Murder Is My Racquet (3 page)

“That’s exactly what happens.”

“And it is unfair.”

“Damn right it is.”

“And you explode in rage, the rage you never let yourself
feel as a child. But now you know its source. It’s not the official, who of course cannot be expected to be right every time.”

“They’re only human.”

“Exactly. It’s your father you’re truly enraged at, and he’s dead, and out of reach of your anger, no longer available to approve or disapprove, to applaud or punish.”

“That’s it, all right.”

“And now, armed with the insight you’ve developed here, you’ll be able to master your rage, to dispel it, to rise above it.”

“You know something?” Tommy said. “I feel better already.”

• • •

I
n a first-round match two weeks later, an unreturnable passing shot by his unseeded opponent fell just outside the sideline marker. The umpire called it in.

“You blind bastard!” Tommy screamed. “How much are they paying you to steal the match from me?”

• • •

“W
ith every breath,” the little man in the loincloth intoned, “you draw the anger up from the third chakra. Up up up, past the heart chakra, past the throat chakra, to the third eye. Then, as you breathe out, you let the anger flow in a stream out through the third eye, transformed into peaceful energizing white light. Breathe in and the anger is drawn upward from the solar plexus where it is stored. Breathe out and you release it as white light. With every breath, your reserve of rage grows less and less.”

“Om,” Tommy said.

• • •

I
n his next tournament, the Virginia Slims Equal Opportunity Challenge (dubbed Men Deserve Cancer Too by one commentator), Tommy waltzed through the early rounds, breathing in and breathing out. Then, in the quarterfinals, he smashed his racquet after a service double fault.

He had a replacement racquet, and it wasn’t until midway through the next game that he snapped it over his knee.

• • •

“W
hy put you on the couch for ten or twelve years,” the doctor said, “when I can give you a little pill that’ll fix what’s wrong with you? If you had high blood pressure, you wouldn’t probe your psyche to uncover the underlying reasons for it, would you? You might stroke out while you were still trying to remember your childhood. No, you’d take your medication. If you had diabetes, you’d watch your diet and take your insulin. I’m going to write you a prescription for a new tranquilizer, and I want you to take one first thing every morning. And you won’t have to master your anger, or figure out where it comes from. Because it’ll be gone.”

“Neat,” said Tommy.

• • •

“T
here’s something curiously listless about Terhune’s play,” the television announcer reported. “He’s performing well enough to win his early matches, but we’re used to seeing him rush the net more often, and his reflexes seem the tiniest bit less sharp. We’ve heard rumors that he’s been taking medication to help him with his emotional difficulties, and it looks to me as though whatever he’s taking is slowing him down.”

“But his temper’s in check, Jim. When that call went against him in the first set, he barely noticed it.”

“Oh, he noticed it. He stared over at the official, and he looked puzzled. But he didn’t seem to care very much, and he lifted his racquet and played the next point without incident.”

“If he’s on something, it does seem to be working…. Oh, what’s this?”

“He thought Beckheim’s return was out.”

“But it was clearly in, Jim.”

“Not the way Terhune saw it. Oh, there he goes. Oh, my.”

• • •

“Y
our eyelids are very heavy,” the hypnotist said. “You cannot keep them open. You are sleeping, you are in a deep sleep. From now on, you will be completely calm and unruffled on the tennis court. Nothing will disturb your composure. If anything upsetting occurs, you will stop what you are doing and count slowly to ten. When you reach the count of ten, all tension and anger will vanish, and you will once again be calm and unruffled. Now how will you be when you play tennis?”

“Calm,” Tommy mumbled. “Calm and unruffled.”

“And what will you do if something upsetting occurs?”

“Count to ten.”

“And how will you feel when you reach the count of ten?”

“Calm and unruffled.”

“Very good. When I reach the count of five, you will wake up feeling curiously refreshed, with no conscious recollection
of this experience. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. How do you feel, Tommy?”

“Calm and unruffled,” he said. “And curiously refreshed.”

