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Parenting: TENNIS and MY SON
by Joyce Maynard
Originally published in Domestic Affairs, Syndicated Column

My son Willy’s passion had always been baseball, and like a lot of little boys with big dreams, he used to talk about how he’d play for the pros when he grew up. Then the summer he was seven Willy discovered tennis, and though he didn’t stop playing baseball, his allegiances shifted. He gave up collecting baseball cards and started sticking pictures of Bjorn Borg and Ilie Nastase on his walls. And when he talked about a career in the pros -- which he still did -- his fantasy destination was no longer the World Series. It was the U.S. Open.

From the first time he picked up a racquet, Willy showed a natural aptitude for tennis. And he had something else too, that doesn’t always go hand in hand with athletic gift: my son possessed a killer spirit on the court. The first summer he played, in fact, he broke his nose when he got in the way of his partner’s racquet in a doubles game. As the blood poured from his wound onto the service line, my son’s main visible emotion was concern that the injury would take him out of commission for tennis. He was back on the court -- his profile only faintly altered -- within a few days.

It wasn’t easy accomodating to Willy’s passion for tennis. Number one, we live in New Hampshire, where the weather makes it impossible to play outdoors for at least six months out of every year, and in a town where the average wait for a membership at the indoor tennis club runs about six years. (Which means that five years after adding our names to the list, we’re still waiting.) No doubt because of this, our area was hardly full of junior players for Willy to play with. In fact, virtually none of Willy’s friends owned a racquet, which left him with few options in the way of a partner, in those early years, but his own mother. Not much challenge in that one, I can assure you.

But as many obstacles as there were to finding courts and playing partners and instruction for Willy, I also enjoyed the fact that my son had found a healthy activity he loved as much as he loved tennis. So often, as a parent, I’d found myself driving one of my children thirty miles to a swimming lesson or gymnastics class they didn’t really care about, or nagging them to practice a musical instrument. I never had to persuade Willy to play tennis though. On a family vacation once, we found ourselves at a hotel where the only available court time was eleven p.m.. We were out there playing till midnight. Back home in New Hampshire, we played even when the weather got so chilly we had to wear our winter parkas. When the city took the nets down, we stretched an old badminton net across the public courts one time to play, and when the snow covered the courts, Willy hit a ball the best he could against the wall in his room. And when a friend of mine, a ranked men’s doubles player, invites Willy to play at his court an hour’s drive from us, we get in the car and go.

Willy was nine the first time he encountered really strong players his age. I had sent him to a tennis camp in Connecticut where he could get all-day instruction and play for twelve solid days, figuring this would be the test of whether my son could ever feel he’d had enough tennis. But when he came home from camp, the first thing he wanted to do was find a game. Camp didn’t burn him out on tennis. But it did reveal to him a somewhat painful reality about competetive tennis. There were lots of players outside the small pond of our little town, much better than Willy. They may or may not have possessed more talent, but they played every day, year round, and on weekends they went to tournaments, driven by their tennis playing parents, who probably warmed them up a lot better than I ever could.

We got Willy a USTA membership the year he turned eleven, and he entered his first tournament that summer -- playing against a fellow eleven year old with the un-nerving last name of Chang. (His uncle was tied up that weekend, in a match of his own, evidently.) That day was my first experience with the frequently cruel world of kids’ tennis.

My son was soundly defeated in that first tournament, and for the first half hour we spent in the car, driving home, he sat utterly silent. I knew enough not to make any upbeat, cheery remarks at that point. Earlier than some, later than others, Willy had come up against the hard, cold fact that every athlete has to face someday or other -- whether he’s an eleven year old junior player or Andre Agassi , looking out across the net at Pete Sampras. Sooner or later, he’s going to run into someone who can beat him, and when that day comes (as it has for Pete Sampras, too, on occasion), it’s never a good one.

What matters, ultimately, I would tell my son, isn’t whether or not you lose sometimes, but what you do about it when that happens. In Willy’s case, he wanted to sign up for another tournament, immediately, and when he didn’t make it to the finals in that one, he was ready for a third. Where he came back from a couple of 5-1 matches to win, and made it to the second day of play, for semi-final competition. Sitting among the other parents on the stand (some of whom are so competetive, themselves, they shoot you looks that could kill, if your child beats theirs), I have sometimes felt the need to get up from the stands and take a walk, when my son’s serving. The tension is that high.

On those occasions, I ‘ve asked myself what we’re doing here -- why I’ve driven two hours to subject my youngest child to this much stress and anxiety, when he could be home at our local park, playing a nice recreational game of tennis with his friend Mark, and then biking into town for a frozen yogurt and a little jumping on our trampoline. Am I simply setting my child up for disappointment and a sense of failure when I bring him to these tournments? Even if he wins, after all, I know it only means he’s heading that much farther down the road -- that much closer to an even higher level of stress and potential for heartbreak, investing that much more heavily into a goal shared by thousands of young players, and realized by only a handful.

Still. I’m not about to be a parent who tells her child to think small. So I keep on taking my son to tournaments -- where he sometimes plays very well, and sometimes doesn’t. And then, last summer, I asked him if he’d like to come to the U.S. Open with me. You can probably guess what he said to that one.

The day we picked to go to Flushing Meadows they were holding the women’s doubles semifinals and the mixed doubles final -- with Gigi Fernandez and TK†Suk opposite TK McGrath and TK Lucena. The big thrill for Willy, though, was an afternoon match between a South African player, Byron Black, and Pete Sampras.

We had flown into New York City the night before. The next morning we hailed a cab outside our hotel and gave our destination: U.S. Tennis Center.

