It is 1:02
A.M.
at 200 East 57
th
Street, and Ira Spade turns the key in the door of his spacious East side duplex and walks past his bedroom toward his son’s, the stink of Wild Turkey preceding his every step.
Ira never knocks before entering Jack’s room because privacy is against his religion and now is no exception, and Jack is sitting up in his sweaty PJs and under his sweaty sheets and the four lifeless eyes meet and without a word Ira staggers over to Jack’s bulletin board and pulls out a folded sheet of laser paper from his breast pocket and pins it up and looks at his son and grins that demonic grin and stumbles out of the room muttering under his foul, bourbony breath.
The 25 Greatest Tennis Players Ever
1. JACK SPADE!
2. Ugo Bellezza
3. Pancho Gonzalez
4. Roger Federer
5. Rod Laver
6. Rafael Nadal
7. Pete Sampras
8. Jaden Gil Agassi
9. Don Budge
10. Bill Tilden
11. Björn Borg
12. Ellsworth Vines
13. Jack Kramer
14. Lew Hoad
15. Fred Perry
16. Jimmy Connors
17. Andre Agassi
18. John McEnroe
19. Roy Emerson
20. Ivan Lendl
21. Ken Rosewall
22. Frank Sedgman
23. Bobby Riggs
24. René Lacoste
25. Henri Cochet/John Newcombe
Jack rises and walks to the bulletin board and reads the list and at first feels a flush of ego and self-importance and filial appreciation but then just as suddenly feels that old familiar surge of unbearable stress and filial resentment and has a sudden urge to yank the taped list, devised so skillfully by King Ira, from its mooring and rip it up into a hundred, no, a million, no, a quintillion pieces. And he lifts his sweaty, trembling hand toward the list, then stops, shakes his head, and bites his tongue until it bleeds.
10
Win or Die
“PANKRATION!”
IRA SPADE WHISPERS OMINOUSLY into his son’s ear.
It is late August, 2047, the eve of the U.S. Open men’s finals in New York City. Unsurprisingly, tomorrow’s match will feature Jack Spade and Ugo Bellezza, in their third encounter this year in the finals of the main draw of a major tournament. Already, at the age of seventeen, Ugo is the reigning Australian and French Open champion and Jack has won at Wimbledon (an injured Ugo did not compete), and the two phenoms are now dominating men’s tennis and the writing of tennis history is indelibly on the wall.
“Huh?”
“Pankration!”
Ira repeats from the comfort of his $7,000 Arne Vodder Danish teak armchair in his East 57
th
Street living room, then, “I learned about it last year at the Athens Olympics, remember, when I went over there for the 150
th
anniversary of the first Athens Olympiad? Anyway, the word literally means ‘all power,’ but what it really means is ‘win or die’!”
Jack gives his father a quizzical look.
“Y’see, long ago,
pankration
was a Greek Olympic sport, a vicious mix of boxing and wrestling first introduced in 638
B.C.,
or almost 2,700 years ago. Contestants were allowed to do virtually anything—choke holds, joint locks, no holds barred, except for eye gouging and biting. So they either had to win or else be killed by their opponents. It was a literal ‘fight to the death,’ where there were two choices when push came to shove—
submission or death
—and for these fierce competitors, submission was definitely not an option.”
Another puzzled look.
“Don’t you see?” Ira says. “I’m telling you about this the night before your important final against that deaf Italian kid. I’m telling it to you because for us, it
is
a fight to the death, where
submission is not an option
. I want you to go out there and show no mercy and fight with all your might until you have choked that little Italian sonuvabitch to death, until he has stopped breathing and
you are the only survivor left on that goddam court
!”
The vein on the left side of Ira Spade’s neck fills to capacity and bulges out, and he is gasping for breath, like a
pankration
contestant whose head is being subjected to a lethal choke hold by his merciless opponent.
“Okay, I get it,” Jack answers, “now, calm down, okay?”
“Calm down,
my ass
,” Ira retorts, busting out of his chair like a sprinter out of the starting blocks. Before Jack can react, he finds his head in a lateral vascular neck restraint performed with pinpoint accuracy by his father, his carotid arteries and jugular veins being compressed on both sides of his neck.
