The Little Prince
I hated him. What wasn't to hate? The kid stunk of entitlement. Even before I saw him play I wanted to hit him. Scratch that: I wanted to slap him.
He'd come to Denver for Junior Davis Club play, a warm-up event to the Intermountain Championship that was to begin in Colorado Springs several days later.
The year was 1978.
There'd been whispers. Things the Boy had done. Things the Boy would do.
As good as his older sister Rita? "Oh, yes."
As good as good as his older brother Phil? "Better."
Whatever. We had guys on the Davis Cup squad from Denver who could bring the punishment. We weren't afraid when the bus pulled up and the Boy from Nevada stepped off.
Actually, he didn't step off. His coaches and teammates—they stepped off. They disembarked. He, on the other hand, emerged.
Appeared. True, he was, like his teammates and coaches, physically inside the bus one moment and then, moments later, physically outside it. Yet he was not with them. Nor were they with, or accompanying, him. They were
attending to him.
No,wait—that's still not it. That "to" misstates the dynamic. Here it is: They were attending him. Yes, they were
attending the Boy, the way one might attend a presidential inauguration. Nominally, the Nevadans had come to play tennis. At a deeper level, though, they'd committed themselves to the business of
presenting the Boy, of ensuring that this ordained little prick made his way from the bus to the courts with all the theatricality that was his due.
The Boy was the youngest among them. He was 8 years old.
A third grader.
And yet he headed their formation—that is, the formation they assumed in order to traverse the hundred yards between the bus and the courts. The alignment was instinctual, as with geese; as the Boy set out, a triangular wedge of Nevadans—10- and 12-year-old boys, 14- and 16-year-old boys, 18-year-old boys,
grown men!—formed behind, and followed.
A single concession to modesty was made; none in the Boy's supporting cast played the role of racquet valet. The Boy carried his own weaponry: six unsheathed Wilson Jack Kramer Autographs, nearly one for each of his years on the planet. (But such gloating there. Of course the Boy needed only one and, if he popped a string or cracked a rim, a back-up; the other four served as a smirking reminder:
Before you get on the court with me (whoever you are, your name is of no concern) you might find it helpful to consider the fact that Wilson sponsors me, even though I'm only eight freaking years old—and that if I'd so chosen, I could have brought twelve.)
For mockery's sake, I wish I could say that with his twittering attendants in tow, this Little Fucking Fountleroy "strode forth" with "his carriage erect." But it wasn't in him to stride. Wasn't in him
physically, I mean. His knees were oddly in-turned, as if several years of corrective braces had almost, but not entirely, fixed a congenital defect. He seemed to amble like a dancing bee, to
jig, his knees and toes and torso zigging right and zagging left, the off-center right of each zig canceling the off-center left of each zag to produce the straight line that ran from bus to court.
I have to admit that that walk, together with the Tiny-Tim tininess of him (not much longer from head to toe than those Jack Kramers), and the yellow mane (what was up with
that?) tamed with the thick tri-colored Bjorn Borg headband everybody and his sister was wearing back then, and the gimpy walk, and the sheepish grin on his baby-face as all eyes fell upon him, was oddly touching. There
was something tender and mild about him. Something sensitive and fragile.
Could it be that the Boy was genuinely—and not just annoyingly—precious? Was it possible that the primary function of the Nevadan wedge was to
protect him, as a nest protects a hatchling—and decorative only in a secondary way?
Alright, then, he was genuinely precious. Which is probably why I felt less like hitting him than slapping him. I didn't want him to see him hurt; I wanted to see him cry.
Cry like a sissy.
Fortunately, I had my older brother's doubles partner there to slap the Boy around the court for me. In fact, the guy was actually named
Hand. David Hand. Damn good player, worthy of all the nicknames we gave him: "Hand of Wrath," "Hand of God," "The
HAND," etc., etc. Better yet, there wasn't a whiff of anything precious about him. The Hand was one loose dude. Acted loose and played cool, with long, silky, matter-of-fact strokes and very little sweat. His rarely riled. When he did, his anger was constructive, taking form as a physically improbable, invariably devastating, baseline forehand that involved stretching his nearly six-foot frame erect and then pile-driving the ball with his elbow straightened and the neck of his racquet vertical—the way a one-armed golfer might hit a tee shot, or a one-armed sociopath might knock the head off a gopher with a sledge-hammer. When David unleashed that forehand, the ball became a blur. I remember the stroke less for what it looked like than for the sound it could produce—a hollow artillery boom as the ball struck the luffed nylon wind guard along the back fence. The Hand could punish your ears with that shot.
And yes, you did read that bit right about The Hand being nearly six-feet tall. That's because he was 14-years-old. It seemed that the Boy, that 8-year-old, that freaking
garden gnome of a human being, had decided he no longer had anything to learn from the other 8-, 9- and 10-year-olds in his age group, or from the 11- and 12-year-olds in the group above him. Only the 13- and 14-year-olds would do.
Think about that for a moment. Think of the physiological differences between a child of eight and a boy of fourteen. Think of, say, a third grader who plays running back for his Pop Warner squad deciding that he ought to be taking hits instead from high school freshmen.
Delusional, right? Hubristic, right? In need of a serious bitch-slapping, right?
So yes, we were pleased, quite pleased, to learn that The Hand, in all his manifest coolness, would be schooling the tow-headed pigmy from Vegas.
I should say that I myself was eleven years old at the time. The "F" word hadn't yet infected my vocabulary. Even so, I'm afraid I must insist, somehow, that when the Boy got on that court with David Hand and began to do what he'd come there to do, what his supporting wedge knew he would do, what it quickly became clear he'd been ordained from birth to do, my response was:
What the FUCK?Lord, it was terrible, terrible. Frankly, I don't care to talk about it.
