by Otto Penzler
Except the official, who declared it out.
Tommy took a step toward the platform. The official cowered, but Tommy didn’t seem to notice. He said, “Was that ball out?”
The official nodded.
“Oh,” Tommy said, and shrugged. “From here it looked good, but I guess you can see better from where you’re sitting.”
He went back to the baseline and served the next point. He went on to win the match and advance to the finals, in which he played brilliantly, beating Roger MacReady in straight sets.
• • •
“And here’s Mrs. Tommy Terhune, the lovely Jennifer,” said the TV reporter, sticking a mike in her face. “Your husband was really commanding out there, wasn’t he?”
“He was,” she agreed.
“He played brilliant tennis, and he seems to have triumphed in the inner game as well, wouldn’t you say?”
“The inner game?”
“He didn’t lose his temper at all.”
“Oh, that,” she said. “No, he didn’t.”
“I’ll bet you’re proud of him.”
“Very proud.”
“You’ve been quoted as saying he’s always been a perfect gentleman off the court. Now he seems to be every bit the perfect gentleman on the court as well. That must be extremely gratifying to you.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling furiously. “Extremely gratifying.”
• • •
It was in the U.S. Open that the extent of the change in Terrible Tommy Terhune became unmistakably evident. Earlier, before his still-secret visit to West Africa, some commentators had theorized that the brilliance of his play might be of a piece with the ungovernability of his temper. Passion, after all, was the common denominator. Put the one on a leash, they suggested, and the other might wind up hobbled in the bargain.
But this was clearly not the case. Tommy had an easy time of it in the early rounds at Flushing Meadows, winning every match in straight sets. In the quarterfinals, his Croatian opponent won a single game in the first set and none at all in the second and third, but the fellow’s play was not as pathetic as the score suggested. Tommy was simply everywhere, getting to every ball, his returns always on target and, more often than not, unreturnable.
The calls, of course, did not always go his way. But his reaction was never greater than a shrug or a raised eyebrow. Spectators looked for him to be struggling with his emotions, but what was becoming clear was that there was no struggle, and no emotions.
In the semifinals, Tommy’s opponent was the young Chinese-American, Scott Chin, but most fans were looking past the semis to a final round that would see Tommy pitted once again against his Australian rival, Roger MacReady. But this was not to be—while Tommy moved easily past Chin, MacReady lost the fifth set to a previously unknown Belgian player named Claude Macquereau.
Two days later, after a women’s final in which one player grunted while the other wept, Terhune and Macquereau met for the men’s championship. If the fans had been disappointed by MacReady’s absence, the young Belgian soon showed himself as a worthy opponent for Tommy. His serve was strong and accurate, his game at net and at the baseline a near mirror-image of Tommy’s. Macquereau won the first set 7–6, lost the second 7–5. Most games went to deuce, and most individual points consisted of long, wearying volleys marked by one impossible return after another.
By the third set, which Tommy won in a tiebreaker, the fans knew they were watching tennis history being made. Midway through the fourth set, won by Macquereau in an even more attenuated tiebreaker, the television commentators had run out of superlatives and the crowd had shouted itself hoarse. Both players, run ragged in the late-summer heat and humidity, looked exhausted, but both played as though they were fresh as daisies.
In the third game of the final set, a perfectly placed passing shot of Tommy’s was called out. The audience drew its collective breath—they knew the ball was in—and Tommy approached the platform.
“Ball was out?” he said conversationally.
The official managed a nod. The man must have known he’d missed the call, and must have been tempted to reverse himself. But all he did was nod.
“Okay,” Tommy said, and played the next point, while the audience released its collective breath in a great sigh that mingled relief with disappointment.
After ten games in the final set, they had taken turns breaking each other’s service, and were tied 5–5. In the eleventh game, Tommy served and went to the net, and Macquereau’s return flew past Tommy’s outstretched racquet and landed just inside the sideline.
The official called it out.
