“Lie down on the table,” said Bobby. “I’ll get the ice.”
“It feels like someone jabbed a pitchfork through my lower back.”
“Just relax. Don’t move.”
“I don’t think I can move.” I was back in Florida where I played so many of my tournaments at that time. The muscles in my lower back had been quivering like the plucked string of a bow the entire third set with occasional seizures of sharp pain. I moved carefully, gingerly during the match. Swung my racket without aggression. It wasn’t enough and I lost in the second round. I had lost in the third round of the tournament before. Both my back and my shoulder had been giving me problems.
“I’m going to massage it out gently for a few minutes, then we’ll go to the ice.”
Bobby pressed his thumbs into the muscles along the sides of my spinal column and my back signaled maximum pain to my brain. “Too hard, too hard,” I yelled.
“Okay.” He pulled back his thumbs. My muscles were raw and angry. Bobby used the heel of his palms to rub up and down over my lower back which still hurt like hell. Then he draped a large plastic bag of ice directly over the skin of my back and I could feel the ice drinking in the intense heat from me.
The relief came fast but the idea of serving a tennis ball was outrageous, like the eighty-year-old man on a park bench watching the kids at play and wishing for just one more day of pain-free movement. Except I was a month before my eighteenth birthday. “My body’s breaking down, Bobby.”
“Yup,” he said.
“Ever since we stepped up my schedule, I can’t take it. I can’t recover enough to play well.”
“We’ll work it out,” he said.
I had started to think I didn’t have a pro body. They talked about it in the NBA all the time. So-and-so is built strong, has an NBA body, can take the pounding. “It’s not like I can train my way out of it. That’s just more abuse I’d have to recover from.”
“We’ll come up with a plan.”
“Should I take time off the tour? Train and try to get stronger, then come back? Maybe I’m too young for the schedule.”
“You’re not too young.”
“Well I’m not doing it. I’m not succeeding. This is just grinding me down to a nub and there’ll be nothing left of me.”
We were quiet for a while. The ice felt so good. All I had to do was lie there. Bobby massaged my calves and hamstrings and nobody spoke for five minutes. Then Bobby said, “The tennis tour is brutal. You get December off, then it’s an eleven-month season. Eleven straight months of pounding, hours a day, every day, tournament after tournament. Throw in a few flights, sometimes to Australia and around Europe.”
I hadn’t even done international travel for tournaments yet. “Brutal.”
“If a player could stay sharp with his game, not walk away from tournament conditioning, physically and mentally, but magically recover as though he’s had a month off, that would be a huge advantage.”
“Of course,” I said.
“You know what that sounds like, Anton?”
“What?”
“The Tour de France.”
“What do you mean? Doping?”
He said, “Given the schedule in the modern era of tennis, it is the most natural fit of all the sports for performance-enhancing drugs.”
“Tennis,” I said, not believing this. Dad had never mentioned steroids to me and Dad does his research and uses any and all advantage. He would have told me. Then it occurred to me that this conversation with Bobby was sanctioned by Dad.
“Of course tennis, Anton.” He stopped massaging my legs and walked to the side of the table so we could see each other. “Look around the sport. There was a clinic in Spain that got busted for PEDs to the Spanish cycling team. They had a file on Nadal. On Ferrer too. Those files were burned later, by the way. And Djokovic? Here’s a guy who used to have a reputation for running out of gas in the fourth and fifth sets. He would blame it on a respiratory problem, say he had a problem with glutens. Suddenly he thrives taking matches deep into five sets because he’s faster and more fit than anyone. His fellow countryman had a positive test. These guys from the same country are all with the same trainers, doctors. It’s pervasive in tennis and has been for years.”
I was believing this now. It seemed so obvious in a flash. Getting the simple answer to the riddle that had eluded me.
Bobby said, “Andy Murray? He started flexing his biceps on the court after big points as though he’d never had a muscle before and can’t believe it himself. That was not subtle. Did you see Agassi win the Australian in 2003? Whenever does the old guy find the extra guns and extra tank to grind down the young guys? He dismantled people that year. He should have tanked a few games to make it look less obvious.”
I was moving from surprise to disappointment and anger. “Is everyone on it?”
“Maybe a few exceptions. A six-ten guy like Isner, that’s like serving out a second-story window. Or James Blake, naturally fast as hell. Both those guys never thought they were going pro. They finished high school, just looking to get some college scholarship money. And maybe not Federer. I’m not sure about Fed. Aside from that? Yes. Everyone. Everyone who can afford it and who has the potential to take it and break through to the top.”
“You have information on people?”
“Do a web search on the phrase ‘tennis has a steroid problem.’ A site will come up that collects all the information. Players deny it, of course.”
“Okay.”
“It’s a small community of professionals in this business. I worked in baseball a lot of years. In my opinion, tennis players need the leg-up much more than baseball players, but there are far fewer players in tennis with enough money to get on a Cadillac program. Lots more money in baseball. So lots more steroids.”
“Jesus Christ.” I was a babe. Not yet eighteen. People around me were taking life-altering drugs to make a career, for world fame and millions of dollars. If I were still in school, I’d be studying for a history test, trying to figure out how to get a girl to take her pants off for me. Real kid problems. Not this.
“Sorry to tell it all to you this way, Anton. You’re going pro. It’s a conversation we knew was coming sooner or later.”
“Who’s we?”
“Gabe,” he said. “Your dad.”
I was too weak to nod. I just closed my eyes and lay motionless.
Bobby put his hand on my head. It was gentle. Surprisingly so, the way a bear is surprisingly gentle with cubs. I looked over at him in his too-small T-shirt, hair in a ponytail and his tan, meaty hand. He said, “It’s a sort of running joke in tennis that at the end of these tournaments it should be the doctor up on the podium, not the player. Which doctor came up with the best cocktail of recovery drugs.”
“I hadn’t heard that one,” I said.
“Yeah. Not such a good joke, I guess. Anyway, I know most of these guys. These doctors. Think about it.” He patted my head a couple times.
“My dad wants me to think about it? Gabe?”
He waited a moment to answer. “They do.” He sounded like a guilty man. “I’m sorry, Anton. It’s the way it is. All of life is a trade-off. You get to be famous, see the world, get the girls, make lots of money. But you have to put some crap in your body.” He took his hand back. “Not a terrible trade, really.”