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CHAPTER ONE
derivative sport in tornado alley
When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad's alma
mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a
sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I'm starting to see why this was
so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner's sickness for home.
I'd grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids--and, on
the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird
topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and
spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the
seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know
infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern
school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light.
Calculus was, quite literally, child's play.
In late childhood I learned how to play tennis on the blacktop courts of a
small public park carved from farmland that had been nitrogenized too often
to farm anymore. This was in my home of Philo, Illinois, a tiny collection of
corn silos and war-era Levittown homes whose native residents did little
but sell crop insurance and nitrogen fertilizer and herbicide and collect
property taxes from the young academics at nearby Champaign-Urbana's
university, whose ranks swelled enough in the flush 1960s to make
outlying non sequiturs like "farm and bedroom community" lucid.
Between the ages of twelve and fifteen I was a near-great junior tennis
player. I made my competitive bones beating up on lawyers' and dentists'
kids at little Champaign and Urbana Country Club events and was soon
killing whole summers being driven through dawns to tournaments all over
Illinois, Indiana, Iowa. At fourteen I was ranked seventeenth in the United
States Tennis Association's Western Section ("Western" being the creakily
ancient USTA's designation for the Midwest; farther west were the
Southwest, Northwest, and Pacific Northwest sections). My flirtation with
tennis excellence had way more to do with the township where I learned and
trained and with a weird proclivity for intuitive math than it did with athletic
talent. I was, even by the standards of junior competition in which
everyone's a bud of pure potential, a pretty untalented tennis player. My
hand-eye was OK, but I was neither large nor quick, had a near-concave
chest and wrists so thin I could bracelet them with a thumb and pinkie, and
could hit a tennis ball no harder or truer than most girls in my age bracket.
What I could do was "Play the Whole Court." This was a piece of tennis
truistics that could mean any number of things. In my case, it meant I knew
my limitations and the limitations of what I stood inside, and adjusted
thusly. I was at my very best in bad conditions.
Now, conditions in Central Illinois are from a mathematical perspective
interesting and from a tennis perspective bad. The summer heat and
wet-mitten humidity, the grotesquely fertile soil that sends grasses and
broadleaves up through the courts' surface by main force, the midges that
feed on sweat and the mosquitoes that spawn in the fields' furrows and in
the conferva-choked ditches that box each field, night tennis next to
impossible because the moths and crap-gnats drawn by the sodium lights
form a little planet around each tall lamp and the whole lit court surface is
aflutter with spastic little shadows.
But mostly wind. The biggest single factor in Central Illinois' quality of
outdoor life is wind. There are more local jokes than I can summon about
bent weather vanes and leaning barns, more downstate sobriquets for
kinds of wind than there are in Malamut for snow. The wind had a
personality, a (poor) temper, and, apparently, agendas. The wind blew
autumn leaves into intercalated lines and arcs of force so regular you could
photograph them for a textbook on Cramer's Rule and the cross-products of
curves in 3-space. It molded winter snow into blinding truncheons that
buried stalled cars and required citizens to shovel out not only driveways
but the sides of homes; a Central Illinois "blizzard"
starts only when the snowfall stops and the wind begins. Most people in
Philo didn't comb their hair because why bother. Ladies wore those plastic
flags tied down over their parlor-jobs so regularly I thought they were
required for a real classy coiffure; girls on the East Coast outside with their
hair hanging and tossing around looked wanton and nude to me. Wind
wind etc. etc.
