A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (40 page)

If the mood for more serious consumption strikes, you can walk due east of the Stadium complex to the Promenade du Sportif,
a kind of canvas strip mall selling every product even remotely associated with the Canadian Open: Prince, Wilson, Nike, Head,
Boost
^®
Vitamin/Energy Drink (free samples available), Swatch, Nature Valley Granola Bars,
⁵⁶
Sony, and DecoTurf Inc.

And at this tournament you can (U.S. readers may want to sit down for this part) actually
buy
du Maurier-brand cigarettes—by the carton or broad flat Europack—from a special red and black booth right outside the main
entrance to the Stadium Court.
⁵⁷
People in Quebec smoke—heavily—and this booth does serious business. No part of Stade Jarry is nonsmoking, and at matches
so many spectators are chain-smoking du Maurier cigarettes that at times a slight breeze will carry the crowd’s exhaled cloud
of smoke out over the court, transforming the players into nacreous silhouettes for a moment before the cloud ascends. And,
in truth, accredited media don’t even have to
buy
the du Mauriers; Press Box employees will give packs out free to journalists, though they don’t announce this or make a big
big deal of it.

It’s the little things like public smoking that remind you that Canada’s not home. Or e.g. Francophone ads, and these ads’
lack of even a pretense of coy subtlety—someplace between the Radisson des Gouverneurs and Stade Jarry is a huge billboard
for some kind of Quebecois ice cream. It’s a huge photo of an ice cream cone poised at a phallic 45°, jutting, the dome of
ice cream unabashedly glansular, and underneath is the pitch: “Donnez-moi ta bouche.”
⁵⁸
The brand’s own trademark slogan, at the bottom, is that it’s “La glace du lait plus lechée.” One of the nice things Michael
Joyce and his coach do is usually let me ride with them in their courtesy car
⁵⁹
between the hotel and Jarry, to sort of lurk and soak up atmosphere, etc. We pass this billboard several times a day. Finally
one time I point up at the glistening phallic ad and ask Joyce whether the ad strikes him as a little heavy, overt, uncoy.
Joyce looks up at the billboard—maybe for the first time, because in the car he’s usually staring commuterishly straight ahead,
either gathering himself into a prematch focus or exiting gradually from same—and turns to me and says in all earnestness
that he’s tried this particular brand of Canadian ice cream and it’s not all that good.

Plus, of course, once the main draw starts, you get to look up close and live at name tennis players you’re used to seeing
only as arrays of pixels. One of the highlights of Tuesday’s second round of the main draw is getting to watch Agassi play
MaliVai Washington. Washington, the most successful black American on the Tour since Ashe, is unseeded at the Canadian Open
but has been ranked as high as #11 in the world, and is dangerous, and since I loathe Agassi with a passion it’s an exciting
match. Agassi looks scrawny and faggy and, with his shaved skull and beretish hat and black shoes and socks and patchy goatee,
like somebody just released from reform school (a look you can tell he’s carefully decided on with the help of various paid
image-consultants, and now cultivates). Washington, who’s in dark-green shorts and a red shirt with dark-green sleeves, was
a couple of years ago voted by
People
one of the 50 Prettiest Human Beings or something, and on TV is indeed real pretty but in person is awesome. From twenty
yards away he looks less like a human being than like a Michelangelo anatomy sketch: his upper body the V of serious weight
lifting, his leg-muscles standing out even in repose, his biceps little cannonballs of fierce-looking veins. He’s beautiful
but doomed, because the slowness of the Stadium Court makes it impractical for anybody except a world-class net man to rush
the net against Agassi, and Washington is not a net man but a power-baseliner. He stays back and trades groundstrokes with
Agassi, and even though the first set goes to a tiebreaker you can tell it’s a mismatch. Agassi has less mass and flat-out
speed than Washington, but he has vision and timing that give his groundstrokes way more pace. He can stay back and hit nuclear
groundstrokes and force Washington until Washington eventually makes a fatal error. There are two ways to make a fatal error
against Agassi: the first is the standard way, hitting it out or into the net or something; the second is to hit anything
shorter than a couple feet inside the baseline, because anything that Agassi can move up on he can hit for a winner. Agassi’s
facial expression is the slightly smug self-aware one of somebody who’s used to being looked at and automatically assumes
the minute he shows up anywhere that everybody’s looking at him. He’s incredible to see play in person, but his domination
of Washington doesn’t make me like him any better; it’s more like it chills me, as if I’m watching the devil play.

