Hitting Partner

‘Look at his haircut. It’s embarrassing. It’s fucking em-ba-rra-ssing!’

Gaby’s been going at me for a full forty five minutes now. She started on my serve and then, as she does at least once every two days, went into a rant about how I had the worst forehand in the developed world. Now she’s onto my haircut, a new means by which to humiliate me.

She is Gaby Prio, the former world number one, current world number eleven tennis player and the winner of nine grand slams. I am her hitting partner - a job I have done and hated for ten years.

There are no more than a hundred, probably fewer, full time professional hitting partners in the world. Not that it’s an elite job, no one wants to be a hitting partner. The moment you become one is the moment you accept defeat, that you will never be a tennis player. Now you’re just an imitation of one, a kind of shitty tribute act. Worse than that in fact. A tribute act still performs in front of an audience. They still do what they set out to do, just not as successfully as they had hoped that they might. A prep cook still cuts carrots that end up in the dish, they just don’t get the credit. What a hitting partner does is cut carrots, cut carrots all fucking day, just so that the chef can cut carrots. Unless you cut carrots, the chef can’t even practice cutting carrots.

Now that I’ve basketed the sixty balls around the court, I hit one to Gaby, in hopes of a brief break from the abuse. She forehands it back, the ball lands inside the service line. Rather than stepping in and putting her under pressure, I wait and simply knock it back with a little more pace and keep her at the back of the court.

It’s December in Fort Lauderdale. There’s rain forecast for right now but, to my disappointment, it’s still a sunny 85 degrees and we have to keep on playing. With no competitions, this month is usually about conditioning. This year is different because she lost in the second round at the US Open to some ‘big chinned fucking lesbian’ (Gaby’s words) Belgian doubles specialist who only got a singles wild card out of sympathy when their partner pulled out through injury. The resulting rankings slip meant that for the first time in eight years Gaby missed out on the WTA Finals in Singapore for which only the top eight qualify.

In those eight years she’s never got close to missing out on the WTA Finals but this has been a bad 12 months. At 29, with a shitty back and four cortisone injections in the last two years, people (most of all Gaby) are wondering whether she can still compete at the top. That’s why these few weeks are about confidence as much as they are about fitness. That puts more responsibility on me.

She hits a cross court backhand and I hit one straight back and this is what we do for the next ten strokes or so. This is where Gaby is most comfortable - on the baseline, hitting cross court top spin backhands. Now I hit one up the line to get her moving. I’ve done this a million times. When she’s playing well, I’ll go for a winner - not today. I hit it flat, relatively short and a foot inside the tram lines so that she has the time to play it how she likes.

She plays the right shot but badly. Gaby crouches down, rotates her hips and uses all the strength from the big Sicilian American arse that led her to three grand slams in 2011. But her timing isn’t right. There’s a stiffness this year that won’t budge. At first that caused her to get to the ball too late, now she’s rushing it. The power is there but it lands two inches past the baseline. Deciding not to call it out means that a bad shot has the effect of being a good shot. I get there but I’m stretching and play a defensive wristy forehand that hits the tape of the net and drops my side of the court.

‘FUCK MARCUS! FUCK!’

She’s stood, feet spread, shoulders back, ready for a fight. Her racquet looks like a baseball bat with me the intruder on her lawn. Gaby turns to Slavo, her Croat coach.
‘You gotta help me out Slavo. I need someone new. Eva’s not hitting easy, fucking EASY fucking shots into the net. How am I supposed to practice? Can’t I just hit balls against a fucking WALL?’

