Starting Out Or Ending Up

Lea has witnessed two occasions when players fought on the court. "It's one on one, survival of the fittest," he says. "When it gets near the end of a segment and the matches are really important, a guy will try to help others beat someone ahead of him in the standings. He'll give them advice, or practice with them. And there are a lot of ways to intimidate players and get them uptight during matches. You can sit on the sidelines and clap when the guy you're rooting against double-faults. Stuff like that.

"When you're in a big match you can intimidate a guy easy. Every time the ball is close, give him a suspicious look when he makes his call. Then you make him feel like a heel for questioning one of your calls. Just keep him on the defensive the whole match. Don't talk to him at all. Just ignore him. Never call a ball 'out,' simply signal instead. And if you're going to cheat, do it late in the match. If you do it early, the guy will complain and call for an umpire. Or worse, he'll turn around and cheat you."

There is a theory that the amount of glamour attendant on a sporting event is in direct relation to the number of beautiful women in the stands. Using this formula, the Penn Circuit, especially during qualifying, is a no-glamour event. Despite the fact there were several hundred young, athletic and attractive men in the Hialeah tournament, there wasn't the slightest hint of perfume in the stands during the qualifying. In fact, except for a few travel-in girl friends, the only unattached female within miles was a poor creature who had been sentenced to sell hot dogs and soft drinks in the temporary concession stand outside the courts. And even she didn't pay the players much attention: after all, she was earning more selling hot dogs than they were playing pro tennis.

For the most part, the Penn Circuit attracts only the hard-core tennis wacko. The casual tennis enthusiast not only doesn't attend the tournaments, but doesn't know they're being played. At Hialeah there were few spectators. In fact, for the early days the only person on hand who wasn't a relative or close friend of a player was a tall, shirtless fellow who wandered around outside the courts, peering through the windscreens at the action. Asked his name, he said, "Have A Name. That's my last name. My first is, I Don't. Actually, you can call me 'Tennis.' Boy, this game keeps you alive. I play every day. I start playing at six or seven in the morning. Play here a lot, but I didn't enter the tournament because I don't want to interrupt my schedule. How old am I? It doesn't matter. I get up each morning and start over. I figure it's death when I go to sleep, and it's life when I wake up."

"Tennis" had picked an appropriate alias, because he could rattle off tournament results and recite statistics as if he had written the USTA handbook. Moreover, he knew many of the players at Hialeah by sight, a fact almost as odd as the balls of cotton stuck in his ears. These, he explained, were "to diffuse the sound waves. Too many sounds in this country. You don't need 'em. What we need are more tennis courts. I'd like to bulldoze that school over there and build 100 tennis courts."

"Tennis" was interrupted by arguing voices. By looking through the windscreen it could be determined that there was a debate over the score of a match. Said one player to the tournament official who had arrived to mediate, "Someone's spaced out and it's not me."

That afternoon a reporter from a local newspaper came out to interview a player. Mike Sassano, the circuit's assistant tour director, suggested he speak with Chip, who had breezed through the first three rounds of qualifying and, almost as good, finally had found a motel room. Chip told the writer, "I hate this circuit, to put it mildly. It's so competitive that it'll either make you or break you. If I can't be in the upper echelons, I don't want to do this. I'll give it two good years, and if I'm not top 50 in the world, I'm going to bag it."

Just then a frustrated player sailed a racket over a fence. Chip and the reporter watched it windmill through the air. "See," said Chip. "That's what the tour will do to you."

It felt good to talk like this, to reaffirm, in his own mind at least, that for him it would never come down to throwing rackets. Chip had won his first three matches so easily that his bad knee felt as if it had undergone successful therapy. Of course, his opponents had been young and inexperienced. That would change the following day when Chip would play a tour veteran with a history of engaging in outrageous antics. Other players had given this fellow a wide berth ever since the time in Europe when he lost a match, took all six of his rackets and broke them over his knee, and then stood on his head for five minutes. At Hialeah, someone had asked this player what life on the Penn Circuit was like. He answered softly, his words punctuated with intermittent silences: "It's hard here to keep a conception of what reality is.... Sometimes you get a thought on this circuit and you think it has some context or relation with reality.... Then later you look back...and realize you were wrong and say to yourself: 'I was really out of touch with what reality is.' You realize...that you're not in reality at all."

Chip beat the eccentric easily, although throughout the match his opponent acted as if there were some alien being inside of him. After a missed shot he would yell, "Get out of me!" Later Chip told friends, "It was like something out of The Exorcist."