Chapter 22 Ashe #2
The fifth set’s opening games were the purest tennis of either man’s life.
The building knew it and went strange and churchlike for whole stretches, the full bowl self-policing its own noise so as not to spill anything.
Hold, hold, hold, but the holds were not safe.
They were earned at deuce, at thirty-all, every service game a negotiation neither man was willing to lose.
Kas served his way out of 15–40 early with three first serves he had no statistical right to find in the fifth hour of a night match.
Theo erased a break point with a forehand up the line, flat and brave, a shot from a man who had stopped carrying insurance.
Between points they did not look at each other and were entirely in conversation, the rallies asking and answering, and Kas understood, somewhere in the middle of the set, the thing about this match he would never say in any press room: it was the longest unbroken exchange they had ever had, hours of it with no protocol, no go-between, no audience either was playing to.
The realest either of them had been all summer, conducted in public at full volume in the only language both were native in.
At 4–4, deuce, the rally went long. Kas constructed it perfectly: the depth, the gradual opening of the court, the forehand into the corner that had ended a thousand points.
Theo arrived on the dead run and hit the percentage shot, the heavy cross-court, the charmless, devastating one, the shot Kas had taught him to choose.
Kas, stretched one half-step too wide for the first time all night, put the reply a fraction past the baseline.
The service game that followed would be studied, Kas knew even while losing it.
Serving for a five-set win over a top-ten player, the moment that had broken the Theo of the old film into highlights and apologies, Theo played it like a practice drill: first serve, body, unreturned; first serve, wide, framed reply.
At 30–0, the stadium was a single standing organism, the noise moving clothing, and Theo stepped off the line, spun the ball once on his strings, the old stall.
Kas watched him use it not to consult the crowd but to wait out his own pulse, the showman’s tic converted to a metronome.
Third serve: kicker, backhand side, reply long.
Match game, and Theo finished it at love, the last serve wide to the ad, untouched.
The building came apart, and Kasimir Varga stood on the paint of Arthur Ashe Stadium having lost in the third round of the US Open to the man he loved, feeling, underneath the loss, which was real and tasted like coins, something he had no practice absorbing: pride, undiluted, ringing.
He had never had to lose well before. He had structured an entire career around making it unnecessary.
He walked to the net.
Theo met him there with his chest still heaving and his eyes already asking. Kas took his hand, then brought his other hand up to the back of Theo’s neck and pulled him in, forehead briefly to forehead, and said under the roar, for one person:
“Everything you have. You kept the deal.”
“Kas…”
“You were better. Hear me say it. Tonight you were better, and I have never enjoyed losing anything, and I would watch that third set for the rest of my life.”
He stepped back, the handshake completing its public shape a full second late.
A full second. The cameras. The whole building. In an editing bay in Queens, a man with a ServeBot credential rewound the handshake and watched it again.
Theo turned to the crowd at last and raised his arm, and then did the thing that broke the stadium’s heart and sealed the highlight: he turned back and raised Kas’s arm too, the loser’s arm, the Atlanta gesture inverted, the kid from the second round of a small July tournament finally on the other end of his own choreography, except this time both faces meant it.
Kas let his arm be raised. The noise came down over them.
His own press conference, an hour later, was short.
The room expected the wall; he had decided in the shower that the wall was unworthy of the evening.
Asked to assess the match, Kas said: “He was the better player tonight, and not by accident. He has rebuilt his game on percentages and his temperament on something I will let him name. I have lost many times to top-five players in my career and this loss is worth more than several of those wins.” Asked, inevitably, about facing his doubles partner, he looked at the room’s worth of waiting pens and gave them the only forecast he had: “We have a quarterfinal together tomorrow. I would not miss it for a ranking.” It ran as a headline within the hour: ICE: I WOULD NOT MISS IT FOR A RANKING.
He packed his bag in the usual order, and the order held, and the curl stayed where it belonged, and only at the tunnel mouth, glancing back once at the man standing alone in the white light doing his on-court interview, did Kas let the night make its final mark: he is going to say something true up there, and I am not allowed to be standing next to him when he does, and that, not the scoreboard, is the loss.
In the locker room corridor afterward, before the interview obligations separated them, they passed in the half-light by the equipment cages, and the protocol said nothing and the night said otherwise, and what happened was this: Theo stopped, and Kas stopped, close enough to touch, dripping, wrecked, neither reaching for the other because the building had eyes, and Theo said, “That was the best match of my life,” and Kas said, “Yes. Mine also,” and the word also did the work of every sentence neither could afford, and they went their separate directions down the same corridor like a play diagrammed by someone merciful.
He was wrong about the interview. Theo, asked what this win meant, looked into the camera with the whole building holding its breath and said, “Ask me Saturday,” and laughed, and gave them the grin, and the building took the bait whole.
The mask, Kas thought, walking into the concrete cool. Holding the line. Buying them time.
In Queens, the clip started over.
He had no way of knowing they were already out of it.