Television tends to level everybody out and make them seem kind of blandly handsome, but at Montreal it turns out that a lot
of the pros and stars are interesting- or even downright funny-looking. Jim Courier, former #1 but now waning and seeded tenth
here,
⁶⁰
looks like Howdy Doody in a hat on TV, but here he turns out to be a very big boy—the “Guide Média” lists him at 175 pounds
but he’s way more than that, with large smooth muscles and the gait and expression of a Mafia enforcer. Michael Chang, 23
and #5 in the world, sort of looks like two different people stitched crudely together: a normal upper body perched atop hugely
muscular and totally hairless legs. He has a mushroom-shaped head, ink-black hair, and an expression of deep and intractable
unhappiness, as unhappy a face as I’ve ever seen outside a Graduate Writing Program.
⁶¹
P. Sampras, in person, is mostly teeth and eyebrows, and he’s got unbelievably hairy legs and forearms, hair in the sort
of abundance that allows me confidently to bet that he has hair on his back and is thus at least not 100% blessed and graced
by the universe. Goran Ivanisevic is large and tan and surprisingly good-looking—at least for a Croat; I always imagine Croats
looking ravaged and katexic and like somebody out of a Munch lithograph—except for an incongruous and wholly absurd bowl haircut
that makes him look like somebody in a Beatles tribute band. It is Ivanisevic who will beat Joyce in three sets in the main
draw’s second round. Czech former top-ten Petr Korda is another clastic-looking mismatch: at 6′3″ and 160, he has the body
of an upright greyhound and the face of—eerily,
uncannily
—a fresh-hatched chicken (plus soulless eyes that reflect no light and seem to “see” only in the way that fish’s and birds’
eyes “see”).

And Wilander is here—Mats Wilander, Borg’s heir, top-ten at age eighteen, #1 at 24, now 30 and unranked and trying a comeback
after years off the Tour, here cast in the role of the wily old mariner, winning on smarts. Tuesday’s best big-name match
is between Wilander and Stefan Edberg,
⁶²
28 and Wilander’s own heir
⁶³
and now married to Annette Olson, Wilander’s S.O. during his own glory days, which adds a delicious personal cast to the
match, which Wilander wins 6–4 in the third. Wilander ends up getting all the way to the semifinals before Agassi beats him
as badly as I have ever seen one professional beat another professional, the score being 6–0 6–2 and the match not nearly
as close as the score would indicate.

Even more illuminating than watching pro tennis live is watching it with Sam Aparicio, Joyce’s coach, who knows as much about
tennis as anybody I’ve talked to and isn’t obnoxious about it. Sam watches a lot of pro matches, scouting stuff for Michael.
Watching tennis with him is like watching a movie with somebody who knows a lot about the technical aspects of film: he helps
you see things you can’t see alone. It turns out, for example, that there are whole geometric sublevels of strategy in a power-baseline
game, all dictated by various P.B.ers’ strengths and weaknesses. A P.B.er depends on being able to hit winners from the baseline.
But, as Sam teaches me to see, Michael Chang can usually hit winners only at an acute angle, from either corner. An “inside-out”
player like Jim Courier, on the other hand, can hit winners only at obtuse angles, from the center out. Hence canny and well-coached
players tend to play Chang “down the middle” and Courier “out wide.” One of the things that makes Agassi so good is that he’s
capable of hitting winners from anywhere on the court—he has no geometric restriction. Joyce, too, according to Sam, can hit
a winner at any angle. He just doesn’t do it quite as well as Agassi, or as often.

