Murder is My Racquet

by Otto Penzler

  Even Tony Douglass should have had the grace to accept what was happening; there was no disgrace in losing to a talented kid having this kind of day.

  But he could not.

  Three games into the third set, with the crowd begging Douglass to come back, to make a match of it, the chair umpire overruled a call by the service linesman, saying Douglass had double-faulted even though the linesman saw his second serve as good. The point gave the game to Ken Lockhart, put him up a service break at two games to one.

  Of course Tony Douglass thought the guy in the chair was criminally insane.

  It had happened on an odd game, which meant a change of side. Ken Lockhart went to towel off. Douglass stayed right where he was, two steps inside the back line, staring at the chair. Somehow it was as if a fuse had been lit in Louis Armstrong Stadium. You could hear the ripple of tension, nervous excitement, run through the crowd the way it always did when the people thought Douglass was ready to blow. It had been the same way with Nastase, Ted knew, and Connors, and McEnroe, the whole line of them.

  “You saw that ball out?” Douglass snapped.

  “I did, Mr. Douglass.”

  “You thought the call was egregiously wrong, that’s what you’re telling me?”

  He was quoting the rules, the umpire was only supposed to overrule in case of an egregious error.

  “The ball was clearly out, Mr. Douglass.”

  The first people, high up in the stands, began to rhythmically clap.

  Douglass stood there, glaring still, hands on hips. Finally he said, “Okay, asshole, my turn.”

  The umpire should have given him a warning right then, for audible profanity, but this was the Open, everyone watching had to know this might be Douglass’s last great chance to win the Open. So the umpire gave him some room, hoping only the people close to the court could hear. Douglass wasn’t nearly in range of the powerful chair microphone yet.

  Even if the umpire knew he was going to be, because now here came Tony Douglass, marching toward the chair.

  “The guy on the line said the ball was in,” Douglass said, “you fucking moron!”

  That was it, the whole stadium heard that one. Hell, the home plate umpire at Shea Stadium, across Roosevelt Avenue from where they were, probably heard.

  “Warning, Mr. Douglass,” the umpire said, having no choice now. “Verbal abuse.”

  Douglass made a motion with his racquet as if masturbating.

  An old standby.

  “Abuse this.”

  Now they were off to the races.

  “Point penalty, Mr. Douglass. Fifteen-love, Mr. Lockhart.”

  There was an explosion of boos from the crowd. Not for Tony Douglass. For the umpire, who had just given the first point of the next game to Ken Lockhart, doing exactly what the rules said he had to do.

  Lockhart had taken his place at the other end, to the umpire’s left, bouncing a ball, waiting to serve. Watching, mesmerized, like everyone else.

  “Eat me,” Douglass snarled, the words somehow sounding worse, as they always did, because of the good-boy Brit accent he’d never lost.

  It was all by the book now.

  “Game, Mr. Lockhart. He leads 3–1, third set.”

  The rules in those days were simple enough. Douglass had gone right past his warning, the beginning of the process, and now had two strikes against him. Strike three meant he was defaulted from the match. Semifinal match of the Open.

  The ball was officially and irrevocably in Tony Douglass’s court. He was the one who had to decide if this was the way he wanted to go out at the United States Open.

  “I will not allow you to do this to me,” Douglass screamed.

  “The ball was out,” the umpire said.

  “Liar!” Douglass screamed.

  “The rules are fairly straightforward, Mr. Douglass,” the umpire said patiently, sitting there in the chair, standing his ground at the same time. “You should know that better than anyone. You are doing this to yourself.”

  Douglass was right underneath the chair now, staring up, his eyes as hot and bright as sparklers.

  “I am Tony Douglass,” he said.

  The umpire, who’d taken as much as he was going to take, as much as anyone could have been expected to take, put his hand over his mike now and said, “You used to be.”

  “Fuck you,” Douglass said.

  “Game, set, match, Mr. Lockhart,” the umpire said.

  Which is what it should have been.

  Which by any sense of justice and fair play is the way the match should have ended, right there. Except that now all holy hell broke loose at Louis Armstrong Stadium. People started throwing programs and seat cushions and soft drink cups. A tennis crowd suddenly acting like one of those hooligan soccer crowds. People running from the cheap seats, or what passed for cheap seats in tennis, down the aisles, trying to get closer to the court, to the action, maybe so they could throw things themselves.

  Not at Tony Douglass.

  In the direction of the chair.

  As if this were somehow the chair’s fault.

  The tournament referee came running out. The whole world saw what happened next, even if no one except the umpire and the referee could hear, the referee apologizing profusely, saying the umpire had done nothing wrong, really did have no choice, but please understand, he, the referee, he was the one who had no choice now, that he was going to have to allow the match to continue, that he was going to have to ask the umpire to step down from the chair.

  That he had to do it for the good of the Open.

  As if the umpire were the bad guy.

  Not the prick.

  They cheered Tony Douglass when he went back out, got ready to take the rest of his ass-kicking from the kid. They booed the umpire, kept throwing things in his direction, the ones close to the court even spitting at him, Tony Douglass finally turning everybody lousy, until the umpire mercifully disappeared into the runway between the stadium court and the grandstand.