• • •

L
ooking neither calm nor unruffled, Tommy stalked over to where the official was perched. “One,” he said, and swung his racquet at the platform. “Two,” he said, and he continued his count, punctuating each number with a hammer blow to the base of the platform. The racquet shattered on the count of six, but he continued counting all the way to ten as he marched off the court.

• • •

“Y
ou have the chicken?” Atuele said. “Perfect white chicken. No dark feather, no blemish. Very good.” He placed the chicken on the little altar, placed his hands gently on the bird, and gazed thoughtfully at it. After a long moment the chicken fell over and lay on its side.

“What happened to the chicken?” Tommy asked.

“It is dead.”

“But, uh, how did it die?”

“As it was supposed to,” Atuele said.

Tommy looked around. He was in a compound about a third the size of a football field, just a batch of mud huts strung around an open area that faced the altar, where the chicken was apparently still dead. He’d flown Air Afrique from New York to Dakar, then transferred to Air Gabon, whatever that was, for a harrowing flight to Lomé, the capital of Togo, wherever
that
was. He’d been granted an audience with this Sorbonne-educated witch doctor, who’d sent him off to buy a
chicken. And now the chicken was dead, and he felt like an idiot. What did any of this have to do with tennis? What could it possibly have to do with Thomas Norton Terhune?

“I don’t know what this guy does,” a friend had told him, “and you feel like the world’s prize jackass while he’s doing it, but it’s magic. And it works.”

“Maybe if you believe in it…”

“Hell, I didn’t believe in it. I thought it was pure-Dee ooga-booga horseshit. But it worked anyway. You want to know something? I
still
think it was ooga-booga horseshit. But now I believe in it.”

How, he wondered, could you believe in something while still believing it to be horseshit? And how could it possibly work? And—

“You need a spirit,” Atuele told him. “A spirit who will live within you, and who will have the job of keeping you serene while you are playing tennis.”

“A spirit,” Tommy said hollowly.

“A spirit. In order to give you this spirit, you require a ceremony. Go to your hotel. Return at sunset. And you must bring something.”

“Another chicken?”

“No, not another chicken. A bottle of scotch whiskey and a box of cigars.”

“That’s easy enough. What are we going to do, get drunk and smoke cigars together?”

“No, they are for me. And bring five thousand dollars.”

“Five thousand dollars?”

“For the ceremony,” Atuele explained.

The ceremony turned out to be ridiculous. Six half-naked men pounded on drums, while two dozen young women
danced around, heads thrown back, eyes rolling. Atuele broke an egg in a bowl, poured it onto Tommy’s head, rubbed it into his scalp. He gave him a ball of ground-up grass and told him to eat it, then left him to sit in the circle, and eventually to shuffle around on the dance floor. After an hour or so of this Tommy got a taxi back to his hotel and went to bed.

In the morning he showered, packed, and went to the airport, knowing he’d wasted his money, hoping only that nothing had leaked to the press, that the world would never know the lengths to which he’d been driven or how utterly he’d been made a fool of. He flew to Dakar and on to JFK, then caught another flight to Phoenix for the Scottsdale Open.

Jennifer met him at the airport. “Waste of time,” he told her. She knew only that he’d heard about a secret treatment, not where you went for it or what it consisted of, and he didn’t feel like filling her in. “Lots of mumbo jumbo,” he said. “It won’t work.”

But it did.

• • •

A
t Scottsdale, Tommy Terhune reached the final round of the tournament, losing to Roger MacReady in four sets. He used the same racquet for the entire tournament, and never used it to hit anything but the ball. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t once curse himself, his opponents, the largely hostile audience, or the officials, who made their share of inaccurate calls. He was, that is to say, a perfect gentleman.

And he managed all this with no effort whatsoever. He didn’t take a pill, didn’t count to ten, didn’t clamp a lid on his anger, didn’t chant or meditate. All he did was play tennis, and the moment he stepped onto the court each day, a curious calm settled
over him. He still took notice when a call went unfairly against him, but he didn’t mind, didn’t take it personally. He stayed focused on his game, and his game had never been better.

Of course, he told himself, one tournament didn’t necessarily prove anything. He’d gone through whole tournaments before without treating the crowd to a display of the famous Terhune temper, only to lose it a week or a month down the line. How could he be sure that wouldn’t happen?