Michael Joyce in close-up person, like eating supper or riding in a courtesy car, looks slighter and younger than he does
on-court. From close up he looks his age, which to me is basically a fetus. He’s about 5′9″ and 160; he’s muscular but quietly
so, without much definition. He likes to wear old T-shirts and a backwards cap. His hairline is receding in a subtle young-man
way that makes his forehead look a little high. I forget whether he wore an earring. Michael Joyce’s interests outside tennis
consist mostly of big-budget movies and genre novels of the commercial paperback sort that one reads on planes. In other words,
he really has no interests outside tennis. He has a tight and long-standing group of friends back home in LA, but one senses
that most of his personal connections have been made via tennis. He’s dated some. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s a virgin.
It seems staggering and impossible, but my sense is he might be. Then again, I tended to idealize and distort him, I know,
because of how I felt about what he could do on the court. His most revealing sexual comment is made in the context of explaining
the odd type of confidence that keeps him from freezing up in a match in front of large crowds or choking on a point when
there’s lots of money at stake.
⁶⁴
Joyce, who usually needs to pause about five beats to think before he answers a question, thinks the confidence is partly
a matter of temperament and partly a function of hard work:

“If I’m in like a bar, and there’s a really good-looking girl, I might be kind of nervous. But if there’s like a thousand
gorgeous girls in the stands when I’m playing, it’s a different story. I’m not nervous then, when I play, because I know what
I’m doing. I know what to do out there.” Maybe it’s good to let these be his last quoted words.

Whether or not he ends up in the top ten and a name anybody will know, Michael Joyce will remain a figure of enduring and
paradoxical fascination for me. The restrictions on his life have been, in my opinion, grotesque; and in certain ways Joyce
himself is a grotesque. But the radical compression of his attention and self has allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner
of an art—something few of us get to be. It’s allowed him to visit and test parts of his psyche that most of us do not even
know for sure we have, to manifest in concrete form virtues like courage, persistence in the face of pain or exhaustion, performance
under wilting scrutiny and pressure.

Michael Joyce is, in other words, a complete man (though in a grotesquely limited way). But he wants more. Not more completeness;
he doesn’t think in terms of virtues or transcendence. He wants to be the best, to have his name known, to hold professional
trophies over his head as he patiently turns in all four directions for the media. He is an American and he wants to win.
He wants this, and he will pay to have it—will pay just to pursue it, let it define him—and will pay with the regretless cheer
of a man for whom issues of choice became irrelevant long ago. Already, for Joyce, at 22, it’s too late for anything else:
he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and un-. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.

1995

Right now it’s Saturday 18 March, and I’m sitting in the extremely full coffee shop of the Fort Lauderdale Airport, killing the four hours between when I had to be off the cruise ship and when my flight to Chicago leaves by trying to summon up a kind of hypnotic sensuous collage of all the stuff I’ve seen and heard and done as a result of the journalistic assignment just ended.

I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced and a tropical moon that looked more like a sort of obscenely large and dangling lemon than like the good old stony U.S. moon I’m used to.

I have (very briefly) joined a Conga Line.

I’ve got to say I feel like there’s been a kind of Peter Principle in effect on this assignment. A certain swanky East-Coast magazine approved of the results of sending me to a plain old simple State Fair last year to do a directionless essayish thing. So now I get offered this tropical plum assignment w/ the exact same paucity of direction or angle. But this time there’s this new feeling of pressure: total expenses for the State Fair were $27.00 excluding games of chance. This time
Harper
’s has shelled out over $3000 U.S. before seeing pithy sensuous description one. They keep saying—on the phone, Ship-to-Shore, very patiently—not to fret about it. They are sort of disingenuous, I believe, these magazine people. They say all they want is a sort of really big experiential postcard—go, plow the Caribbean in style, come back, say what you’ve seen.

I have seen a lot of really big white ships. I have seen schools of little fish with fins that glow. I have seen a toupee on a thirteen-year-old boy. (The glowing fish liked to swarm between our hull and the cement of the pier whenever we docked.) I have seen the north coast of Jamaica. I have seen and smelled all 145 cats inside the Ernest Hemingway Residence in Key West FL. I now know the difference between straight Bingo and Prize-O, and what it is when a Bingo jackpot “snowballs.” I have seen camcorders that practically required a dolly; I’ve seen fluorescent luggage and fluorescent sunglasses and fluorescent pince-nez and over twenty different makes of rubber thong. I have heard steel drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a woman in silver lamé projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator. I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the 2:4 beat of the exact same disco music I hated pointing at the ceiling to in 1977.