Released at last from his protective caul of Nevadans, the Boy took the court and instantly morphed into the tennis equivalent of that steroidal Monty Python bunny that rips out the throats of half a dozen Arthurian knights before they even know what's happening. Like the bunny, the Boy was—in freeze-frame—perfectly adorable, cute as a button, choking up on the neck of his Jack Kramer with both hands for leverage. (As if he didn't have the strength to hold the racquet by the grip! As if he was too young even to know what to do with this goofy
thing some adult had stuck in his hands!) Even in motion, if you divorced your mind from the queasy fact of what he was doing to David Hand (vivisection), he looked cute, because there was nothing "adult" about his strokes. He didn't so much have a forehand and a backhand as two two-handed forehands. These were jerky, unrefined, little-kid strokes, the strokes most 8-year-olds employ when trying to whack a piñata at a birthday party.
They were
patently ridiculous strokes, okay?
But of course you couldn't consider the Boy in freeze-frame, or apart from what he was doing to The Hand—especially if you were a kid like me who had long aspired to do like the Hand did, and be like the Hand was. So overall, the whole thing was pretty fucking uncute indeed.
The Boy began each point with his feet on the baseline. Then gleefully, sickeningly...
advanced. It didn't matter if he was serving or receiving, and it didn't matter if The Hand was hitting line-drive backhands deep or topspin forehands shallow. The Boy just started walking, and he didn't stop until he was at the net or the point was over. (He didn't "punch" his volleys, by the way, or even "volley," per se; he swung for the piñata at the net as greedily as he did from the baseline.) When receiving, the little bastard actually started marching toward the net
before the ball was in play, because he knew where The Hand's serves were headed before The Hand knew himself, and because he was capable of playing the first serves of one of the best fourteen-year-old singles players in the state of Colorado...
as half volleys. The power he had off both sides with those ridiculous strokes was freakish, in defiance of natural laws, and generated from the most improbable places: halfway between the baseline and the service court, and five feet in the air; two feet inside the service area, and from a height of six inches.
The power was the least of it, though. When it came to placement, he had two spots: deep left and deep right. He was metronomic about it. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Right. Never two lefts or two rights in a row. His execution was surgical. He just ran The Hand back and forth, back and forth, until the big guy netted or outed the ball, or just couldn't keep running anymore.
Worse yet, the constituent cogs of the Nevadan wedge wouldn't stop chanting.
Grown men, some of them. Chanting homáge. To a third-grader.
Every time the Boy either ran The Hand into the ground or hit an outright winner, which was roughly seventy—five percent of the time, the Nevadans launched into their sneering, creepily reverent chorus.
André! André! André!
That was his name, apparently.
And that's how they intoned it, with a mystique-enhancing emphasis on the second syllable:
Awn—DRAY!
The changeovers produced a haunting visual. There was The Hand with his shell of cool ripped off, revealing beneath a soft, bewildered creature—its chest heaving, its shirt soaked through, its face an alarming pink color—that none of his friends had ever seen before. And there, coming only a few inches above David's belt line, was this preening child, as dry and fluffy and cute and pleased with the world as a giveaway chick at a carnival.
One of us Denver guys finally said it. "This can't be happening."
Because we refused to believe what we were seeing, we continued to hope, and because we continued to hope, we continued to wait for it. And wait. And wait. One, two, three, four games… The Hand lost them quickly, and without getting mad. Was he confused? Yes. Was he spooked? Of course. And still we waited, waited. Then, at long last, in the seventh game of their ten-game pro set, the opportunity presented itself and The Hand took it. Stood tall, started a back-stroke that began somewhere up where the air was thin, then unleashed that trademark roundhouse pile-drive forehand of his.
It was awesome.
And the Boy?
He seemed strangely unaware that The Hand had delivered up an awesome something, a genuine piece of news about himself. Not because the shot blew by him, unfortunately—
most unfortunately—but because he dealt with it as reflexively as everything else he'd been offered that day. The Boy simply mirrored the shot, returning to David (C.O.D) exactly what David had sent to him. David just stood there, stilled, in the fractional second it took for the ball to rocket back over the net, in play, then past him. Stood there and realized, no doubt, that nothing he could do mattered; that for all intents and purposes he wasn't even there; that he wasn't so much being humiliated as rendered invisible.
The Nevadans began to hoot like gibbons.
Awn-DRAY! Awn-DRAY! Awn-DRAY!
It was demonic.
What else do I remember about that morning? I remember that the final score was ten to zero. I remember feeling that what had happened, though indescribable, was nevertheless very, very
clear. And I remember sensing, in some inchoate way, that David Hand's life would never be the same, that he'd been force-fed a lesson most of us learn as adults, if ever.
I'll tell you what I
don't remember about that morning: I don't remember who I played, whether it was singles or doubles or both, or how I fared. There simply wasn't enough K left on that day's disk to preserve it in memory.
As for the garden gnome from Vegas, whom I regret I never got to slap, or see slapped—I guess I have to admit that he really did exist, and that he really did what my eyes told me he did, and that he did it to a guy I sincerely looked up to. Beyond that, I have no idea of what, if anything, became of him. Probably grew up and married a supermodel, the smug little prick. Or an actress. Or a supermodel/actress. Hell, for all I know, Awn-DRAY turned into a stand-up guy, started a school for needy urban children or something.
Stranger things have happened.
Tell you this, though: If anybody out there does know, do
not bring it up with me. Understand? I don't need to hear one damn word.
Andrew Corsello is a correspondent for GQ.