Starting Out Or Ending Up

Many satellite players cannot afford to use gut, which gives a better "feel" than cheaper nylon stringing. To compensate, some of them string their rackets half with gut, half with nylon. These tend to be the same guys who put glue across the toes of their tennis shoes where they show wear, and at each tournament the first consideration of these impoverished players is picking up the free T shirt to which they are entitled.

Chip has never wanted to learn how to string a racket or put on a new grip. Club pros like his father string rackets. Players like Borg have someone do it for them. And Chip doesn't have to worry about getting equipment, because he is a member of the ATP, his world ranking having once been better than 200. That means he still receives free clothing from Adidas, and manufacturers remain fairly generous with rackets and balls.

From his relatively exalted station, Chip cynically regarded the young players milling around the tournament draw-sheets posted outside the locker rooms in Hialeah. They were figuring the odds, which said that for every John Sadri who made it out of the parking lot, 1,000 players didn't. And so they sifted through the drawsheets, checked the dog-eared computer standings and studied the entry lists for the next tournament. Circuit players sarcastically refer to this as "piling up indirect wins," figuring out that the player who beat them once beat someone else who beat someone else.... In reality, they were searching for a shred of evidence that what they were doing made sense.

Chip thought back to his first pro tournament and how naive and unsuspecting he had been. He had changed. The Penn Circuit does that to you. Chip knew that good friends would cheat each other for a computer point. He had observed it, had seen buddies almost come to blows during a match. In qualifying, there are no umpires—except when a player requests one to arbitrate a disputed call—and the players call their own lines, which sometimes leads to cheating. Some players have even been known to sabotage an opponent's racket by pouring a soft drink on the strings just before a match.

Looking back, Chip could see how it was almost preordained that he would win in Hialeah on this particular week. Sure, his father had stuck the racket in his hand when he was five, but Chip realized now that he hadn't played only to please his father, though the old man certainly was proud he had. No, he had enjoyed it, loved the feeling of the ball coming cleanly off his strings. But he had never liked the competition, right from the time he played in his first tournament, a local 10-and-under event. He was seven years old, and after he won his match he felt like crying because he knew tomorrow he would have to play again. It was the fear of losing that bothered him. Winning never could erase tomorrow.

But he played because, after all, he was a natural. Anyone who knew anything about tennis saw that. He was always highly ranked as a junior, and he played well in college. So few people suspected what he knew—that he lacked the killer instinct. He didn't want to make the commitment to get out there and fight and scrap and, yes, even hate, to do whatever one had to do to make it to the top. Part of the reason he went to college was to delay the decision to turn pro for a few years. And when he did go on the circuit and moved up to the Grand Prix, he refused to let the subsequent losses bother him, because if he did he knew he would have to change. He would have to make the game an obsession or give it up, and either way, he didn't know if he could live with himself. And so he'd come off the court and go to a telephone and call his father to tell him how he did. Week by week he could hear the disappointment growing at the other end of the line. And as his ranking continued to drop he came to realize that he wasn't good enough. So he went back to college, as much to hide as to finish the work for his degree.

It was while practicing with his old college team that his right knee started to bother him. At first he paid it no attention. But finally one morning he could barely walk. It was swollen. A doctor drained it and said that the cartilage was disintegrating and that he probably would need an operation. But that was the last thing he wanted. A knee operation would be the end of him. At his age, he couldn't afford to take a year off, and besides very few players fully recover from such an operation. With all of its cutting back and forth, the sport is simply too strenuous. So, just as he had disguised his fear of losing, he now hid his knee injury. No one knew about it. He didn't wear a brace on the court, and after matches he sneaked off by himself to ice the knee, because he knew that if the other players found out about his injury they would be like sharks around blood. They would work on this weakness, hitting drop shots and lobs, moving him around the court, hitting behind him when it meant he would have to plant his right foot solidly. The important thing was to get through the qualifying this week and into the main draw. The Hialeah tournament was being played on hard courts, the worst possible surface for his knee, but for the next two weeks the tournaments were scheduled for softer clay. If he could do well this week he was sure he would be all right on clay.

On the satellite circuit they say that you can check a player's wallet and predict whether he'll make it on the tour. If he doesn't have any kind of credit card, he's probably underfinanced and doesn't have a chance, because the nights of sleeping in his car will eventually wear him down. If he has an American Express card, his parents or a sponsor are funding him, and he won't be hungry enough to make it. The players to watch out for, this line of reasoning goes, are those with one bank charge card. They are sponsoring themselves. A bank card was the only one Chip had with him. And he was watching his expenses. In fact he had hit upon a scheme to get his meals half price, a proposition based upon the premise that, to busy waitresses, all tennis players look alike. Chip and another player of similar height and coloring used the scam at motel buffets. One would go into the dining room carrying a tennis bag and be seated. After finishing most of his food, he would walk out, leaving behind the tennis bag. Then the other player would sit in the same seat and go through the buffet line as if he were the first guy getting a second helping. The waitress wouldn't give him a second glance when he paid the bill.

The player who is probably the reigning authority on satellite-tour life is George Lea, a 33-year-old pro from Vancouver, British Columbia who has played the circuit for seven years and never survived the qualifying, which means that he never has cashed a check. The other players regard a match with Lea as a workout on the light bag.

Lea doesn't much care how they feel. For him the circuit affords a chance to escape Canada's harsh winters, an opportunity for competition before he returns to a summer of lifeguarding or teaching tennis. He thinks many of the players ought to pack up their dreams. "There are only four or five guys here who are going to make any money," he says. "There's no circuit as tough as this one. Most of the guys aren't being realistic. If you haven't made it by 18 in tennis, you don't have much hope of earning a living by playing. Down here, you're a little fish in a little pond." As he spoke, a fellow on a nearby court was losing a match 6-0, 6-0. After the player blew the final point, he walked over to a low mesh fence, smashed his racket on it and then stalked off, carrying the racket as if it were a dead chicken with a broken neck. Bystanders could hear his girl friend running after him, yelling, "That was my racket. You owe me a racket." She didn't sound pleased.