“Ah,” said our driver, a young man whose license gave his first name as Youssou. “You’re going to see Byron Black play Pete Sampras. That could be interesting.”

It turned out Youssou came from Senegal, West Africa. When he was a little boy, he told us, he used to hang around the U.S. Embassy, watching the military men play tennis. Sometimes he’d pick up balls for them, and they’d reward him with tennis instruction. Modestly he told us that he’d gotten good at the game -- sufficiently so that one day , after a match in which he’d soundly beaten a young Marine at least a dozen years older than himself, the Marine had presented Youssou with his racquet.

“This was a great day for me,” Youssou told us. That racquet was so precious to him, in fact, that it took him several months before he could bring himself to play with it. But once he did, he played constantly. “I had the dream of coming to America to play professional tennis,” he said. “I wanted to play in the U. S. Open myself someday.”

On the drive out to Flushing, Youssou told us the rest of his story. “It took me many years,” he said, “but I saved my money and came to New York City. I knew no one. I spoke very little English. I brought very little with me, besides my racquet.”

Youssou found a job at a camp teaching tennis. Without a green card, he couldn’t be choosy about his employment situation. He was paid very little, but what he got he sent home to Senegal, with the request that his mother use the money to purchase African crafts to mail to him in New York. He got a used van and filled it with craft items. He drove to fairs where he sold the crafts, and did well enough with his sales that he put himself through college, majoring in mathematics. He got his degree, and in his spare time he set up a service to help African peddlers with their finances and teach them banking procedures. Now, he told us, he’s driving a cab until he saves up enough money for graduate school.

“And what about tennis?” Willy asked him. “The U.S. Open?”

Youssou smiled. “I’m thirty four,” he said. “Too old. But that’s alright. I’ll be a businessman, or a math teacher. And I can still play good tennis. Perhaps you and I will play one day.” So I wrote his name and phone number down and stuck it in my pocket.

We got to Flushing Meadows early enough that we had time to wander around the grounds checking out the booths and all the latest styles in racquets. Watching my son as he tested a two hundred and fifty dollar model at the Prince booth, I was glad the story of Youssou’s precious hand-me-down racquet from the U.S. Marine was still fresh in our minds. Then we headed over to watch some junior singles matches, in the smaller playing areas surrounding the main stadium. A boy no more than five years older than Willy was getting demolished by his opponent. Back home, of course, he’d probably been just about unbeatable.

We took in a women’s master’s championship, and a men’s 45’s doubles masters in which the player lineup included John Newcombe and Ken Rosewall -- names that meant nothing to my son, whose current wall decorations feature Andre Aggassi and the Jensen brothers. Hard to picture Luke Jensen, gray haired and sedate, ending up on this court. But who knows?

We caught the second half of the Women’s doubles, followed by the mixed doubles, picked up some lunch, then hurried back to our seats in time for the opening of the Sampras match. Byron Black had some good moments, but it was clear early on that he didn’t stand a chance against Sampras. Mostly I kept my eye on Pete, of course, but sometimes I liked to watch my son watching, too. He looked as focussed as he sometimes does in a match point, when he’s about to serve. Once, during the Black-Sampras match, one of Sampras’ serves was clocked at 105 miles an hour, and the crowd let out a roar. In his seat beside me, my son was very quiet, except for a deep intake of breath.

When we’d taken our seats, there was a woman seated in the row in front of us who looked a lot like Gabriela Sabatini. Willy was convinced that’s who she was, in fact, although I pointed out that probably Sabatini would have gotten somewhat better seats than these, and that she wouldn’t have been wearing plastic earrings. “You never know,” he whispered. “She might want to feel like a regular person.”

We were going to ask her if she was Sabatini, but all of a sudden she disappeared. The match ended with an easy victory for Sampras, and -- with a plane to catch that night -- we headed down the rows of bleachers for the exit. That night Jim Courier was playing Michael Chang (uncle of Willy’s original nemesis), but we didn’t have tickets for that one, and anyway, we had a plane to catch. Next year, I told my son, we’d try to come for two days.

Knowing how Willy used to talk, when he was little, about coming to the U.S. Open and playing here with Mark, I had asked myself the question, before coming here, as to whether attending an event like this might send my highly competetive and ambitious son the wrong kind of message about the goals of a tennis player. Would it be enough for him to see the great players in the stadium, or would it end up breaking his heart if he didn’t become one of them some day?

But in the end, of course, what I believe is that it’s only a good thing for a child, or anybody else for that matter, to witness the very best examples of whatever kind of excellence he’s pursuing, whether it’s jazz clarinet or a one-handed backhand. Once he’s seen those things, he might be inspired to go after them himself. To respect them, in any case.

On the matter of the U.S. Open experience, for instance, Willy continues to believe we were sitting just one row away from Gabriela Sabatini at Flushing last year. Just recently -- two weeks past his twelfth birthday -- my son rode a bus alone, four hours, to Montpelier Vermont to play in a fourteen -and- under tournament, where he came back from being down, five-one, and winning a crucial match that brought him to the finals.

We still talk to Youssou on the phone regularly. Last winter, at our invitation, he rode the bus from New York City to New Hampshire to visit us and play tennis with Willy. Someday, he tells us, we must go to Senegal, and when we do, he will make sure his mother cooks us a wonderful meal. Meanwhile, he has presented me with a traditional Senegalese outfit of hand-woven material, and earrings made of bone.

As for Willy: he is learning, I believe, that there are more good things to this game than the big silver trophy and the number one slot on the men’s tour. Seeing him discover that, I don’t even need to leave my seat anymore, when he’s playing in a tournament, and it’s his turn to serve. Who would even wish for her son to win every game he ever played, after all? Who would ever want him not to dream?