It was close, certainly closer than the call that had gone against Tommy earlier in the set, but the ball was definitely in and, more to the point, Tommy Terhune knew it was in. The game had been tied at 15–all, and this point put Tommy ahead, 30–15.
His response was immediate. He went to the service line, hit two serves into the net to tie the score at 30–all, then deliberately double-faulted a second time, putting Macquereau a point ahead, as he would have been had the call been correct.
The act was uncommonly gracious, and all the more so for coming when it did. It is, as one reporter pointed out, easier to give back a questionable point when you’re winning or losing by a considerable margin, but Tommy’s unprecedented act of chivalry might well cost him the championship.
Not so. Trailing 30–40, he won the next point with a service ace, then won the game by playing brilliantly for the next two points. The final game was almost anticlimactic; Macquereau, serving, seemed to know how it was going to end, and scored only a single point while Tommy broke his service to take the game, the set, the match, and the United States Open championship.
All of which made the aftermath just that much more tragic.
• • •
The whole world knows the rest. How Tommy Terhune, flushed with triumph, accompanied by his curiously unemotional wife, returned to his hotel, racquet in hand. How Roger MacReady was waiting for them in the lobby, and accompanied them upstairs to their suite. How Jennifer explained haltingly that she and MacReady had fallen in love, that they had been, like, having an affair, and that she wanted Tommy to give her a divorce so that she and MacReady could be married.
She said all this calmly, expecting Tommy to take it every bit as calmly. Perhaps she thought it was a good time to tell him—riding high after his victory, he could presumably take a lost love in stride. In any event, Tommy had never shown much emotion off the court, and now was equally cool on it, so she knew she could count on him to be a gentleman about this. If he could be gallant enough to hand two points to Claude Macquereau through purposeful double faults, wouldn’t he be equally gallant and self-sacrificing now?
As it happened, he would not.
He was clutching his tennis racquet when she told him all this. It was the racquet he had been using ever since his return from Togo, and it had lasted longer than any racquet he had previously owned, because he had not once swung it at anything harder than a tennis ball.
By the time he let go of it now, it was in pieces, and his wife and his rival were both dead. He smashed the edge of the racquet into Roger MacReady’s head, striking him five times in all, fracturing his skull even as he smashed the racquet, and he went on swinging until all he had left in his hand was the jagged handle.
Which he continued to hold as he backed the terrified Jennifer into a corner, where he pinned her against the wall and drove the racquet handle into the hollow of her throat.
Then he picked up the phone and told the desk clerk to summon the police.
• • •
Everyone had a theory, of course, and one that got a lot of play held that Tommy’s temper, no longer released periodically on the tennis court, didn’t just disappear. Instead it got tamped down, compressed, so that the eventual inevitable explosion was that much greater and more disastrous.
One enterprising newsman found his way to Togo, where t
he enigmatic Atuele told him essentially the same thing. “I gave the man a spirit,” he said, between puffs on a cheroot. “To help him when he played tennis. And it helped him, is it not so?”
“But off the court—”
“Off the court,” Atuele said, “the man had no problem. So, when he was not playing tennis, the spirit’s work was done. And the anger had to go somewhere, didn’t it?”
TENNIS, ANYONE?
KINKY FRIEDMAN
Haven’t played tennis since high school. Haven’t touched a racquet since Christ got aced but I was pretty hot way back when. Got to the state finals in my senior year. My coach, Woodrow Sledge, always emphasized basic skills and groundstrokes, a dominant serve, strong forehand and backhand, and a confident, yet conservative approach to the net. Therefore, he was never completely happy with what I will call the peculiar morality of my game. As long as I was winning, however, he’d just pat me on the back and shake his head.
They say sports does not build character, it just reveals it. Maybe this is true but I think I learned important life lessons from the way I was able to win at tennis. To put the best face on it you could say I played like a high-stakes poker player or a riverboat gambler. There was nothing wrong with my game. It was just that I’d allowed my basic tennis fundamentals to be corrupted and seduced by weaving a web of artifice and delusion. Playing me was, for most good church-going Americans, like playing tennis with a sentient wall of carnival mirrors. And that has been my style ever since. Maybe even before I ever picked up a racquet.
