Ugo you can be.
On Jack’s side of the net, Coach Ira Spade is blasting through his habitual pre-match rant, rat-a-tatting Jack about how he is on his way and not that many years removed from being the greatest tennis player who ever lived and how he’s gonna beat this little Italian sonuvabitch who’s standing in his path to greatness and if he doesn’t there’ll be hell to pay and now he’s quoting Lombardi and Hayes and Knight and Steinbrenner for the nth time about winning, winning, winning.
In the first game of the match, Jack is serving at 40-0. And Ugo Bellezza is remembering the forty-love game against Tristan Corbière in Barcelona and that anything anytime is possible, but so is the well-schooled and well-prepared Jack Spade, and even though Ugo’s return of service is potentially the best ever, better than Connors’s or Agassi’s even, it is a moot point as fifteen-year-old Jack whistles a monster serve right on the T , sending chalk flying and freezing the helpless Ugo’s racquet as it rests on his left hand in front of his body.
As Lloyd Bentsen would have said: Tristan Corbière, you are no Jack Spade.
Early on, as the games fly by in this opening set, Jack is discovering that it will be an exercise in futility to cling to his expectation of winning with power. Not only are Ugo’s returns of serve too good and his groundies too deep and strong and—in the proud tradition of maestros Laver, Borg, and Nadal, who dominated on clay—exaggerated by unbelievable topspin, but great power net-rushing champions like Newcombe and Ashe and Tanner and McEnroe and Cash and Edberg and Becker and Krajicek and Ivanisovic and Sampras had never won this clay-court major. So Jack is forced to back up a step, pull back on the power a bit, and concentrate more than usual on his considerable defensive skills.
He also realizes that he can’t use his grunting as an intimidating weapon against this particular opponent.
Through the first two sets, the match is as exciting as advertised, with flashes of the greatest all-time strokes filling the red court. A Rosewall backhand. A Roche volley. A Borg lob. A Becker diving get. A Sampras overhead. A Federer retrieval. The mind is boggled when it tries to imagine how good these two will be at sixteen, twenty…twenty-three!
As injustice would have it, although each player has been identically brilliant, won the same number of points, and hit the same number of winners, Ugo Bellezza is comfortably ahead of his American counterpart, 7-6 (18), 7-6 (22).
Such is tennis, such is life.
“You sonuvabitch !” Ira Spade roars at his only child during the break between sets, his left eye twitching like the dickens. “Okay, enough of Mister Nice Guy. We are gonna pull out all the stops now! Remember what I told you about Darwin and adaptation and survival? If you stick with a losing game, you’re history ! Now go out there and adapt, goddammit!”
On Ugo’s side of the net, no words are required.
At 5-4 in the third, as he crosses Ugo’s path on the way to his chair, Jack perpetrates a dirty trick that would have made Donald Segretti and his sidekick Karl Rove grin crookedly. On instructions and goading from his father and despite the slightest hint of an internal hesitation, he looks Ugo Bellezza straight in the eyes and makes the deaf sign for stupid, internally invoking the Nuremberg Defense, Befehl ist Befehl , “an order is an order.” Jack is only fifteen after all and, yes, he has a burning desire to be number one and his father has made it clear that Ugo and Ugo alone is in the way but, yes also, Jack is an almost-man who is almost capable of deciding for himself and should he have done that dirty deed or is winning, as he has been raised to believe, all that matters?
Meanwhile, the French fans are not stupid, in fact they are quite bright actually, most of them having been able to quote the great playwright Molière by heart in the third grade, thank you very
On Jack’s side of the net, Coach Ira Spade is blasting through his habitual pre-match rant, rat-a-tatting Jack about how he is on his way and not that many years removed from being the greatest tennis player who ever lived and how he’s gonna beat this little Italian sonuvabitch who’s standing in his path to greatness and if he doesn’t there’ll be hell to pay and now he’s quoting Lombardi and Hayes and Knight and Steinbrenner for the nth time about winning, winning, winning.
In the first game of the match, Jack is serving at 40-0. And Ugo Bellezza is remembering the forty-love game against Tristan Corbière in Barcelona and that anything anytime is possible, but so is the well-schooled and well-prepared Jack Spade, and even though Ugo’s return of service is potentially the best ever, better than Connors’s or Agassi’s even, it is a moot point as fifteen-year-old Jack whistles a monster serve right on the T , sending chalk flying and freezing the helpless Ugo’s racquet as it rests on his left hand in front of his body.
As Lloyd Bentsen would have said: Tristan Corbière, you are no Jack Spade.
Early on, as the games fly by in this opening set, Jack is discovering that it will be an exercise in futility to cling to his expectation of winning with power. Not only are Ugo’s returns of serve too good and his groundies too deep and strong and—in the proud tradition of maestros Laver, Borg, and Nadal, who dominated on clay—exaggerated by unbelievable topspin, but great power net-rushing champions like Newcombe and Ashe and Tanner and McEnroe and Cash and Edberg and Becker and Krajicek and Ivanisovic and Sampras had never won this clay-court major. So Jack is forced to back up a step, pull back on the power a bit, and concentrate more than usual on his considerable defensive skills.
He also realizes that he can’t use his grunting as an intimidating weapon against this particular opponent.
Through the first two sets, the match is as exciting as advertised, with flashes of the greatest all-time strokes filling the red court. A Rosewall backhand. A Roche volley. A Borg lob. A Becker diving get. A Sampras overhead. A Federer retrieval. The mind is boggled when it tries to imagine how good these two will be at sixteen, twenty…twenty-three!
As injustice would have it, although each player has been identically brilliant, won the same number of points, and hit the same number of winners, Ugo Bellezza is comfortably ahead of his American counterpart, 7-6 (18), 7-6 (22).
Such is tennis, such is life.
“You sonuvabitch !” Ira Spade roars at his only child during the break between sets, his left eye twitching like the dickens. “Okay, enough of Mister Nice Guy. We are gonna pull out all the stops now! Remember what I told you about Darwin and adaptation and survival? If you stick with a losing game, you’re history ! Now go out there and adapt, goddammit!”
On Ugo’s side of the net, no words are required.
At 5-4 in the third, as he crosses Ugo’s path on the way to his chair, Jack perpetrates a dirty trick that would have made Donald Segretti and his sidekick Karl Rove grin crookedly. On instructions and goading from his father and despite the slightest hint of an internal hesitation, he looks Ugo Bellezza straight in the eyes and makes the deaf sign for stupid, internally invoking the Nuremberg Defense, Befehl ist Befehl , “an order is an order.” Jack is only fifteen after all and, yes, he has a burning desire to be number one and his father has made it clear that Ugo and Ugo alone is in the way but, yes also, Jack is an almost-man who is almost capable of deciding for himself and should he have done that dirty deed or is winning, as he has been raised to believe, all that matters?
Meanwhile, the French fans are not stupid, in fact they are quite bright actually, most of them having been able to quote the great playwright Molière by heart in the third grade, thank you very
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