Somehow, though, he knew it wouldn’t. Somehow he could tell that something had happened within that circle of mud huts in Togo. According to Atuele, he now had a spirit invested inside of him, a spirit who took control of his temper the moment he picked up a racquet and stepped onto a court. And that’s just how it felt. One way or another, he’d morphed into a person who didn’t have to control himself because he didn’t experience any anger to begin with. He played his matches, won or lost, and went home feeling fine either way.

Calm and unruffled, you might say.

• • •

T
ommy played brilliantly in his next tournament. He sailed serenely through the early rounds, fell behind in his quarterfinal match, then rallied to salvage a victory over his unseeded opponent. Then, in the third set of the semis, the audience fell silent when Tommy served, came to the net, and leaped high into the air to slam his opponent’s return. The ball struck near the baseline, but everyone present could see it was clearly in.

Except the official, who declared it out.

Tommy took a step toward the platform. The official cowered, but Tommy didn’t seem to notice. He said, “Was that ball out?”

The official nodded.

“Oh,” Tommy said, and shrugged. “From here it looked good, but I guess you can see better from where you’re sitting.”

He went back to the baseline and served the next point. He went on to win the match and advance to the finals, in which he played brilliantly, beating Roger MacReady in straight sets.

• • •

“A
nd here’s Mrs. Tommy Terhune, the lovely Jennifer,” said the TV reporter, sticking a mike in her face. “Your husband was really commanding out there, wasn’t he?”

“He was,” she agreed.

“He played brilliant tennis, and he seems to have triumphed in the inner game as well, wouldn’t you say?”

“The inner game?”

“He didn’t lose his temper at all.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “No, he didn’t.”

“I’ll bet you’re proud of him.”

“Very proud.”

“You’ve been quoted as saying he’s always been a perfect gentleman off the court. Now he seems to be every bit the perfect gentleman on the court as well. That must be extremely gratifying to you.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling furiously. “Extremely gratifying.”

• • •

I
t was in the U.S. Open that the extent of the change in Terrible Tommy Terhune became unmistakably evident. Earlier, before his still-secret visit to West Africa, some commentators had theorized that the brilliance of his play might be of a piece with the ungovernability of his temper. Passion, after all, was
the common denominator. Put the one on a leash, they suggested, and the other might wind up hobbled in the bargain.

But this was clearly not the case. Tommy had an easy time of it in the early rounds at Flushing Meadows, winning every match in straight sets. In the quarterfinals, his Croatian opponent won a single game in the first set and none at all in the second and third, but the fellow’s play was not as pathetic as the score suggested. Tommy was simply everywhere, getting to every ball, his returns always on target and, more often than not, unreturnable.

The calls, of course, did not always go his way. But his reaction was never greater than a shrug or a raised eyebrow. Spectators looked for him to be struggling with his emotions, but what was becoming clear was that there was no struggle, and no emotions.

In the semifinals, Tommy’s opponent was the young Chinese-American, Scott Chin, but most fans were looking past the semis to a final round that would see Tommy pitted once again against his Australian rival, Roger MacReady. But this was not to be—while Tommy moved easily past Chin, MacReady lost the fifth set to a previously unknown Belgian player named Claude Macquereau.

Two days later, after a women’s final in which one player grunted while the other wept, Terhune and Macquereau met for the men’s championship. If the fans had been disappointed by MacReady’s absence, the young Belgian soon showed himself as a worthy opponent for Tommy. His serve was strong and accurate, his game at net and at the baseline a near mirror-image of Tommy’s. Macquereau won the first set 7–6, lost the second 7–5. Most games went to deuce, and most individual
points consisted of long, wearying volleys marked by one impossible return after another.

By the third set, which Tommy won in a tiebreaker, the fans knew they were watching tennis history being made. Midway through the fourth set, won by Macquereau in an even more attenuated tiebreaker, the television commentators had run out of superlatives and the crowd had shouted itself hoarse. Both players, run ragged in the late-summer heat and humidity, looked exhausted, but both played as though they were fresh as daisies.