The people I know from outside it distill the Midwest into blank flatness,
black land and fields of green fronds or five-o'clock stubble, gentle swells
and declivities that make the topology a sadistic exercise in plotting
quadrics, highway vistas so same and dead they drive motorists mad. Those
from IN/WI/Northern IL think of their own Midwest as agronomics and
commodity futures and corn-detasseling and bean-walking and
seed-company caps, apple-checked Nordic types, cider and slaughter and
football games with white fogbanks of breath exiting helmets. But in the odd
central pocket that is Champaign-Urbana, Rantoul, Philo,
Mahomet-Seymour, Mattoon, Farmer City, and Tolono, Midwestern life is
informed and deformed by wind. Weatherwise, our township is on the
eastern upcurrent of what I once heard an atmospherist in brown tweed call
a Thermal Anomaly. Something about southward rotations of crisp air off
the Great Lakes and muggy southern stuff from Arkansas and Kentucky
miscegenating, plus an odd dose of weird zephyrs from the Mississippi
valley three hours west. Chicago calls itself the Windy City, but Chicago,
one big windbreak, does not know from a true religious-type wind. And
meteorologists have nothing to tell people in Philo, who know perfectly well
that the real story is that to the west, between us and the Rockies, there is
basically nothing tall, and that weird zephyrs and stirs joined breezes and
gusts and thermals and downdrafts and whatever out over Nebraska and
Kansas and moved east like streams into rivers and jets and military fronts
that gathered like avalanches and roared in reverse down pioneer oxtrails,
toward our own personal unsheltered asses. The worst was spring, boys'
high school tennis season, when the nets would stand out stiff as proud
flags and an errant ball would blow clear to the easternmost fence,
interrupting play on the next several courts. During a bad blow some of us
would get rope out and tell Rob Lord, who was our fifth man in singles and
spectrally thin, that we were going to have to tie him down to keep him from
becoming a projectile. Autumn,
usually about half as bad as spring, was a low constant roar and the
massive clicking sound of continents of dry leaves being arranged into
force-curves--I'd heard no sound remotely like this megaclicking until I
heard, at nineteen, on New Brunswick's Fundy Bay, my first high-tide wave
break and get sucked back out over a shore of polished pebbles. Summers
were manic and gusty, then often around August deadly calm. The wind
would just die some August days, and it was no relief at all; the cessation
drove us nuts. Each August, we realized afresh how much the sound of
wind had become part of the soundtrack to life in Philo. The sound of wind
had become, for me, silence. When it went away, I was left with the squeak
of the blood in my head and the aural glitter of all those little eardrum hairs
quivering like a drunk in withdrawal. It was months after I moved to western
MA before I could really sleep in the pussified whisper of New England's
wind-sound.
To your average outsider, Central Illinois looks ideal for sports. The
ground, seen from the air, strongly suggests a board game: anally precise
squares of dun or khaki cropland all cut and divided by plumb-straight tar
roads (in all farmland, roads still seem more like impediments than avenues).
In winter, the terrain always looks like Mannington bathroom tile, white
quadrangles where bare (snow), black where trees and scrub have shaken
free in the wind. From planes, it always looks to me like Monopoly or Life,
or a lab maze for rats; then, from ground level, the arrayed fields of feed
corn or soybeans, fields furrowed into lines as straight as only an Allis
Chalmers and sextant can cut them, look laned like sprint tracks or Olympic
pools, hashmarked for serious ball, replete with the angles and alleys of
serious tennis. My part of the Midwest always looks laid down special, as if
planned.
The terrain's strengths are also its weaknesses. Because the land seems
so even, designers of clubs and parks rarely bother to roll it flat before
laying the asphalt for tennis courts. The result is usually a slight list that
only a player who spends a lot of time on the courts will notice. Because
tennis courts are for sun- and eye-reasons always laid lengthwise
north-south, and because the land in Central Illinois rises very gently as
one moves east toward Indiana and the subtle geologic summit
that sends rivers doubled back against their own feeders somewhere in
the east of that state, the court's forehand half, for a rightie facing north,
always seems physically uphill from the backhand--at a tournament in
Richmond IN, just over the Ohio line, I noticed the tilt was reversed. The
same soil that's so full of humus farmers have to be bought off to keep
markets unflooded keeps clay courts chocked with jimson and thistle and
volunteer corn, and it splits asphalt courts open with the upward pressure
of broadleaf weeds whose pioneer-stock seeds are unthwarted by a
half-inch cover of sealant and stone. So that all but the very best
maintained courts in the most affluent Illinois districts are their own little
rural landscapes, with tufts and cracks and underground-seepage puddles
being part of the lay that one plays. A court's cracks always seem to start
off to the side of the service box and meander in and back toward the
service line. Foliated in pockets, the black cracks, especially against the
forest green that contrasts with the barn red of the space outside the lines
to signify fair territory, give the courts the eerie look of well-rivered
sections of Illinois, seen from back aloft.