Eva is the Swiss 21 year old new number one who won both the US and the French this year. Not an easy double to do. The US is one thing. Eva, like Gaby, like most pros, grew up playing on the sort of hard courts you get at the US Open. The French is played on clay and that is something entirely different. Clay is slower, which means longer rallies. The bounce is higher so the clay game is dominated by players with serious top spin - a slice goes for nothing on clay. And there’s the fact that the ground literally moves under your feet. You are running on dirt. To play well on clay you have to learn to spend half your time sliding along the court. Clay tennis is effectively a sub sport of the rest of tennis. The French Open is usually won by clay specialists, big South American or Spanish thugs who grew up with red dirt on their legs. Eva didn’t grow up like that. Eva was raised in a Zurich country club. While her father made millions looking after the cash of African despots, her mother made a project of Eva and turned her into what the tennis world is calling ‘the female Federer’. Not unreasonably either. She has that sort of made in a Nazi laboratory Arian perfection to her. After picking up a couple of Australians and a Wimbledon as a teenager, winning the French is a big deal. Completing the career grand slam (all four majors) with her US Open victory, Eva is already being talked of as someone who could go on to be the ‘best ever’. The ‘best ever’ ship has most likely departed for Gaby. This is why Gaby hates Eva. Because she’s better than her. I hate Gaby because I do not like her as a person.

Every tennis player has their story of a brutally unusual childhood. Mine is the most common one. An obsessive parent (in my case my mother) decided I was going to make up for her failings when I was four. Her father, a Harley Street doctor, died and left her half a million and a big house in Richmond, London. His death and the resulting financial freedom it gave my mother determined my career path before I knew what one was. Just days after the funeral she sat in the garden and looked at the tennis court she now owned, then at her son and knew what the rest of our lives would be about.

It never once occurred to me that tennis was supposed to be fun. She never said the word ‘play’. It was always ‘practice’ or ‘work’. I was a four year old with a job. Having been a half decent junior player herself she was able to teach me the strokes. We’d get up at six, before my father left for his civil service job, and hit balls for two hours before school. Then after school it was another two hours before dinner and bed. As the first winter approached she installed floodlights so that the schedule couldn’t be interrupted by the seasons. As the

years went on there was a succession of different coaches but it was always my mother who drove my ‘development’.

When I started to enter tournaments a major problem became apparent - I didn’t care about winning. I had the strokes. Technique wise I was probably one of the best eight year olds in the world. A match though was just an opportunity to hit balls with another kid instead of my horrible mother or one of her surrogate coaches. An only child who was now schooled at home, which meant only tennis, this was the closest I got to playing with other children. Why waste such a chance by stressing about a scoreline?

Gaby is different. Gaby would punch her adorable nephew in his adorable three year old face for a point. Gaby didn’t need the pushy parent. She was the pushy parent. Sure, her mother took her to a tennis summer school at the the age of four but that was only because it gave her the opportunity for Sauvignon Blanc lunches with other depressed mothers. It was Gaby who refused to leave two hours after picking up a tennis racquet for the first time, it was Gaby who spent the next six years hitting balls against the wall in her back garden and it was Gaby who at the age of eleven, realising that there was no one left in her small New Mexico town who could beat her demanded that she move to Florida to join the Steve Maddison Tennis Academy.

Gaby, as far as I can see, is unique in the sport. She is a tennis player who actually chose to be a tennis player.

I hit her another ball. She hits a soft forehand back. The tension hangs over the first few shots but gradually we speed up. She signals that we’re at it again by whipping a 110mph forehand at my feet. Nearly thirty years of hitting balls mean I’m able to half volley it back to her baseline. The next few shots from each of us could be accompanied by a ‘fuck you’. We’re both hitting it as hard as we can. John McEnroe just said that Gaby probably won’t ever win another Grand Slam. Fuck you. Where’s that rain? Fuck you. Her hitting partner is getting old and deteriorating just as fast as her. Fuck you. Gaby Prio has called me a prick every day for the last ten years. Fuck you. Eva Merian just got a massive Dior contract. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Thunder and a sudden barrage of heavy Florida afternoon raindrops. Yes! I’m so excited that I hit a beautiful angled winner that Gaby doesn’t bother chasing. We run under the covered area beside the court. Slavo walks out into the rain and collects the balls so that they’re still usable. Gaby takes her phone from her bag and heads to, I assume, Instagram. I sit down and drink water. The entire sky is grey. Within forty five minutes there will, most likely, be blazing sun again and a dry court. We’re not done for the day.

