The Players (10 page)

Alan Doughty stood in the shade of one of Hurlingham’s old copper beeches talking earnestly with his friend and manager, a busy, balding man named Paul Quinn. A little distance away Hazel Doughty sat on a bench being careful not to wrinkle the new outfit Alan had insisted she buy. She smiled to herself as she watched the beautiful, poised women stroll along the paths.

Paul Quinn’s eyes went wide at something Alan had just said to him. “What do you mean you’re not interested?” Quinn demanded. “This is a tour with World Championship Tennis I’m talking about. They’ve got all the top names, and week by week the biggest prize money is won in the WCT matches. I can place you in their Green group, which means you’ll do most of your playing in Europe so you’ll be closer to home, and now you tell me you’re not interested. I don’t get it.”

“I’m sorry, Paul,” Alan said, “but I’m packing it in after Wimbledon. In a year and a half I’ll be forty. That’s too old for a man to be galloping about a tennis court. I’m already playing boys who could be my sons.”

“All right then, say you only play one year. You still hang it up before the old four-oh mark, and you pick up a nice piece of change.”

“I just can’t do it. I appreciate what you’re trying to do for me, Paul, but you should have talked to me about it first. My mind is made up.”

Quinn looked closely into the face of his friend. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“What do you mean?” Alan asked quickly.

“It’s just that, well, I’ve known you a long time, and you’ve never had trouble lookin’ me in the eye before.”

Alan laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “It’s nothing important,” he said. “Just tournament nerves.”

“Have it your way,” Quinn said with a shrug of resignation. He drew a battered notebook from his pocket and flipped it open. “I talked with the Panther Shoe people yesterday. They made me a tentative offer to use you in their adverts. You’ll have to show up at department stores now and then, and put in appearances at tennis clinics, but the traveling will be light. Still, I don’t know how they’ll feel about a contract once they hear you’re quitting.”

“I’d rather not sign any contracts until after Wimbledon,” Alan said.

Quinn jammed his hands into his pockets and walked around in a little circle before he went on. “Alan, let’s be honest with ourselves. After Wimbledon all bets are off. Right now you’ve got your name in the papers a lot and people know who you are. If you get beat in one of the early rounds it’s all over. You know as well as I do that only the top four finishers get the plums. The rest have to scramble for what’s left. I know they’ve got you seeded this year, but thirteenth isn’t all that high.”

Alan waited patiently until his friend had finished, then he said, “Listen, Paul, I’m going to win it.”

“Win
, did you say?”

“I said win. I mean it, I’m going to win or …” Alan broke off in mid-sentence. He had been about to say,
or die in the attempt
.

Quinn opened his mouth to argue some more, then he saw the look in his friend’s eyes and changed his mind. He said, “All right, old chum. You know something? I’m damned if I don’t think you just might pull it off. I tell you this, there’ll be one laddie pullin’ for you all the way.”

“Thanks, Paul. That means a lot.”

“Bye the bye, what did the doctor tell you?”

“Doctor? What do you know about the doctor?”

“Why, nothing. You told me last week you were going in for a checkup, that’s all.”

“Oh, sure. He said I was fine. Just fine.”

“What’s this about a doctor?” Hazel Doughty had walked over from her bench to join the men, and had heard only the tail end of their conversation.

“It’s nothing, pet,” Alan said, circling an arm about his wife’s waist. “I was just telling Paul the old checkup went swimmingly.”

“You didn’t tell me anything about a checkup.”

“It must have slipped my mind. Not important anyway.”

“I see.”

Paul Quinn looked from Alan to Hazel and back again uncertainly. He said, “I’d best be off now and straighten things out with the Panther people.”

“I’m sorry if you went to a lot of trouble,” Alan said, “but we’ll do a lot better. You’ll see.”

“Right. Cheer’o for now.”

“What about the Panther people?” Hazel asked as Quinn walked away from them.

“Just business, love. Nothing for you to concern yourself about.”

Hazel Doughty searched her husband’s face. She said, “We never used to have secrets from each other, Alan.”