A tennis court, 78'x27', looks, from above, with its slender rectangles of
doubles alleys flanking its whole length, like a cardboard carton with flaps
folded back. The net, 3.5 feet high at the posts, divides the court widthwise
in half; the service lines divide each half again into backcourt and fore-. In
the two forecourts, lines that run from the base of the net's center to the
service lines divide them into 21'x13.5' service boxes. The sharply precise
divisions and boundaries, together with the fact that--wind and your more
exotic-type spins aside--balls can be made to travel in straight lines only,
make textbook tennis plane geometry. It is billiards with balls that won't
hold still. It is chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes what football
is to infantry and attrition.
Tennis-wise, I had two preternatural gifts to compensate for not much
physical talent. Make that three. The first was that I always sweated so
much that I stayed fairly ventilated in all weathers. Oversweating seems an
ambivalent blessing, and it didn't exactly do wonders for my social life in
high school, but it meant I could play for hours on a
Turkish-bath July day and not flag a bit so long as I drank water and ate
salty stuff between matches. I always looked like a drowned man by about
game four, but I didn't cramp, vomit, or pass out, unlike the gleaming Peoria
kids whose hair never even lost its part right up until their eyes rolled up in
their heads and they pitched forward onto the shimmering concrete. A
bigger asset still was that I was extremely comfortable inside straight lines.
None of the odd geometric claustrophobia that turns some gifted juniors
into skittish zoo animals after a while. I found I felt best physically
enwebbed in sharp angles, acute bisections, shaved corners. This was
environmental. Philo, Illinois, is a cockeyed grid: nine north-south streets
against six northeast-southwest, fifty-one gorgeous slanted-cruciform
corners (the east and west intersection-angles' tangents could be evaluated
integrally in terms of their secants!) around a three-intersection central town
common with a tank whose nozzle pointed northwest at Urbana, plus a
frozen native son, felled on the Salerno beachhead, whose bronze hand
pointed true north. In the late morning, the Salerno guy's statue had a squat
black shadow-arm against grass dense enough to putt on; in the evening
the sun galvanized his left profile and cast his arm's accusing shadow out to
the right, bent at the angle of a stick in a pond. At college it suddenly
occurred to me during a quiz that the differential between the direction the
statue's hand pointed and the arc of its shadow's rotation was first-order.
Anyway, most of my memories of childhood--whether of furrowed
acreage, or of a harvester's sentry duty along RR104W, or of the play of
sharp shadows against the Legion Hall softball field's dusk--I could now
reconstruct on demand with an edge and protractor.
I liked the sharp intercourse of straight lines more than the other kids I
grew up with. I think this is because they were natives, whereas I was an
infantile transplant from Ithaca, where my dad had Ph.D.'d. So I'd known,
even horizontally and semiconsciously as a baby, something different, the
tall hills and serpentine one-ways of upstate NY. I'm pretty sure I kept the
amorphous mush of curves and swells as a contrasting backlight
somewhere down in the lizardy part of my brain, because the Philo children
I fought and played with, kids who knew and had known nothing else, saw
nothing stark or new-worldish in the township's planar layout, prized
nothing crisp. (Except why do I think it significant that so
many of them wound up in the military, performing smart right-faces in
razor-creased dress blues?)