You see, I was a chess prodigy when I was very young. At the tender age of seven I played the world grandmaster, Samuel Reschevsky, in Houston, Texas. He was there to play a simultaneous match with fifty people, all of whom, except for me, were adults. He beat all of us, of course, but afterward he told my dad he was sorry to have had to beat his son. He just had to be very careful with seven-year-olds. If he ever lost to one of them it’d be headlines.
The way you play a game, especially as a child, does more than reveal your character. I believe, after some grudging reflection, it provides a psychological peephole into the kind of person you will someday be. The way you play the game becomes an ingrained, living thing, a succubus that eventually determines how you play the game of life.
As far as chess was concerned, however, you could say I peaked at the age of seven. But by then, I now realize, I’d internalized the nature of the game. Very possibly, I’d unconsciously brought a sidecar of chess to my game of tennis. After all, tennis is not a team sport; the way you play tends to reveal who you really are. As long as you’re winning, of course, nobody ever notices.
The game I played, the one that mildly irritated Coach Sledge, was an extremely duplicitous, downright deceitful at times, fabric of cat-and-mouse conceit. Yes, I’d begin with a strong, left-handed serve. But after that, things tended to degenerate. My stock-in-trade became a willful charade of evil fakes, feints, and last-moment viciously undercut backhands. In other words, I was playing physical chess. There is no morality in chess or tennis, or course; morality, I suppose, is considered to be confined only to the game of life. Again, when you’re winning, nobody notices.
Opposing players, many of whom were superior to me in basic tennis skills, were often left shaking their heads in what looked to me like a slightly more demonstrative impersonation of Coach Sledge. I would smile and graciously accept whatever accolades were thrown my way by any lookers-on. Sometimes there were stands full of people and sometimes there was only the sound of one hand clapping. It didn’t matter. I knew. Deceiving the opponent was just as good as, indeed, it almost seemed preferable to, beating him with sound groundstrokes and solid play. When you beat a highly skilled player in such a fashion, you almost have to struggle to contain your glee. I got pretty good at that, too.
When I graduated high school I left the sport of tennis far behind me, much as I’d done with chess back in my childhood. I could still play either of them, of course, but life was moving too fast for chess, and tennis seemed to require too high a degree of tedium in finding appropriate courts, lining up appropriate opponents, and constantly changing into appropriate clothing. It just didn’t seem appropriate. Besides, I had college to deal with. My tennis racquet remained in the closet; the only webs of deceit associated with it were now woven exclusively by highly industrious spiders.
But, to be sure, I was quite busy myself. College was a whole new ballgame, as they say. Many of the kids who were the stars of my high school senior class went directly to pumping gasoline. New facts emerged in college and I discovered to my personal delight that I flourished in this new environment. A deft talent for obfuscation works wonders with any seemingly sophisticated social set. “What you do in this world,” the great Sherlock Holmes once said, “is a matter of no consequence. The question is what you can make people think you have done.” Like Sherlock, I somehow instinctively knew never to reveal my methods.
No matter what anybody tells you, relationships between men and women on this particular planet are anything but straightforward and forthright. A successful relationship is usually governed by forces ingrained from childhood that one or both parties often remain totally unaware of. One may be a born gold-digger looking forever for a free ride. One may be a caregiver, always looking for a bird with a broken wing. It’s not so important who the two people are: timing and what they are is usually what counts. That’s how the game is played and won. Sometimes, however, the bird with the broken wing heals up and beats you to death with it.
I met my future ex-wife, Leila Marie, in anthropology class, on one of the rare occasions I attended. I cut a lot of classes and (I hope you won’t be disappointed) I also cribbed an exam now and then in the manner of Ted Kennedy at Harvard. After all, I was enrolled in a highly advanced liberal arts program at the time that was mainly distinguished by the fact that every student had some form or other of facial tic. Every student, that was, except Leila Marie.
