WHY STOCKTON has stuck it out as long as he has is a puzzle. Certainly his father has not let up his ugly pressure--as late as Dickie's last year in the juniors Mr. Stockton was still mortifying him in public. And the whole family has felt the trauma of the tension. Mrs. Stockton has fought her husband's tyranny with everything in her. At the Canadian Nationals five years ago, while Dickie's younger sister, Donna, was playing, Mr. Stockton stuck a racket through the fist of his tousle-haired three year old and was tossing tennis balls at him, trying to get this kid who half-crawled to swing a flat forehand. Meanwhile Mrs. Stockton kept trying tried to intercept the tosses with mad clutching movements. And she kept shrieking, "You're not going to get this one! You're not going to wreck this one like you wrecked the others!"
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AT LONGWOOD, Stockton met Connors in the quarterfinals. Connors had upset Smith in the first round, and the winner would meet Richey in the semis. They were playing for maybe the fiftieth time, but this one counted for more than most. Stockton never got started. Both were edgy, hitting too soon. But Stockton was taking his misses more to heart than Connors. He let them wear down his pace, and he trudged ever heavier from side to side on game changes. He grew cautious when his anger should have triggered an offensive--hugging the backcourt when he should have attacked from the net, trying to outhit with loping topspins when he needed bullets. Connors wasn't beating him, he was eating himself out on the court. He played like the old Dickie grown tired too soon.
He was stormy faced when he lost. And Mrs. Stockton, sitting anonymous in General Admissions, tried to hide the tears she cried. A half hour later Connors, high on his success, is surrounded in the pressroom. The Stockton family, minus Mr., waits for Dickie on the clubhouse porch, looking out over the grass now singed dusky by the sun's going down. He barely acknowledges them as he trudges by, towel draped around his neck for a shower. How do you greet a beaten Stockton when all the customary reassurances, the buck ups, the next times, the good fights, come as so much rubbing in of failure?
IN THE CLUBHOUSE the dining room fills up with club members, USLTA officials, players in street clothes. The players stick together. The talk everywhere is tennis, but the players talk it differently than the rest. The interchangers are curt as if in code -- Connors is hot, Lutz out, Smith down, Richey tight, Ashe loose, Graebner coming back up, Alexander pushed, Reissen clutched, Sullivan is a fish, Connors is on top. It is a language that comes out of living though a life together, knowing from the inside all the levels of the game. And knowing that they all will at one time or another have to face each other as opponents, that tennis is a merry go round of short lived success. It is knowing finally - the knowing at the heart of big time tennis - that the winners win alone. But where will they play to win, especially the ones like Connors who need to win, once they are finished in the game?
In a corner Ashe jokes with two pot bellied bearded black men. When they leave he sits silent beside his blonde wife. It is understood between them that there is to be no talk. Ashe is 30 now, and he is waiting to play his semifinal against Graebner. He has played Graebner maybe 100 times - they grew up together. They've got 11 years more experience behind them than Connors or Stockton, and they have played a whole history on the revolving wheel that Connors and Stockton have just begun to ride. Ashe looks distant, self-absorbed, steeling himself to concentration. After fifteen years he faces another match with another bout of pre-game nerves. He is called, jumps up skittishly and disappears. Then Graebner, big and bull-boned, saunters in and sinks heavily into the chair Ashe just vacated. He stares into space slowly tapping his foot.
The author is an ex-tournament tennis player who played for 9 years the same national circuit that Connors and Stockton travelled.