Unless you're one of those rare mutant virtuosos of raw force, you'll find
that competitive tennis, like money pool, requires geometric thinking, the
ability to calculate not merely your own angles but the angles of response
to your angles. Because the expansion of response-possibilities is
quadratic, you are required to think n shots ahead, where n is a hyperbolic
function limited by the sinh of opponent's talent and the cosh of the number
of shots in the rally so far (roughly). I was good at this. What made me for a
while near-great was that I could also admit the differential complication of
wind into my calculations; I could think and play octacally. For the wind put
curves in the lines and transformed the game into 3-space. Wind did
massive damage to many Central Illinois junior players, particularly in the
period from April to July when it needed lithium badly, tending to gust
without pattern, swirl and backtrack and die and rise, sometimes blowing in
one direction at court level and in another altogether ten feet overhead. The
precision in thinking required one to induct trends in percentage, thrust, and
retaliatory angle--precision our guy and the other townships' volunteer
coaches were good at abstracting about with chalk and board, attaching a
pupil's leg to the fence with clothesline to restrict his arc of movement in
practice, placing laundry baskets in different corners and making us sink ball
after ball, taking masking tape and laying down Chinese boxes within the
court's own boxes for drills and wind sprints--all this theoretical prep went
out the window when sneakers hit actual court in a tournament. The
best-planned, best-hit ball often just blew out of bounds, was the basic
unlyrical problem. It drove some kids near-mad with the caprice and
unfairness of it all, and on real windy days these kids, usually with talent
out the bazoo, would have their first apoplectic racket-throwing tantrum in
about the match's third game and lapse into a kind of sullen coma by the end
of the first set, now bitterly expecting to get screwed over by wind, net, tape,
sun. I, who was affectionately known as Slug because I was such a lazy turd
in practice, located my biggest tennis asset in a weird robotic detachment
from whatever unfairnesses of wind and weather I couldn't plan for. I
couldn't begin to tell you how many tournament matches I won between the
ages of twelve and fifteen against
bigger, faster, more coordinated, and better-coached opponents simply by
hitting balls unimaginatively back down the middle of the court in
schizophrenic gales, letting the other kid play with more verve and panache,
waiting for enough of his ambitious balls aimed near the lines to curve or
slide via wind outside the green court and white stripe into the raw red
territory that won me yet another ugly point. It wasn't pretty or fun to
watch, and even with the Illinois wind I never could have won whole
matches this way had the opponent not eventually had his small nervous
breakdown, buckling under the obvious injustice of losing to a
shallow-cheated "pusher" because of the shitty rural courts and rotten
wind that rewarded cautious automatism instead of verve and panache. I
was an unpopular player, with good reason. But to say that I did not use
verve or imagination was untrue. Acceptance is its own verve, and it takes
imagination for a player to like wind, and I liked wind; or rather I at least felt
the wind had some basic right to be there, and found it sort of interesting,
and was willing to expand my logistical territory to countenace the
devastating effect a 15- to 30-mph stutter-breeze swirling southwest to east
would have on my best calculations as to how ambitiously to respond to
Joe Perfecthair's topspin drive into my backhand corner.
The Illinois combination of pocked courts, sickening damp, and wind
required and rewarded an almost Zen-like acceptance of things as they
actually were, on-court. I won a lot. At twelve, I began getting entry to
tournaments beyond Philo and Champaign and Danville. I was driven by
my parents or by the folks of Gil Antitoi, son of a Canadian-history
professor from Urbana, to events like the Central Illinois Open in Decatur, a
town built and owned by the A. E. Staley processing concern and so awash
in the stink of roasting corn that kids would play with bandannas tied over
their mouths and noses; like the Western Closed Qualifier on the ISU
campus in Normal; like the McDonald's Junior Open in the serious corn
town of Galesburg, way out west by the River; like the Prairie State Open in
Pekin, insurance hub and home of Caterpillar Tractor; like the Midwest
Junior Clay Courts at a chichi private club in Peoria's pale version of
Scarsdale.
Over the next four summers I got to see way more of the state than is
normal or healthy, albeit most of this seeing was a blur of travel and crops,
looking between nod-outs at sunrises abrupt and terribly candent over the
crease between fields and sky (plus you could see any town you were
aimed at the very moment it came around the earth's curve, and the only
part of Proust that really moved me in college was the early description of
the kid's geometric relation to the distant church spire at Combray), riding in
station wagons' backseats through Saturday dawns and Sunday sunsets. I
got steadily better; Antitoi, unfairly assisted by an early puberty, got
radically better.
By the time we were fourteen, Gil Antitoi and I were the Central Illinois
cream of our age bracket, usually seeded one and two at area tournaments,
able to beat all but a couple of even the kids from the Chicago suburbs who,
together with a contingent from Grosse Pointe MI, usually dominated the
Western regional rankings. That summer the best fourteen-year-old in the
nation was a Chicago kid, Bruce Brescia (whose penchant for floppy white
tennis hats, low socks with bunnytails at the heel, and lurid pastel sweater
vests testified to proclivities that wouldn't dawn on me for several more
years), but Brescia and his henchman, Mark Mees of Zanesville OH, never
bothered to play anything but the Midwestern Clays and some indoor
events in Cook County, being too busy jetting off to like the Pacific
Hardcourts in Ventura and Junior Wimbledon and all that. I played Brescia
just once, in the quarters of an indoor thing at the Rosemont Horizon in
1977, and the results were not pretty. Antitoi actually got a set off Mees in
the national Qualifiers one year. Neither Brescia nor Mees ever turned pro; I
don't know what happened to either of them after eighteen.
