Everything on the Line (7 page)

That movement is slower which covers less distance in the same time.

And that movement is swifter which covers more distance in the same time.

And from that moment on, every time he pursues a tennis ball, Ugo Bellezza has never forgotten this all-too-obvious but profound thought.

During a short break, Giglio and Ugo discuss with their hands the tactical catechism of creating beautiful points—hitting every ball as early and cleanly as possible, moving your opponent around, planning ahead, not getting late to balls or being off-balance, footwork, focus, and footwork.

The man and the boy-man are now back at work on the red stuff, crushing blistering baseline groundies. Ugo is making it all seem so effortless, but
little does one know
.

It is impossible for a person who possesses the ability to hear to imagine what it would be like to be deaf and play tennis. And especially to play tennis at such a high level.

Without being in that deaf person’s tennis shoes, little does one know what it is like not to hear the sound of ball on racquet, to be thus disoriented, not knowing how hard a ball is being hit or with (or without) what type and severity of spin. Little does one know what it is like to be playing points in a cocoon of utter soundlessness, with no echo of footsteps from the other side of the net, no way of knowing that your opponent is (or isn’t) charging the net when your back is toward him after you have chased down a lob. Little does one know what it is like not to hear umpire calls, or scores being announced if there’s no scoreboard (so you have to keep score yourself, adding to the mental stress), or applause, or jeering for that matter, or the aural ebb and flow between the point itself and then the crowd reaction and then the silence preceding the next point.

Instead of possessing these hearing aids every other player enjoys and takes for granted, Ugo’s tennis universe is mute, mum, still, and silent.

As a tomb.

But life has this funny way of compensating, of allowing a person’s body to make up for an absence or a defect. Much like the saphenous vein is rent from a heart attack victim’s leg to bypass a blocked artery (and compelled to act, after a lifetime of being a vein carrying blood to the heart, as an artery transporting blood away from it), Ugo’s lack of hearing has been replaced by something just as powerful and maybe more wondrous. It is another, substitute fifth sense, in the place of hearing, a sense of creativity and high right-brain activity, an ability to see what hearing people do not, an eerie sense of knowing when to take risks and which shots to execute, a frightening intuitive intimacy with the entire court and how to make use of it and where to be at all times and where to make his opponent be.

It is a sense only special people are born with.

La vita è strana,
life is funny, Giglio is thinking as he and Ugo wrap up their hit. Here we are, living in an age where technological advances are astounding: We’ve put a man and a woman on Mars, surgeons are performing brain implants, we can see each other as we speak on our TelevideoPhones. And yet there’s still no progress on helping deaf people overcome their handicap. But…perhaps everything happens for a reason? Perhaps, were he a hearing person, Ugo would not have developed this special ability. And who knows? Perhaps he would not have been happier than he is now and has always seemed to be.

* * *

Fifteen-year-old Ugo Bellezza continues to turn tennis heads, reaching the finals of this preparatory event in Barcelona. But now an upset is brewing, and he is mired in a struggle against an eighteen-year-old who is ranked number three in the Juniors behind Ugo and Jack—the talented Frenchman from Brittany, Tristan Corbière.

The young man from Roscoff—a remote town on the northern coast of Finistère and just east of the tip of France’s nose—has done his homework and, so far, figured out a way to blunt the aggressive, thinking style of the Florentine. He has realized, early on, that any serious competitor will try to take advantage of his opponent’s weakness, and in order to profit from Ugo’s deafness he has concentrated on disguising his shots, on keeping them on his racquet for as long as possible, on not telegraphing anything, especially his drop shot. And since he knows that Ugo depends entirely on visual cues in order to anticipate shots, his strategy has until now, through nearly two sets, perplexed the Italian youngster and thrown him completely off his game.

Devo migliorare,
Ugo is thinking as he takes a swig from his bottle of high-energy Agua del Cid on his seat during a changeover. I need to get better. I’m down 6-0, 5-1. Okay, so how’d I get here? Well, this guy is tough, I give him credit for that. But like Giglio always tells me, his good play will make mine better.

