Motherfucker.
I look around at the crowd. People are leaning forward; some are tapping their fingers. Every one of them seems to be breathing a little faster. I can only imagine what the sportscasters are saying.
The spectators sitting around us are looking at my father and me out of the corner of their eyes, watching my reaction. I’m starting to feel caged.
“If I do it…” I say softly. “I want you to coach me. That’s what I’m saying, Dad.”
He looks at me as Cortez scores a point off Nicki. The crowd holds their breath, eager to see history being made. I might be too if it weren’t my history on the line.
“Are you sure, hija? I am not the man I once was. I don’t have the…stamina I once did.”
“That makes two of us,” I say. “You’ll be coaching a has-been.”
Now it’s 40–15. Nicki is at championship point.
“I’d be coaching the greatest tennis player of all time,” my father says. He turns to me and grabs my hand. I am staring down forty, but still, somehow, his hands dwarf mine. And just like when I was a child, they are warm and rough and strong. When he squeezes my palm, I feel so small—as if I am forever a child and he is this giant I will have to gaze up at to meet his eye.
Nicki serves the ball. I inhale sharply.
“So you’ll do it?” I ask.
Cortez sends it back.
“We might lose…badly,” I say. “Prove to everyone the Battle Axe can’t hack it now. They’d love that. I’d tarnish not only my record but my legacy. It might…ruin everything.”
Nicki hits a groundstroke.
My father shakes his head. “We cannot ruin everything. Because tennis is not everything, pichona.”
I am not sure I agree.
Cortez returns the shot.
“Still,” I say. “We’d have to work harder together than we ever have. Are you up for that?”
“It would be the honor of my lifetime,” my father says. I can tell there are tears forming in his eyes, and I stop myself from looking away. He holds my hand tighter. “To coach you again, pichona, I’d die happy.”
I try to move past the tender ache taking hold in my chest. “So I guess that decides it, then,” I say.
A smile takes over my father’s face.
Nicki lobs the ball. It arcs through the air, slowly. The stadium watches as it flies high, then starts its descent.
“I guess I’m coming out of retirement,” I say.
The ball looks like it is going to be out. If so, Cortez will delay defeat for the moment.
My father puts his arm around me, hugging me tight. I can barely breathe. He whispers in my ear, “Nunca estuve más orgulloso, cielo.” He lets go.
The ball falls, landing just inside the baseline. The crowd is silent as it bounces, high and fast. Cortez has already backed off, thinking it would be long, and it is too late now. It’s impossible to return. She lunges forward and misses.
There is no sound for a split second, and then the roar erupts.
Nicki Chan just won the US Open.
Cortez falls to the ground. Nicki throws her fists into the air.
My father and I smile. Ready.
THE
FIRST TIME
AROUND
1955–1965
My father moved to the United States from Buenos Aires at age twenty-seven. He had been an excellent tennis player back in Argentina, winning thirteen championships over his eleven-year career. They called him “Javier el Jaguar.” He was graceful but deadly.
But, as he would tell it, he went too hard on his knees. His jumps were too high, and he didn’t always land properly. As he approached thirty, he knew that they wouldn’t hold up for much longer. He retired in 1953—something he never talked to me about without tensing up and eventually leaving the room. Soon after that, he started making plans to come to the United States.
In Miami, he got a job at a fancy tennis club as a hitter, available all day to play with any member who wanted a game. It was a job normally reserved for college students home for the summer—but he did it with the same focus with which he competed. As he told many of the members at that first club, “I do not know how to play tennis without my full heart.”
It wasn’t long until people started asking him for private lessons. He was known for his commitment to proper form, his high expectations, and the fact that if you listened to el Jaguar, you’d probably start winning your matches.
By 1956, he had offers to work as a tennis instructor all over the country. That’s how he landed at the Palm Tennis Club in Los Angeles, where he met my mother, Alicia. She was a dancer, teaching the waltz and foxtrot to club members.
My mother was tall and stood taller, wearing four-inch heels wherever she went. She walked slowly, purposefully, and always looked people in the eye. And it was hard to make her laugh, but when she finally did, it was so loud you could hear it through the walls.
On their first date, she told my father that she thought he had tunnel vision when it came to tennis. “It is something you have to grow out of soon, Javier. Or else, how will you learn to be whole?”
My father told her she was out of her mind. Tennis was what made him whole.
She responded by saying, “Ah, so you’re stubborn too.”
Still, he showed up the next day at the end of one of her classes with a dozen red roses. She took them and said thank you, but he noticed she didn’t smell them before she set them down. My father got the sense that while he had given flowers to only a few women in his life, my mother had received flowers from dozens of hopeful men.
“Will you teach me the tango?” he said.
She looked at him sideways, not buying for one minute that this Argentine didn’t have at least a passing knowledge of the tango. But then she put one hand on his shoulder and another in the air, and said, “Come on, then.” He took her hand, and she taught him how to lead her across the dance floor.
My father says he couldn’t take his eyes off her; he says he marveled at how easy it was to glide with her across the room.
When they got to the end, my father dipped her and she smiled at him and then said, rather impatiently, “Javier, this is when you kiss me.”
Within a few months, he’d convinced her to elope. He told her that he had big dreams for them. And my mother told him his dreams were his own. She didn’t need much at all besides him.
The night my mother told him she was pregnant, she sat in his lap in their Santa Monica apartment and asked if he could feel that he held the weight of two people. He teared up as he smiled at her. And then he told her he could feel in his gut that I was a boy, and that I was going to be twice the tennis player he’d ever been.
* * *
—
When I was a baby, my father would bring a high chair to the courts so I could watch him play. He says I would dart my head back and forth, tracking the ball. According to him, my mother would sometimes come and try to take me out of the high chair to sit in the shade or have a snack, but I’d cry until she brought me back to the court.
My father loved to tell the story of the time when I was just barely a toddler and he first put a racket in my hand. He softly tossed the ball to me, and he swears that on that fateful day, I swung and made contact.
He ran back to the house, carrying me on his shoulders, to tell my mother. She smiled at him and continued making dinner.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” he said.
My mother laughed. “That our daughter likes tennis? Of course she likes tennis––it’s the only thing you’ve shown her.”
“That’s like saying Achilles was a great warrior simply because he lived during wartime. Achilles was a great warrior because it was his destiny to be one.”
“I see. So Carolina is Achilles?” my mother asked, smiling. “And what does that make you, a god?”
My father waved her away. “She’s destined,” he said. “It is plain as day. With your grace and my strength, she can be the greatest tennis player the world has ever seen. They will tell stories about her one day.”