Antitoi and I ranged over the exact same competitive territory; he was
my friend and foe and bane. Though I'd started playing two years before
he, he was bigger, quicker, and basically better than I by about age
thirteen, and I was soon losing to him in the finals of just about every
tournament I played. So different were our appearances and approaches
and general gestalts that we had something of an epic rivalry from '74
through '77. I had gotten so prescient at using stats, surface, sun, gusts,
and a kind of Stoic cheer that I was regarded as a kind of physical savant, a
medicine boy of wind and heat, and could play just forever, sending back
moonballs baroque with spin. Antitoi, uncomplicated from the get-go, hit
the everliving shit out of every round object that came within his
ambit, aiming always for one of two backcourt corners. He was a Slugger; I
was a Slug. When he was "on," i.e. having a good day, he varnished the
court with me. When he wasn't at his best (and the countless hours I and
David Saboe from Bloomington and Kirk Riehagen and Steve Cassil of
Danville spent in meditation and seminar on just what variables of diet,
sleep, romance, car ride, and even sock-color factored into the equation of
Antitoi's mood and level day to day), he and I had great matches, real
marathon wind-suckers. Of eleven finals we played in 1974, I won two.
Midwest junior tennis was also my initiation into true adult sadness. I
had developed a sort of hubris about my Taoistic ability to control via
noncontrol. I'd established a private religion of wind. I even liked to bike.
Awfully few people in Philo bike, for obvious wind reasons, but I'd found a
way to sort of tack back and forth against a stiff current, holding some wide
book out at my side at about 120 [degrees] to my angle of thrust--Bayne and Pugh's
The Art of the Engineer and Cheiro's Language of the Hand proved to be
the best airfoils--so that through imagination and verve and stoic cheer I
could not just neutralize but use an in-your-face gale for biking. Similarly, by
thirteen I'd found a way not just to accommodate but to employ the heavy
summer winds in matches. No longer just mooning the ball down the center
to allow plenty of margin for error and swerve, I was now able to use the
currents kind of the way a pitcher uses spit. I could hit curves way out into
cross-breezes that'd drop the ball just fair; I had a special wind-serve that
had so much spin the ball turned oval in the air and curved left to right like
a smart slider and then reversed its arc on the bounce. I'd developed the
same sort of autonomic feel for what the wind would do to the ball that a
standard-trans driver has for how to shift. As a junior tennis player, I was
for a time a citizen of the concrete physical world in a way the other boys
weren't, I felt. And I felt betrayed at around fourteen when so many of these
single-minded flailing boys became abruptly mannish and tall, with sudden
sprays of hair on their thighs and wisps on their lips and ropy arteries on
their forearms. My fifteenth summer, kids I'd been beating easily the year
before all of a sudden seemed overpowering. I lost in two semifinals, at
Pekin and Springfield in '77, of events I'd beaten Antitoi in the finals of in
'76. My dad just about brought me to my knees after the Springfield loss to
some kid from the Quad Cities when he said, trying to console me, that it
had looked like a boy playing a man out there. And the other
boys sensed something up with me, too, smelled some breakdown in the
odd detente I'd had with the elements: my ability to accommodate and
fashion the exterior was being undercut by the malfunction of some internal
alarm clock I didn't understand.