Jack Spade can’t believe that his father is seriously doing this. It’s a joke, right?
Wrong.
Ira isn’t letting up, because this is serious stuff here. This is about Darwin and survival and life and death and all he has struggled for and sacrificed for and all his blood and sweat and tears. And there is fury in his eyes and terror in Jack’s and who knows what might have happened were it not for a key in the door? and here comes Avis Spade in from a trip to the market and just before she enters Ira knows it is she and he loosens his grip and Jack knows it, too, and he coughs quietly and does his best to recover unobtrusively from the assault.
“How you boys doin’?” Avis inquires as she places a Gristede’s bag loaded with groceries on the kitchen counter.
There is no response, aside from one final, barely suppressed cough from her offspring. Finally, Ira says everything’s okeydokey and Avis smiles and enters the living room and things look normal to her except for this bright red mark on Jack’s neck that wasn’t there before she went out and once again Avis’s worst fears bubble up and once again the scab of healing is violently ripped off her marital wound.
* * *
Talk about a romantic setting.
Ugo Bellezza, Antonella Cazzaro, Gioconda Bellezza, and Giglio Marotti are sitting at a table in The View,
a restaurant cozily sequestered beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.
Never was an eatery so aptly named: The view from any of the window seats almost competes with the view of San Francisco Bay from just south of the Waldo Tunnel or the view of Rio de Janeiro and Sugarloaf from above Corcovado Mountain or the view of the entire planet from the summit of Maui’s Haleakala Mountain.
On this eve of the U.S. Open men’s finals, the four are gawking at the water sparkling on the East River and the lights twinkling on one of America’s oldest and most revered bridges and the glittering stars illuminating an imposing concrete panorama spreading from Gotham’s Lower Manhattan to its majestic skyline.
The tranquil beauty of the scene is searing into the souls of the Italians, and their souls are singing, in much the same way the soulful American poet, Hart Crane, sang upon penning this glorious dithyrambic quatrain in his “To Brooklyn Bridge”:
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
The two teenagers gaze at each other, and Antonella smiles at Ugo, smiles at him with those gorgeous periwinkle eyes that in here reflect the sparkling of the water and the twinkling of the lights and the glittering of the stars out there.
The two adults gaze at each other, lovingly as always, but this time the mood and the setting and the just being here with their two young lovebirds are rendering their gazes a trifle more intense, a hair more penetrating.
And when Ugo’s mother and coach turn their heads and look once more into the beckoning night outside the window, the immensely talented tennis prodigy mouths and signs to his girlfriend two little words, and these for the very first time.
Ti adoro
.
* * *
If you walk past any of the outside courts at Flushing Meadows during the opening rounds of the U.S. Open, your ears will tell you in no uncertain terms that this is not a tournament for the faint of heart. They will be ruthlessly assaulted by the cruel sounds of physical and mental agony—the staccato squeaking of soles against green concrete-hard acrylic, the gasping for breath and the grunts and the groans and the moans of the combatants—that differentiate the brutal ambiance here in the country’s roughest city from, say, the stylish schussing on the clay of Roland Garros or the elegant thumping of little cat feet on the grass of Wimbledon. This late-summer classic is, above all, a supreme test of attrition, where more players than in any other tournament are forced to default their matches in medias res due to blisters, exhaustion, dehydration, nausea, dizziness, back spasms, or a tear in any one of the some 4,000 tendons in the human body.
Today, following two seemingly interminable weeks of agony and pain, two players are left standing, two seventeen-year-olds whose ages belie uncommonly profound reservoirs of fortitude, stamina, and toughness clearly superior to those of the other 126 combatants.
As predicted, and eerily similar to the scores of the two other majors finals between them so far in this year of 2047, Ugo Bellezza and Jack Spade have split the first four sets, all in tie-breakers, with Jack’s wins palindromically bookending Ugo’s, 7-6, 6-7, 6-7, 7-6. The gritty New Yorker has momentum slightly in his favor now, but unbelievably, yet to no one’s surprise, each player has precisely the same number of points won (128 apiece), the same number of winners (89 apiece), and the same number of unforced errors (11 apiece).
