What these Bloomington ladies are, or start to seem to me, is innocent. There is what would strike many Americans as a marked, startling lack of cynicism in the room. It does not, for instance, occur to anyone here to remark on how it’s maybe a little odd that all three network anchors are in shirtsleeves, or to consider the possibility that Dan Rather’s hair’s being mussed might not be wholly accidental, or that the constant rerunning of horrific footage might not be just in case some viewers were only now tuning in and hadn’t seen it yet. None of the ladies seem to notice the president’s odd little lightless eyes appear to get closer and closer together throughout his taped address, nor that some of his lines sound almost plagiaristically identical to those uttered by Bruce Willis (as a right-wing wacko, recall) in The Siege a couple years back. Nor that at least some of the sheer weirdness of watching the Horror unfold has been how closely various shots and scenes have mirrored the plots of everything from Die Hard I–III to Air Force One. Nobody’s near hip enough to lodge the sick and obvious po-mo complaint: We’ve Seen This Before. Instead, what they do is all sit together and feel really bad, and pray. No one in Mrs. Thompson’s crew would ever be so nauseous as to try to get everybody to pray aloud or form a prayer circle, but you can still tell what they’re all doing.
Make no mistake, this is mostly a good thing. It forces you to think and do things you most likely wouldn’t alone, like for instance while watching the address and eyes to pray, silently and fervently, that you’re wrong about the president, that your view of him is maybe distorted and he’s actually far smarter and more substantial than you believe, not just some soulless golem or nexus of corporate interests dressed up in a suit but a statesman of courage and probity and … and it’s good, this is good to pray this way. It’s just a bit lonely to have to. Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around. I’m not for a moment trying to suggest that everyone I know in Bloomington is like Mrs. Thompson (e.g., her son F— isn’t, though he’s an outstanding person). I’m trying, rather, to explain how some part of the horror of the Horror was knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America, and F—’s, and poor old loathsome Duane’s, than it was these ladies’.
2001
HOW TRACY AUSTIN BROKE MY HEART
BECAUSE I AM a long-time rabid fan of tennis in general and Tracy Austin in particular, I’ve rarely looked forward to reading a sports memoir the way I looked forward to Ms. Austin’s Beyond Center Court: My Story, ghosted by Christine Brennan and published by Morrow. This is a type of mass-market book — the sports-star-“with”-somebody autobiography — that I seem to have bought and read an awful lot of, with all sorts of ups and downs and ambivalence and embarrassment, usually putting these books under something more highbrow when I get to the register. I think Austin’s memoir has maybe finally broken my jones for the genre, though.
Here’s Beyond Center Court’s Austin on the first set of her final against Chris Evert at the 1979 US Open: “At 2–3, I broke Chris, then she broke me, and I broke her again, so we were at 4–4.”
And on her epiphany after winning that finaclass="underline" “I immediately knew what I had done, which was to win the US Open, and I was thrilled.”
Tracy Austin on the psychic rigors of pro competition: “Every professional athlete has to be so fine-tuned mentally.”
Tracy Austin on her parents: “My mother and father never, ever pushed me.”
Tracy Austin on Martina Navratilova: “She is a wonderful person, very sensitive and caring.”
On Billie Jean King: “She also is incredibly charming and accommodating.”
On Brooke Shields: “She was so sweet and bright and easy to talk to right away.”
Tracy Austin meditating on excellence: “There is that little bit extra that some of us are willing to give and some of us aren’t. Why is that? I think it’s the challenge to be the best.”
You get the idea. On the upside, though, this breathtakingly insipid autobiography can maybe help us understand both the seduction and the disappointment that seem to be built into the mass-market sports memoir. Almost uniformly poor as books, these athletic “My Story”s sell incredibly well; that’s why there are so many of them. And they sell so well because athletes’ stories seem to promise something more than the regular old name-dropping celebrity autobiography.
Here is a theory. Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we Americans revere — fastest, strongest—and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way. Questions of the best plumber or best managerial accountant are impossible even to define, whereas the best relief pitcher, free-throw shooter, or female tennis player is, at any given time, a matter of public statistical record. Top athletes fascinate us by appealing to our twin compulsions with competitive superiority and hard data.
Plus they’re beautifuclass="underline" Jordan hanging in midair like a Chagall bride, Sampras laying down a touch volley at an angle that defies Euclid. And they’re inspiring. There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man. So actually more than one theory, then. Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable. To be a top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves.
So we want to know them, these gifted, driven physical achievers. We too, as audience, are driven: watching the performance is not enough. We want to get intimate with all that profundity. We want inside them; we want the Story. We want to hear about humble roots, privation, precocity, grim resolve, discouragement, persistence, team spirit, sacrifice, killer instinct, liniment and pain. We want to know how they did it. How many hours a night did the child Bird spend in his driveway hitting jumpers under home-strung floodlights? What ungodly time did Bjorn get up for practice every morning? What exact makes of cars did the Butkus boys work out by pushing up and down Chicago streets? What did Palmer and Brett and Payton and Evert have to give up? And of course, too, we want to know how it feels, inside, to be both beautiful and best (“How did it feel to win the big one?”). What combination of blankness and concentration is required to sink a putt or a free-throw for thousands of dollars in front of millions of unblinking eyes? What goes through their minds? Are these athletes real people? Are they even remotely like us? Is their Agony of Defeat anything like our little agonies of daily frustration? And of course what about the Thrill of Victory — what might it feel like to hold up that #1 finger and be able to actually mean it?
I am about the same age and played competitive tennis in the same junior ranks as Tracy Austin, half a country away and several plateaus below her. When we all heard, in 1977, that a California girl who’d just turned fourteen had won a professional tournament in Portland, we weren’t so much jealous as agog. None of us could come close to testing even a top eighteen-year-old, much less pro-caliber adults. We started to hunt her up in tennis magazines, search out her matches on obscure cable channels. She was about four foot six and eighty-five pounds. She hit the hell out of the ball and never missed and never choked and had braces and pigtails that swung wildly around as she handed pros their asses. She was the first real child star in women’s tennis, and in the late Seventies she was prodigious, beautiful, and inspiring. There was an incongruously adult genius about her game, all the more radiant for her little-girl giggle and silly hair. I remember meditating, with all the intensity a fifteen-year-old can summon, on the differences that kept this girl and me on our respective sides of the TV screen. She was a genius and I was not. How must it have felt? I had some serious questions to ask her. I wanted, very much, her side of it.