Starting Out Or Ending Up

From a distance, tennis appears to be a wonderful world of strawberries and cream, of royalty at courtside and Cheryl Tiegs on the disco floor. The satellite circuit offers a chance to sneak in the back door of this dreamworld, and John Lackey was representative of the players in Hialeah who thought they could crack the game's exclusivity—if only he could get past the security guard at the gate.

Lackey is 35 years old, and his most recent residence was Williamson, W. Va., a small coal-mining town, where he worked for the Federal Government on a disaster-relief team. Lackey, a lawyer by profession, associates the times and places of his life with disasters. Louisville, 1974, tornado. Detroit, 1976, flood. He decided to take up tennis the year of the Detroit flood. He taught himself the game out of an instruction book.

He arrived in Hialeah driving a 1964 truck with, he said, about 120,000 miles on it. He was worried, not because he had to sleep in the truck each night, but because it had snowed in Williamson a month before, and he hadn't practiced since then. Lackey reckoned that he was the first touring professional Williamson had ever had, because there were only four courts in the town. "Five, if you count the one an accountant has in the back of his house," he said.

After a few days of practice in Florida, it became apparent to Lackey that the competition was tougher than he had expected, that the opposition had almost as many tennis miles on them as his truck's odometer. "I couldn't believe these young boys' legs," said Lackey. "They were so strong, a lot stronger than mine. So I started doing knee bends, and after two days I could hardly walk." He also developed a severe case of sunburn, and his forehead was blotched and peeling.

Lackey is a bearded, serious fellow with long hair that brushes his shoulders, and while playing he wears a thick hairnet to keep his locks in place. And that isn't his only idiosyncrasy. He employs a bizarre, self-taught grip in which the racket handle extends several inches up his wrist. "I learned on my own," he explained. "I figured I could make the racket an exact extension of my arm, so I could swing it like I swing my arm. It's just like I've grown the racket from my hand to my elbow."

Playing in his first-round qualifying match with a racket he had picked up for $19 at a local discount store, Lackey lost 6-0, 6-1. Later, he was philosophical about his plight. He had forsaken his girl friend and a job paying about $30,000 a year to play tennis. But losing in the first round meant he wouldn't even be eligible for qualifying during the rest of the circuit. For the rest of the week he slept in his truck, ate his meals in a cafeteria and hung around the courts, watching tennis and hoping for some practice time. For him the week was just another disaster, and, after all, he pointed out, he was accustomed to those.

Chip and the other players knew that to avoid disaster on the Penn Circuit you had to give to get, and so out in the parking lot of the Goodlet Tennis Center were an array of vans, campers and tents, many of them with extension cords connected to the main building's power supply so their inhabitants could cook on hot plates. And when they weren't eating, playing or resting, the players were working out, running wind sprints or doing leg kicks, stretching tight muscles. It was a Spartan existence. Every morning at eight o'clock Mike Jula, the tournament director, was confronted with a line of players, half of them waiting to charge onto the courts for a few minutes of practice, the others about to rush into the locker room for showers that would wash away the sweat of a three-mile dawn run.

The parking lot was the tournament's shantytown; the dilapidated state of many of the mobile homes made it look like something out of Grapes of Wrath. In fact, Brian Earley, the Penn Circuit tour director, said he almost felt embarrassed to drive his Mercedes into the lot each morning. Even so, the players there were better off than those sleeping six to a room at motels for $9 a head per night, to say nothing of those who simply took their sleeping bags out into the surrounding fields and bedded down.

One of those traveling by van was Mark Rath, 27, who had a cottage industry going in the parking lot—stringing rackets. This is Rath's third year on tennis' back roads, and he admits the trip has been rough. He gauges his progress by noting that last year, "I missed getting an ATP point by one match in two different segments."

Rath, who is originally from Detroit, has curly black hair, a mustache and a thickening middle that he explains away by saying, "It isn't that my waist's so big but that my chest's so small." In his van are cartons of low-fat milk, peanut butter and strawberry jam, plus the obligatory book on concentration. He said he was holding his expenses to about $50 a week, partly by changing the oil in the van himself and making sure his engine was in tune. "There are a lot of players out here, and all of us are hungry," he said. "I lost today, but I shouldn't have. I had a 4-1 lead in the first set, then I let up a bit and he got a little confidence back. I blew it. Never give a sucker an even break. I gave him a break and it hurt me. Now I'm trying to decide whether to go back home and practice with my coach or stay here and string rackets. I do about three rackets a day. Any more, and I wouldn't have time to practice. And if I don't have time to practice, what's the use of being here? Right now one of my big problems is that I'm almost out of gut. When it goes, that's it. I just can't afford to buy more of it."