Hold onto your hats, because here comes the much-awaited fifth and final set, which, because of a recent ruling, will not be a tie-breaker but rather, like the other three Grand Slams, a fight to the finish after 6-all until a player wins by two games.
Ira Spade has been trying everything today with his charge, including the kitchen sink, and now, at crunch time, it’s time to play the jingoism card.
“Goddammit!” Ira screeches into his son’s face on the sidelines at 2-1, Jack’s, in the fifth. “Now’s the time to break this kid’s goddam will! It’s win or die, remember?
Pankration!
And one more thing. These are low-life people, these Italianos. I mean, what have they ever produced? A bunch of painters, a few sissy singers, and the Mafia! So you gotta beat him not only for yourself, but also for the good ol’ red, white, and blue!”
Ira’s face is as flushed as it would have been had he swallowed half a bottle of niacin tablets, and his left eye is twitching something wicked. Jack places a towel over his own sweat-soaked head, more to tune out his father’s tirade than to dry off.
On the other side of the umpire’s chair, Giglio Marotti looks lovingly at his protégé and says, “I’m so proud of you,
ragazzo
. You okay?”
Ugo nods, but he is hiding the fact that something is terribly wrong.
He is hiding it because he doesn’t want to worry Giglio, not here, not now. And besides, his mentor had always taught him about
per aspera ad astra
, that in order to achieve something there is always a need to deal with and overcome obstacles, and how to take the high road and display
sprezzatura
and sublimate the struggle and not let it show and not wear his feelings on his short tennis sleeve.
What is so impressive about compensation in nature is that it reflects a constant balance in the universe, that when one entity dies another is born, that when one part of the body breaks down or is disabled another one makes up for the loss. And so Ugo Bellezza, deaf from a very early age, was also blessed with a visual acuity that, especially on the tennis court, has always made up for his infirmity.
Until now.
A bug or a tiny piece of debris has suddenly lodged itself in Ugo’s right eye, and he is having a devil of a time dealing with it.
As he walks back onto the court at 1-2 in the fifth and deciding set, he is being forced to perform with 23 percent of his most precious sensory possession.
He grabs a towel from one of the ball boys and wipes his eye.
Niente.
Walking to the baseline to serve, Ugo Bellezza knows he is in serious trouble, but there is no panic in his eyes. Just some foreign body.
Across the net, he sees two receivers. Two Jack Spades, as if one weren’t enough for him to handle, swaying back back and forth forth and transferring his weight from one foot one foot to the other the other. Ugo looks for one more brief second at his fierce opponent and can’t help but notice those four pursed lips and those four killer eyes.
Ugo tosses the ball, lower than usual and way out to the right, and catches it. The crowd senses something is a bit off but figures even the greatest of players can occasionally execute a poor toss.
Again Ugo tosses the ball, this time a bit closer to his body but still poorly, and again catches it. He gestures to Jack a civil manual apology for the delay. The crowd murmurs. Jack sneers.
Ugo tosses the ball a third time, and it is not exactly a charm, but good enough, and he slams it pathetically into the bottom of the net.
Ditto for the second serve, and it is love-fifteen and somehow Ugo is not discouraged and gives Giglio a little smile, but his mentor and coach knows exactly what is going on and is not a happy camper and the fans are buzzing with consternation.
The always tranquil Ugo Bellezza walks calmly to the back of the court and asks one of the ball girls for a towel and what happens now is nothing short of divine intervention.
Somehow, knowing that he must get the speck out of his eye and fast—but how?—Ugo presses the towel against his face and closes his right eye and imagines the absolutely saddest of all his stored memories, and it is the sight of his mother that bitter December night receiving word from the coroner’s office that her twenty-eight-year-old husband had taken his own life and Ugo was only fifteen months old at the time but when he saw his
mamma
’s face contort and her reddened eyes squint and gush tears of sorrow and her throat get stuck and her mouth emit what in his unhearing toddler’s world he imagined to be an unspeakably plangent moan, the poignant silence of which he has never forgotten and never will forget…