  • • •

  Now Tony Douglass was forty-two. He could have tried the new over-forty circuit a couple of years before, but he thought he was too big for that. The exact quote from Douglass, as Ted recalled, was, “I’m too rich and too old for this shit.” He had already tried broadcasting for a while, working for TNT at Wimbledon, but had been too lazy off the air to be any good at it, much too mean on the air. There had also been the unfortunate incident his last year on the air, Douglass thinking his mike was dead when he said over a close-up of Princess Anne that she should be pulling the royal carriage instead of sitting in it.

  He had produced a couple of movies with some Hollywood friends, gotten divorced again, even written an autobiography, called “What a F——ing Racket,” which had spent a couple of months on The New York Times best-seller list. Now he had decided he wanted to play tennis again, mostly, Ted had heard from old friends in tennis, because the prick was bored. The people running the over-forty circuit didn’t care why he wanted to play, they just wanted him to play, they needed a drawing card, and Tony Douglass had always been that, no matter what.

  So now here he was making his debut at Westchester, all the stories leading up to the event talking about how the bad boy of tennis had finally grown up.

  Lawrence Semple, Jr., Ted’s driver, had said on the way up from the city that there was as much chance of Tony Douglass changing as the goddamn ocean. But Ted wanted to see for himself, see if the stories were just the normal hype and bullshit that had surrounded Douglass during the prime of his career, when he always seemed to be coming back from something, another injury, or one of his famous sabbaticals, which Ted had assumed was another code for rehab, covering a drinking problem that had always been the worst-kept secret in tennis.

  Douglass would always talk about a new attitude, a new outlook on his tennis life. Once he said yoga had turned him around. Another time it was Jesus. The year he lost the Lockhart match at the Open, his last year on the regular circuit, he wa
s extolling the virtues of a radical new macrobiotic diet.

  The day before the Westchester tournament Douglass had told the woman tennis writer from the Times, “I just finally decided that hitting a tennis ball was the only thing I’d ever really loved.”

  Ted read that one and thought: Where is Jesus when I really need Him?

  Ted Carlyle: the Laver man. The Rosewall man who’d spent all those hours trying to perfect the same kind of backhand little Muscles had. Ted Carlyle: who’d been a boy in the fifties when tennis was in its last Golden Age, because of the Aussies, and the great Gonzales. Who’d heard the stories about the barnstorming matches between Gonzales and Hoad. Who’d read Gordon Forbes’s book, A Handful of Summers, a marvelous account of those years from the old South African player, of that golden time in tennis, more than twenty times, because it was a way of going back, of remembering when the players acted the way they were supposed to, when his world would come alive for those two weeks at West Side Tennis Club, on those glorious grass courts, when the Open would come back to town.

  Before pricks like Tony Douglass, every one of them, ruined everything….

  It happened in the very first set at Westchester.

  Douglass was playing Arazi Siddarides, the Greek guy who’d beaten him in the French Open finals when Douglass was seventeen. Ted Carlyle had a front-row seat for that one, too, the way he’d had such a great seat that day for Douglass versus Lockhart. Ted used to love the trip to Stade Roland Garros in May, the elegance and romance and beauty of Paris in the spring, before that was another place Douglass and the rest of them ruined for him.

  Now at Westchester, at 4–5 and 30–40 against Douglass on his own serve, he hit what he thought was an ace, a bomb out of his youth, right down the middle.

  It was called wide by the woman working the center service line.

  “You’re kidding, right, lady?” Douglass said.

  Ted Carlyle knew the deal with the senior circuit. There was no code of conduct, no rules, no point penalties or game penalties, mostly because the older guys didn’t need rules to rein them in, they were just happy to be out there, still making a few dollars playing the game, they were lucky if the matches even made it to Cable America in the middle of the night.

  There was another woman, an old friend of Ted’s named Helen Kaiser, sitting in the chair.

  “The ball was wide, Mr. Douglass,” Kaiser said.

  “Bullshit!” Douglass said, and now he was walking slowly toward the umpire’s chair. “That was a goddamn ace and you know it.”

  “It’s her call,” Helen Kaiser said.

  “Well, guess what, honey?” Tony Douglass said, his voice loud enough in the small temporary stadium to be heard by everyone. “It’s my turn,” he said.

  The idiots, maybe two thousand of them, actually cheered.

  “Listen…” Helen Kaiser said meekly.

  “No, honey,” he said, “you listen to me.”

  Ted Carlyle watched it like an old nightmare.

  “Second service,” she said. “Please.”

  She’s negotiating with him, Ted thought.

  “You were blind when you were young,” Douglass said.

  He was right underneath the chair now, pointing at her with his racquet.

  Helen Kaiser had been a beauty when she was young, a terrific local doubles player who had actually gotten into the Open a couple of times, then stayed in the game for the simple reason that she loved it, working the lines at the Open in her silly Fila clothes, working her way up through the Eastern Tennis Association until she became president, finally getting the chair for a couple of women’s finals after the Open moved over to the National Tennis Center in the late seventies.