If Gaby is nearing the end of her career then I most certainly am. At thirty two, as a hitting partner I’m no longer an appealing candidate for anyone who could afford one. Three or four years ago I could have walked into a job, perhaps even as a coach, with any of Gaby’s rivals. Being part of her camp meant being associated with winning. No one could know that I never really cared about competition. Of course I wanted the bonuses that tournament wins brought but that animal need to better someone else that the sport depends on is not something I have nor want.

So I’m approaching the finish line on a career that somebody else chose for me, with no qualifications and very little cash to show for it. According to the last time I googled it Gaby has a net worth of $55 million. Much of that has come from endorsements. A great deal of her actual tennis winnings are spent on her team - coach, trainer, physio, PA and me.

Added to that are a series of figures who pop in and out - a dietician, security, a fat Reverend by the name of Chuck whom Gaby will not tolerate a bad word against. Then there’s her family who come to all the major tournaments and many of the smaller ones - her idiot brother who has supposedly been doing a degree in Psychology for the last nine years, her quiet, vacant looking father and his ex wife - her drunken, boob jobbed, claims to have fucked Jimmy Connors, called the tournament director at the Dubai Open a rag head, under strict instructions to be kept away from the press at all times, mother. All these people’s flights, some first class, some (mine) economy have to be paid for. All these people’s hotels have to be paid for - some of us at the Meridian, some of us at the Ramada Inn. All that expenditure leaves me with a basic salary of $60,000 a year. Not bad for someone with no A Levels but not enough not to worry about what may well be an upcoming fifty years of poverty once tennis stops paying.

Need it stop? I have friends from my junior days who make a living coaching the children of more rich pushy parents, one in fact set up an academy in upstate New York and judging by his Facebook posts appears to have bought a boat. There could always be a job for me in England. The British tennis establishment fetishizes American tennis and surely my long time involvement with its leading player would get me a job on the Lawn Tennis Association. But that would mean living in the same country as my mother and, to her satisfaction and even worse, working in tennis. Most people hate their jobs, right? Plumbers, accountants, people like that. But no one fixes drains from the age of four.

I could just leave. Get into my car and go. I’ve never been to the Keys. I hear the beaches smell but that’s ok.

Gaby looks up from her phone and at me. She throws me a baseball cap with a smile. ‘Wear a hat, that’s all I’m asking’

It’s a peace offering in the form of another dig at my haircut. She skips over and sits on my lap.

‘Do you hate me?’

She’s done this for ten years. It’s always a countdown to the next tirade and the next flirtatious make up. I tolerate it because she’s good at tennis which at this moment in time seems like an odd reason.

A melancholy in my gut rises and becomes a nervous anger in my chest. One day when I was six a teacher singled me out for talking in assembly when I hadn’t been. I couldn’t handle the fact that that injustice could just be left hanging there, uncorrected. Their authority, my inarticulate six year old voice, the impossibility of me proving my innocence all meant nothing could be done.

Twenty five years later that same feeling is with me. I cannot challenge her. Until I was 22 my mother controlled my life almost entirely then without me noticing it I transferred those powers to a girl three years my junior.

What I’m supposed to say is obvious to any socialised adult human. Coming as frequently as it does I’m well practiced at answering the ‘Do you hate me?’ line correctly and I do.

‘No’

It’s already stopped raining. I look beyond the drying court to the car park and beyond that a highway, some marsh land, a strip mall, a church, an empty baseball diamond. In of themselves none of those places hold any appeal. Nevertheless, each of them is sending out a ferocious pull thanks to what they are not - tennis courts.

I look at the tennis racquet beside me, the woman still sat on my lap and the coach preparing the court and I know what to do. 

This time, I do it.