Leila Marie was a perky brunette with flashing green eyes who helped me write my monograph for anthropology: The Flathead Indians of Montana. Even with Leila Marie’s talented and efficient help, it soon became apparent that liberal arts was never intended to be my long suit. I didn’t want to become some stuffy professor helping students learn about the Flathead Indians of Montana. If they were burning with intellectual desire to find out about the Flathead Indians, they could damn well go to Montana and study campfire shards. I needed a field that was more applicable to today’s world. A field in which I could help others, but also help myself. Meanwhile, the only field of study I seemed to be identifying with was Leila Marie.
Not only did Leila Marie appear to have an infinite amount of income, but she was also very easy on the eyes and lips. On top of that, no pun intended, she seemed to be willing to do anything it took to see that I succeeded. As things transpired, it was going to take quite a bit. I had decided that I wanted to go to medical school. It was not going to be easy and it was not going to be cheap. That was where Leila Marie came in.
I was always pretty strong when it came to the old gray matter department but I must confess I was not prepared for organic chemistry. Leila Marie had to practically walk me through that one. But somehow we managed. I came to rely upon her judgment, her hard work ethic, and, yes, her financial resources. But I worked hard, too. Leila just worked a little harder. She even took a waitress job on the side when medical school tuition loomed near. That meant a lot to me. Besides, I’ve always been a sucker for attractive waitresses.
I didn’t get into the best medical school, but I did get into medical school and that’s what counts. In medical school, the guy who comes in last in his class is still called Doctor. We had to move to the island of Grenada and Leila Marie was beginning to appear a bit shopworn from working two jobs, but we looked to the future and somehow kept moving forward. I believed in myself and Leila Marie believed in me and sometimes that’s all that keeps you going. Fortunately, I could stand the s
ight of blood. Otherwise, I would’ve had to go to law school.
Leila Marie and I got married about the time I realized I wasn’t going to be a brain surgeon. As long as I finished medical school and got my internship I didn’t really care what kind of doctor I’d become. Just as long as I didn’t have to make house calls. You had to be sort of ruthless about the whole thing or otherwise you wouldn’t get through. What was the point of saving the world if you couldn’t save yourself? So I became a proctologist. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, I figured. Besides, you have to work with so many assholes every day you might as well get paid for it.
After medical school we moved to a new town where I took my internship at the local hospital. If you’ve never gone through an internship you probably have no idea how much of your personal life it consumes. Every night in the emergency room I’d witness the flotsam and jetsam of humanity walk, crawl, wheel themselves, or be carried past my increasingly jaded irises. People with limbs missing. People with gunshot wounds. People stuck together fucking. It was a real mess but I think I can truly say that it made a doctor out of me. All those hours at the hospital, of course, had a rather debilitating effect on my marriage. But it was at about that time that I took a turn for the nurse.
She was a gorgeous, young, blue-eyed blonde from the Great Northwest and she had a real way with people and one of them was me. When you work with somebody in life-and-death situations, you really get to know them. Her name was Lana Lee and I credit her with bringing the fun and excitement back into my life. Somehow, I had grown past Leila Marie, who’d continued working her dreary jobs and complaining about the long hours the internship was causing me to keep. It was kind of sad but increasingly Leila Marie seemed to be living in the past and I seemed to be living for the future. And Lana Lee seemed inexorably to be a part of that future.
If there’s one thing I know about destiny it is that you can’t count on it forever. I knew things couldn’t go on like this and sure enough they didn’t. Tragically, in the first year of my private practice, Leila Marie died rather suddenly of a fairly arcane illness that is faintly related in the literature to toxic shock syndrome. The malady was impossible to treat, diagnose, or detect and it caused me no little grief to realize the irony that I was a doctor and there was nothing I could do for her. The subsequent autopsy revealed no clue as to the cause of her death.
