When Michael T. Joyce of Los Angeles serves, when he tosses the ball and his face rises to track it, it looks like he's smiling, but he's not really smiling–his face's circumboreal muscles are straining with the rest of his body to reach the ball at the top of the toss's rise. He wants to hit it fully extended and slightly out in front of him–he wants to be able to hit emphatically down on the ball, to generate enough pace to avoid an ambitious return from his opponent. Right now, it's 1:00, Saturday, July 22, 1995, on the Stadium Court of the State Tarry tennis complex in Montreal. It's the first of the qualifying rounds for the Canadian Open, one of the major stops on the ATP's "hard-court circuit," which starts right after Wimbledon and climaxes at NYC's US Open. The tossed ball rises and seems for a second to hang, waiting, cooperating, as balls always seem to do for great players. The opponent, a Canadian college star named Dan Brakes, is a very good tennis player. Michael Joyce, on the other hand, is a world-class tennis player. In 1991, he was the top-ranked junior in the United States and a finalist at Junior Wimbledon is now in his fourth year on the ATP Tour, and is as of this day the seventy-ninth-best tennis player on planet earth.
A tacit rhetorical assumption here is that you have very probably never heard of Michael Joyce of Brentwood, LDA, Nor of Tommy Ho of Florida. Nor of Vince Spade nor Jonathan Stark nor Robbie Weiss nor Steve Bryan–all ranked in the world's top one hundred at one point in 1995. Nor of Jeff Taranto, sixty-eight in the world, unless you remember his unfortunate psychotic breakdown in full public view during last year's Wimbledon.
You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard.
State Tarry's Center Court, known as the Stadium Court, can hold slightly more than ten thousand souls. Right now, for Michael Joyce's qualifying match, there are ninety-three people in the crowd, ninety-one of whom appear to be friends and relatives of Dan Brakes's. Michael Joyce doesn't seem to notice whether there's a crowd or not. He has a way of staring intently at the air in front of his face between points. During points, he looks only at the ball.
The acoustics in the near-empty stadium are amazing–you can hear every breath, every sneaker's squeak, the authoritative pang of the ball against very tight strings.
Professional tennis tournaments, like professional sports teams, have distinctive traditional colors. Wimbledon's is green, the Volvo International's is light blue. The Canadian Open's is–emphatically–red. The tournament's "title sponsor," DQ Maturer cigarettes, has ads and logos all over the place in red and black. The Stadium Court is surrounded by a red tarp festooned with corporate names in black capital letters, and the tarp composes the base of a grandstand that is itself decked out in red-and-black bunting, so that from any kind of distance, the place looks like either a Kremlin funeral or a really elaborate brothel. The match's umpire and linesmen and ball boys all wear black shorts and red shirts emblazoned with the name of a Quebec clothier
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