You won’t remember me unless you’re a trivia freak with a stack of Tennis back issues, but that’s cool. Hardly anyone, even in the industry, follows the game well enough to know anyone but the men’s and women’s winners at Wimbledon, plus a few other genuine American heroes. Right now it goes like this: Roger Federer, that Ukrainian chick, Serena and Venus, Agassi, Anna Kournikova, Sampras sort of, and McEnroe, because who can forget McEnroe if he won’t go away. A few more people know who Hingis is, and Graf, maybe Becker, and some people might remember Navratilova–she still plays some, pretty well for an old broad–or they might think she’s the girl who nailed her dismount in the Olympics with the broken ankle. But if they played before new wave or they had a funny accent, forget it. You say Laver, Ashe, King, Evert, Connors, and Borg, people think it’s a law firm. I mean, ask any high school player, “Who’s a tennis legend?” and they’ll say that punk Andy Roddick. And who watches the finals of any tournament when it’s a Dutchman versus a Dane–aren’t they from the same country anyway? We only remember the names of the foreigners for the duration of the match in which they play an American. And doubles? Name one great doubles team. See? But I’m getting away from my point, which is to say, you don’t remember me, which is cool. I’m not bitter about it.
They used to call me “The Warhead.” I liked it pretty well, I guess. Sounds powerful, rhymes with my last name. I’m six-three, used to weigh about 200, and I’ve got long arms. Longer than most guys’, and when I extended for a full swing, especially on serves, I made the ball flatten out like a missile. And this was before graphite, before oversized rackets–high tech was Connors playing with that crappy Wilson T2000. I always played with wood, myself. Of course, being a big guy I wasn’t super fast, so I hated to serve and volley, but I could play the net if I had to. It’s hard to hit a passing shot against a guy with a wingspan like a 747. That’s what a TV announcer said about me in my first televised match, which went five sets. But my game has always been about power. People talk about power baseline like it was invented in the 90s, or maybe the late 80s, but I’m here to tell you I was playing it in the 70s. I know some people say it’s nothing to be proud of, that it’s changed tennis from a “game of finesse” to a “war of strength,” but a tennis player doesn’t decide what kind of player he is, he just plays the game his natural strengths and instincts tell him to play.
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Even though I got knocked out in the first round in Australia, my confidence was up, and I was thinking I had a chance to qualify at Wimbledon, too. And I did! In the first round I drew a skinny Italian guy, Giovanni Testarossa or something, and annihilated his country’s hopes in straight sets. My serve was locked in and I was hitting the sweet spot on every stroke.
There was this POK! when it hit him. His head banged into the post and he wobbled, tried to stand up, and then fell forward onto the court. For a few seconds nobody moved or said anything. I guess nobody knew what to say or do. I mean, I was as surprised as everybody else, but I was also pissed, because I already knew that my rhythm was shot. I knew there’d be a fuss, there’d be delay–15 minutes minimum. I didn’t want to stop. Ask anyone who’s ever been in the zone–you don’t want to get out of the zone.
Well, he ended up breaking my serve, and pretty soon he had me back on my heels, playing catch-up, fighting for every point. He was reading my serves really well and getting a lot of my first serves back. He was even hitting winners off some of them. At the next crossover, he just sits there, quietly sipping water and all Teutonic and Russian and everything while I’m trying to get myself back in the game. I change my socks, my racket, towel myself dry, put on a new red-white-and-blue headband, and take a couple of bites of a granola bar, something I never do. I hear this dude in the stands go: “He broke that boy’s jaw. Smashed it like a teapot.” And this lady goes: “He doesn’t even look sorry.”
I won’t lie, I wasn’t playing that great, but I really couldn’t get a call from anyone after that. The Russian would serve and it would be out by three feet, I’m not exaggerating at all, and the line judge wouldn’t say anything, the chair judge wouldn’t say anything, and I’d just have to walk to the other side of my court and wait for the next serve. You could just see it, the whole crowd sitting there with pinched faces, thinking, go ahead, protest the call. Evgenyev, playing like shit, still closed me out and won. And of course he went on to lose badly in the third round.
