament. He sailed serenely through the early rounds, fell behind in his quarterfinal match, then rallied to salvage a victory over his unseeded opponent. Then, in the third set of the semis, the audience fell silent when Tommy served, came to the net, and leaped high into the air to slam his opponent’s return. The ball struck near the baseline, but everyone present could see it was clearly in.