Ugo looks at Giglio, seated by his side. (The rules were changed in 2027—the sole exception being the always-reactionary Wimbledon—when the WTA realized that Davis Cup had it right all along and that having coaching was more exciting and the player had to win it on the court anyway and why not allow a coach there in the chair on the sidelines, since every other major sport except for golf allowed coaches to give input during timeouts or on the bench?) Mentor and protégé exchange loving glances.

Giglio makes the sign for
deaf
(he touches his index finger first to his mouth, then to his ear)
and then for
zero
(he makes a big
O
with both hands, then pulls them apart with each hand thrusting out, all ten fingers separated). Ugo understands instantly: “You are deaf. So what? That is
nothing
.” He knows by now that adversity is a built-in part of tennis and of life, and that his deafness is a major obstacle and really
una metafora
for adversity. How to react to adversity is the key. So when it presents itself, what will you do? Giglio is saying that this obstacle is not a problem, but instead it is a motivator, just like being behind.

But despite the best-laid plans of mice and boy-men, this seventh game of the second set doesn’t quite work out, as Ugo’s usually dependable serve is broken after a long, eight-deuce game, and now he is down,
really
down, 6-0, 6-1. (In 2033, all Juniors matches were officially increased to a more adult three-of-five sets.)

A player with a weaker character might have caved in at this point. Not Ugo Bellezza. He is determined to change the way the match is being played. But how?

That
is the eighty-five million, three hundred-eighty-six thousand, three hundred-thirty-five
lire
question.

Toweling off, Ugo is thinking of all the practice hours he has put in to be performing on this stage, to be here in front of 7,200 cheering spectators. He can see them clapping rhythmically for him, for a comeback. He cannot hear them, but he can see them, and he can feel their spirit in his bones.

Ugo becomes focused when he sees in his mind’s eye his coach Virgilio Marotti urging him to take
piccoli passi
, those little steps, and he is thinking of that Chinese proverb that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and that’s what he must do now.

And here are Ugo Bellezza and Tristan Corbière back on the court for the third set and Tristan is serving and he wins the first three points and is ahead forty-love and this is where most players who are receiving serve would sort of tank and give it about 30 percent thinking they’re almost certainly not going to win the game and the prevailing wisdom is just to take a risk and go for broke and try for a long-shot winner first chance they get and see how it goes and they usually miss and there goes the game and they are content to have given it a shot and oh well.

Not Ugo Bellezza.

Ugo sets his jaw and focuses on the Frenchman’s service motion and even though he knows he is the underdog now, he and Giglio have discussed being down forty-love many times and how despite the long odds this is perhaps the most important point in any match simply because your opponent, who’s serving and in complete control, doesn’t expect to lose the game and more important doesn’t expect heavy resistance from you and should you put up this resistance, should you demonstrate to him that you are not willing to lose any point, not even this one with the odds heavily stacked against you, well then, you are making a powerful symbolic statement that you are not going away, not now and not ever, and if you do win this point, this forty-love point, then the server is a scintilla more worried and less confident on the subsequent forty-fifteen point and if he should lose
that
one, well, lookee here, he’s within one measly point of having the game go to deuce, this game that only moments ago he had basically wrapped with pretty paper and tied up with a cute little bow made of red ribbon.

And Ugo hangs in there and wins the forty-love point with persistence and grit, after an arduous twenty-eight-shot rally, with his penetrating groundies and his moving Corbière side to side until the Breton at long last dumps a backhand drive weakly into the middle of the net.

And this is the moment, the turning point Ugo has been waiting for and he can sense the momentum ooze from Corbière’s side of the net to his and he wins the next point after a similarly tactical and grueling twenty-four-shot rally with the same result and it is now forty-thirty and Ugo can feel Tristan feeling the tension upon seeing his seemingly insuperable lead transformed into a suddenly shaky one.