“Ah, I didn’t mean it to sound that way, old girl. I’m just keyed up. Tournament nerves, like I told Paul. We’ll have plenty of time to talk after Wimbledon.”

Hazel’s worried expression held for a moment longer, then she smiled. “Shall we have some tea and cakes, dear? I see they’re serving over at the tent.”

“That’s a good idea,” Alan said, taking her arm. “Let’s go.”

• • •

Milo Vasquez sat alone with a tiny tea cup clamped in his big brown hand. The tea was hot enough to burn his mouth, but he had drunk two cups and still it had not touched the core of cold deep inside him.

A group of ladies in flowered dresses came down the path acting as though they meant to speak to him. Milo turned on his blackest scowl and aimed it directly into their eyes. The ladies hesitated in confusion, then changed their direction.

Even in his blazing championship days Milo Vasquez had been the least approachable player on the circuit. Now, since the time of his trouble, he kept to himself more than ever. In the old days when he was winning everything in sight he kept people off simply because he did not like them or trust them. A bunch of phonies with big smiles and loud voices, all the time crowding him, trying to get close to a star. They were the same people who had looked right through him when he was nothing but a young Mexican trying to break into an Anglo game. If the Mexican kid wasn’t good enough for them, Milo decided, then they weren’t good enough for the champion.

His reason now for keeping people away from him was that he could not spare one shred of his concentration for anything other than playing winning tennis. It wasn’t like the old days any more when all the moves were automatic. Back then it was as though the racket moved with a mind of its own to meet the oncoming ball dead center on the strings. His serve was an awesome weapon, a missile that blurred into a pale streak. If an opponent managed a return, he would find Milo blocking the net like a brick wall.

No more. Every movement he made on the court now had to be calculated in advance and put into action with an agonizing effort of will. He was winning again, but now it was hard. It was so hard that Milo Vasquez cried sometimes in the dark of the night.

He gulped down the last of his tea, which had gone cold, and shuddered at the taste. A pattern of greenish dregs remained in the bottom of the cup. People were supposed to be able to tell fortunes from tea leaves. Milo could read nothing in the cup. At least, nothing of the future. The past was there. The past was everywhere. Somehow it was not the glory days that Milo remembered, but the ugly times.

There had been much ugliness in the early years of his life. There was no mother that he remembered, only a father who smelled of stale wine and spent his welfare check with the bookie who drove an ice-cream truck through the neighborhood. When he lost his bets, which was most of the time, he would drink more wine and beat his son in frustration. When he was fourteen Milo left home and never went back.

Fourteen is considered too old to begin at tennis if you want to become a championship player. Milo had no thoughts of championships when he started. He took up the game to have something to do. He did not have the patience to idle around the streets like his friends; his exploding energy needed an outlet. He signed up for a class conducted by the city park department, and with his raw power and determination, he was soon the best in his group. The instructor, a graduate student at UCLA, recognized the boy’s natural talent and introduced him to a man named Ybarra, one of the city’s best and most expensive private coaches.

Ybarra, bored with teaching wealthy, overweight matrons and film celebrities who wanted to be fashionable, willingly took on the young Mexican boy. Four years later when Ybarra died of a heart attack Milo was on his way to becoming the best player in the world. The coach was one of the good things in Milo’s life.

Another good thing was Maria. Slim and dark and shy, with great coffee-colored eyes that looked at him with love. Maria. His wife.

When Maria and Milo met at a dance they were both sixteen, though he seemed much older and wiser. Milo was working hard on his tennis then, and earning enough to live on from a job Ybarra had found for him. He told Maria he would have little time to spend with her between the tennis and his job. Maria said it did not matter. She gave him all her love, holding back nothing, and they were married.

They were little more than children at the time, and success in the tennis world was still a far-off dream for Milo. Maria’s dream was more modest. She wanted only to live in a home. A home like the roomy old house in Boyle Heights where she was bom. There she lived for the first ten years of her life, until her father died. There was no insurance, and no way for her mother to keep up the payments on the house. After that the family lived in a succession of apartments on the east side of Los Angeles, each smaller and shabbier than the last.