I mention this mostly because so much of my Midwest's communal
psychic energy was informed by growth and fertility. The agronomic angle
was obvious, what with my whole township dependent for tax base on
seed, dispersion, height, and yield. Something about the adults' obsessive
weighing and measuring and projecting, this special calculus of thrust and
growth, leaked inside us children's capped and bandanna'd little heads out
on the fields, diamonds, and courts of our special interests. By 1977 I was
the only one of my group of jock friends with virginity intact. (I know this
for a fact, and only because these guys are now schoolteachers and
commoditists and insurers with families and standings to protect will I not
share with you just how I know it.) I felt, as I became a later and later
bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body,
but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my
coconspirator. I knew, somehow, that the call to height and hair came from
outside, from whatever apart from Monsanto and Dow made the corn grow,
the hogs rut, the wind soften every spring and hang with the scent of
manure from the plain of beanfields north between us and Champaign. My
vocation ebbed. I felt uncalled. I began to experience the same resentment
toward whatever children abstract as nature that I knew Steve Cassil felt
when a soundly considered approach shot down the forehand line was
blown out by a gust, that I knew Gil Antitoi suffered when his pretty
kick-serve (he was the only top-flight kid from the slow weedy township
courts to play serve-and-volley from the start, which is why he had such
success on the slick cement of the West Coast when he went on to play for
Cal-Fullerton) was compromised by the sun: he was so tall, and so stubborn
about adjusting his high textbook service toss for solar conditions, that
serving from the court's north end in early afternoon matches always filled
his eyes with violet blobs, and he'd lumber around for the rest of the point,
flailing and pissed. This was back when sunglasses were unheard of,
on-court.
But so the point is I began to feel what they'd felt. I began, very quietly,
to resent my physical place in the great schema, and this resentment
and bitterness, a kind of slow root-rot, is a big reason why I never qualified
for the sectional championships again after 1977, and why I ended up in
1980 barely making the team at a college smaller than Urbana High while
kids I had beaten and then envied played scholarship tennis for Purdue,
Fullerton, Michigan, Pepperdine, and even--in the case of Pete Bouton,
who grew half a foot and forty IQ points in 1977--for the hallowed U of I at
Urbana-Champaign.
Alienation-from-Midwest-as-fertility-grid might be a little on the
overmetaphysical side, not to mention self-pitying. This was the time, after
all, when I discovered definite integrals and antiderivatives and found my
identity shifting from jock to math-wienie anyway. But it's also true that my
whole Midwest tennis career matured and then degenerated under the aegis
of the Peter Principle. In and around my township--where the courts were
rural and budgets low and conditions so extreme that the mosquitoes
sounded like trumpets and the bees like tubas and the wind like a five-alarm
fire, that we had to change shirts between games and use our water jugs to
wash blown field-chaff off our arms and necks and carry salt tablets in Pez
containers--I was truly near-great: I could Play the Whole Court; I was In
My Element. But all the more important tournaments, the events into which
my rural excellence was an easement, were played in a different real world:
the courts' surface was redone every spring at the Arlington Tennis Center,
where the National Junior Qualifier for our region was held; the green of
these courts' fair territory was so vivid as to distract, its surface so new and
rough it wrecked your feet right through your shoes, and so bare of flaw,
tilt, crack, or seam that it was totally disorienting. Playing on a perfect court
was for me like treading water out of sight of land: I never knew where I was
out there. The 1976 Chicago Junior Invitational was held at Lincolnshire's
Bath and Tennis Club, whose huge warren of thirty-six courts was enclosed
by all these troubling green plastic tarps attached to all the fences, with little
archer-slits in them at eye level to afford some parody of spectation. These
tarps were Wind-B-Gone windscreens, patented by the folks over at
Cyclone Fence in 1971. They did cut down on the worst of the unfair gusts,
but they also seemed to rob the court space of new air: competing at
Lincolnshire was like playing in the bottom of a well. And blue bug-zapper
lights festooned the lightposts when really major Midwest tournaments
played into the night: no clouds of
midges around the head or jagged shadows of moths to distinguish from
balls' flights, but a real unpleasant zotting and frying sound of bugs being
decommissioned just overhead; I won't pause to mention the smell. The
point is I just wasn't the same, somehow, without deformities to play
around. I'm thinking now that the wind and bugs and chuckholes formed for
me a kind of inner boundary, my own personal set of lines. Once I hit a
certain level of tournament facilities, I was disabled because I was unable to
accommodate the absence of disabilities to accommodate. If that makes
sense. Puberty-angst and material alienation notwithstanding, my Midwest
tennis career plateaued the moment I saw my first windscreen.