  Now Ted, right across the court from her, was afraid she might cry.

  Maybe the plan started to form then.

  He knew he couldn’t watch another minute of this. He got out of his seat, walked along the front row of the bleachers, made his way to the parking lot, to where Lawrence Semple, Jr., said he’d be waiting.

  Lawrence Semple, Jr., had said he’d rather listen to the Mets than watch Tom Douglass and his chicken ass play another match, no matter how much he said he’d changed.

  “I’m sorry…” Helen Kaiser was saying over the sound system.

  “No,” Tony Douglass said, as though he were talking into the same microphone, “you’re a moron…”

  The idiots cheered again, as though this was what they had come to see, this was what they wanted.

  This zoo.

  The car was right where Lawrence said it would be, parked near the golf driving range, the motor running, as if Lawrence somehow knew Ted was on his way, the back door already open. Ted got in and told him to drive straight to the country house.

  There was so much to do.

  • • •

  Ted Carlyle had retired five years before after making one last huge score in the market, with the equipment that did the laser eye surgery. The score came after the divorce and, more important, after Rachel remarried; it meant Ted could finally look at something as sheer profit again, after all the years when she got half. Rachel had told him during that time she would remarry when the sky was a different color on this particular planet, but then she met the guy whose coffee shops were outdoing Starbucks now, and all of a sudden she didn’t need Ted’s money the way she did oxygen.

  It was funny, Ted thought, how much he associated Rachel with Tony Douglass, as if there were some sort of weird connection there. Maybe it was because she used to tell him so often that he worried more about some obnoxious tennis player than he did about his own marriage.

  Maybe it was because the marriage broke up for good the year of Douglass versus Lockhart at the Open.

  “He blew up a tennis match,” she said, “not an office building.”

  “You don’t understand,” he told her.

  “You’re right,” she said.

  He could never decide which was worse, his leaving tennis or his wife leaving him.

  He traveled, his schedule not built around the French any longer, or Wimbledon; he really did what divorced men of leisure were supposed to do: tried to see new places, from Jamaica to the Scottish Highlands, even to South Africa, trying to see some of the places his friend Arthur Ashe had seen there.

  Ted Carlyle followed the tennis results, all right, tried to learn some of the new names. But he did not watch on television and he missed the Open for the first time since he was ten. He tried baseball for a while, but hated the little boutique ballparks, and the slow games, and the high scores, and the crazy number of home runs being hit. He bought season tickets to the Knicks. He took golf lessons.

  He still played tennis himself, his regular games at the Vanderbilt Club, and out at West Side, as sad and forgotten as that place had become, Ted having more and more trouble each year remembering what it was like in the old days when it would be the capital of tennis for those two glorious weeks at the beginning of September.

  Then one day, like a smoker deciding it wouldn’t hurt to smoke one cigarette, he decided it would be all right to start watching women’s tennis. But he couldn’t keep the Russians straight. He hadn’t liked watching the Williams sisters even when they were on top. He loved Jennifer Capriati’s heart, not her sledgehammer game. One year he watched two Belgian women play the U.S. Open final, and it was like watching the championship of Middle Earth.

  It wasn’t long before Ted was watching the men again, especially this kid Roger Federer from Switzerland, as talented and graceful as anybody he had ever seen.

  Ted decided that maybe it was time for him to come all the way back. A friend was willing to sell him a box at the new stadium at the Open, named after Ashe. He was even thinking about returning to Wimbledon, went so far as booking his old room at the Connaught.

  Then Ted picked up the Times and read about Tony Douglass’s return to tennis, and how he’d changed, how this was like a second chance for him to do things the right w
ay, to honor his talent and his sport.

  Somehow, this was like the last test for Ted, some finish line he had to cross, seeing if it was really safe for him to give his heart back to his sport. So three nights later Lawrence Semple, Jr., a former defensive back from the Giants who had later drifted into tennis officiating himself once, was driving Ted up to Westchester Country Club, so they could both see for themselves.

  They saw.

  In the car now, the Hutch becoming the Merritt, Ted said, “It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks to get everything together.”

  “Then we go pick up the trash,” Lawrence Semple, Jr., said, bigger now than when he’d played corner for the Giants, the size of him seeming to take up the whole front seat.

  “You go.”

  “My pleasure,” Lawrence Semple, Jr., said.

  • • •

  Ted had a friend at CBS who was able to get some of the tapes he needed. And Lawrence knew some production people at both NBC and ESPN from his football days, so it was easy getting the help they needed there, especially with Ted’s amazing memory for dates and places.

  “How do you remember some of this shit?” Lawrence Semple, Jr., said.

  “Because I do,” Ted said, giving him the tournaments they needed, the years.

  The people from Circuit City got the room exactly the way he wanted, two huge screens positioned perfectly, what Lawrence called some of that surround sound shit, even speakers, though the Circuit City people didn’t see why he would need speakers.

  Lawrence said, “Sounds like a goddamn recording studio in here when you amp it up all the way.”

  “Except that we’re out here in the middle of nowhere in Wilton, Connecticut.”

  “No one around for miles.”