Now, remembering Maria, Milo made a sound like a moan deep in his chest. Never once in their time together had she spoken to him in anger, though he had deserved it many times. Even on the day he told his wife he no longer wanted her. Maria had simply said she understood, and had even tried to smile at him while tears welled in her dark eyes. How often since that day Milo had wished she had screamed at him, cursing him, thrown something. But he would always hold the memory of her soft, forgiving smile as the tears rolled over her cheeks. It was the last time he saw Maria alive.

“Hello, Milo, how’s it going?”

Milo looked up from his empty cup to see Brian White smiling at him. It would be. No one else would walk up unasked and talk to him that way. Brian White—wealthy, friendly, popular—was everything that Milo Vasquez was not. No amount of coaching could have turned Milo into a Brian White. Still, Brian would never be half the tennis player that the Mexican was.

“Hi,” Milo said shortly.

“I watched you warm up the other day,” Brian said. “You’re hitting out again the way you used to.”

“Yeah.” Milo always found it as difficult to accept a compliment as to give one. When he was playing well he didn’t need anyone to tell him so.

“I’m just glad we’re in different halves of the draw,” Brian said. “If you play the way you did in Paris, you’d murder me.”

Yes, Milo thought, he would easily defeat Brian White if his game was as sharp as it had been in the French championship tournament. In Paris he had reached into hidden reserves from the past, and with supreme concentration had fought his way to the finals. It was not like the old days when he merely overpowered all comers, but it felt good to win again.

“Look,” Brian said, “if you don’t have other plans for the Savoy tonight, how about coming along with Joan and me. We could all sit together, if you don’t mind being with a dull married couple.”

“I’m not going,” Milo said.

“Oh. All right, then.” Brian put out his hand. “Good luck, Milo.”

Milo shook the proffered hand briefly and watched the lean, clean-cut tennis player walk away. “Hey, Brian,” he called. Brian White stopped and turned back. “Thanks anyway. And good luck.”

Brian smiled and gave him a wave before going on his way.

Milo looked down and saw he was absent-mindedly rubbing his left arm through the soft material of his shirt sleeve. The marks were still there, he knew, along the vein inside the elbow. The deadly tracks of the needle. None of the marks was fresh; Milo hadn’t shot up in a year. But the cold was still inside him. The cold that came when Maria died. His eyes narrowed as he looked across to where the defending champion sat.

• • •

Ron Hopper of Australia relaxed on the lawn that sloped up and away from the tennis courts and watched championship players of decades past stroke the ball back and forth in a decorous doubles match. Would he be on those courts in years to come, Ron wondered, playing easy, graceful ground strokes while people on the sidelines pointed him out as a former Wimbledon champion? Nobody could be a champion forever, and Ron Hopper at thirty-five knew his days as a top competitor were numbered. He could retire right now at the top, but he was determined to go down as a champion should—on the courts.

A steady procession of people stopped by to speak to him or to ask him to sign an autograph “for my little boy.” Ron obliged them all, smiling and cordial. From time to time he reached over to pat the hand of his wife, Esther, who was seven months pregnant with their third child.

The kid would have a good life, Ron thought with satisfaction, just as they all would, whether or not he ever played another set of tennis. When he first started making big money out of the game in the mid-1960s Ron had invested wisely both in Australia and in the United States. It had earned him a reputation among the other players of being tight with a dollar, but many of them openly envied his financial security.

When the two of them were alone for a moment Esther leaned toward her husband and rubbed her hand lightly over his thigh. “How is it, hon?” she asked. “Any twinges?”

“It’s all right, dear. Not even a tickle.”

They referred to a tear in the vastus lateralis, part of the massive quadriceps muscle in Ron’s right thigh. The quadriceps controls extension of the leg.

It happened the week after Ron won the Australian championship at Melbourne. It was not even in a competitive match. Ron was out one afternoon having a friendly hit with one of the younger Aussie players. While charging from the baseline to get a shot that barely dribbled onto his side, Ron felt something tear in his leg. He played out the set feeling only a vague soreness, and went to bed that night confident that it would be gone by morning. In the morning he could not straighten his leg.