And at forty-thirty, the Frenchman spins in a safe serve and Ugo is ready and drives it deep into the backhand side of the court, right in the corner, and Tristan barely gets his racquet on it and returns it very shallow, not even to the service line, and Ugo sees blood and is all over it like a rash. And he can now go to either corner and deep and he will have his opponent right where he wants him and Corbière knows that this is the safe and sure route and is ready to scamper either to his left or to his right behind the baseline to retrieve the deep and dangerous drive but instead what Ugo pulls off at this moment is a shot of such brilliance and daring, especially after clawing his way back to forty-thirty and being so close to knotting the game so why would he go for any shot that wasn’t totally safe and sure?

But no, there he is at the center of the court and halfway in toward the net and here’s that fifth sense kicking in big-time and to Tristan’s surprise and to the surprise of all 7,200 spectators, Ugo Bellezza executes the most delicious and premeditated forehand drop shot of all time, surpassing anything Beppe Merlo or Budge Patty or Manolo Santana or Björn Borg could have cooked up, first by keeping the ball on his racquet for what seems a mini-eternity and then slicing down on the ball—a maneuver as delicate as a mother placing her newborn back in the crib—and then sending it, with excruciating nonchalance, spinning felt head-over-felt heels barely over the net and three inches from the sideline and the ball hits the red clay surface and dies a glorious death and spins back against the net and collects itself there in a lump and Tristan Corbière is frozen stiff on the baseline and doesn’t even try for it and looks across the net at the audacious and brilliant perpetrator of the dastardly surprise ambush and shrugs his shoulders as if to hoist up a white flag.

And now the Gallic lad himself is giving Ugo a round of applause and the crowd of 7,200 erupts in collective appreciation and shrieks out
vamos
and
andiamo
and
allez
as one and Ugo can’t hear anything but can feel it all and he looks over at Giglio sitting there not ten feet from the ball and his mentor’s mouth is open wide but when their eyes meet it enunciates four syllables to his protégé and Ugo lip-reads the syllables but doesn’t really need to because he already knows what they are.

Sprez-za-tu-ra.

And Giglio is thinking,
Sì! È il motivo per cui mio figlio gioca!,
Yes, this is the reason why my son is playing!, and pride fills his heart for the boy-man whom he has taught how to create
le belle cose
, and boy, this drop shot was sure a thing of beauty and gosh, he suddenly realizes, this is the first time I’ve ever called Ugo
mio figlio
.

Ugo peers across the net at Tristan and gives him a look that needs no words to translate. It is not a mean, in-your-face, macho look, accompanied by yelp and fist pump, that is so endemic to today’s ultracompetitive game, but the same knowing Mona Lisa smile that his mother dispenses all the time. It is meant to express respect for his opponent, but in fact what it does is to break the spirit of his eighteen-year-old adversary because now he knows Ugo is in control and can execute this kind of shot at will.

Corbière is up 6-0, 6-1, but now it is deuce and he is no longer in control despite the lopsided score, as a result of this one shot, this ridiculously artful and tactically brilliant single shot, which has officially announced: a. I am not giving in, even an inch,
ever
! and b. This is the kind of tennis of which I am fully capable, and which from this point on I am fully intending to play.

And Ugo begins to play with more confidence and way beyond his years and he breaks Tristan’s serve just after breaking his will and a few moments later, as he walks back to the service line after a successful foray to the net culminated by another wondrous and surprising drop shot, he thinks of Gaudí and of pushing the envelope and not licking it and of creativity and beauty and what Giglio had told him about the tennis court being finite but also infinite and about expanding the lines and playing like they are there but not there and that is precisely what Ugo is feeling like now and trying to accomplish.

And early in this third set, at 2-1 Ugo’s, he discovers the key to making all this work. The resourceful Ugo figures out how to overcome Corbière’s disguising of his shots, in a way that is so simple and clean. Realizing that he is reacting
too
quickly to Tristan’s disguise and getting
too
early a jump without knowing precisely where the Frenchman is intending to guide the ball, he eliminates this confusion and flawed positioning simply by slowing down his split step just a speck, this split step that involves jumping off the ground slightly and landing on the balls of your feet while you are awaiting your opponent’s shot, allowing your weight to be centered and enabling you to run for a ball in any direction.