TROPHY SON

Until 2011, Douglas Brunt was CEO of Authentium, Inc., an Internet security company. He is the author of two previous novels, the New York Times bestselling Ghosts of Manhattan and The Means. A Philadelphia native, he lives in New York with his wife and their three children.

Author Website

A USA Today Notable Book
A New York Post “Must Read” Book

“Keenly observed and provocative.”—Sports Illustrated

“Trophy Son brings Conroy’s The Great Santini and Malamud’s The Natural into the present day…A terrific book.”—Harlan Coben

1. Do you feel that parents of this generation are more involved in the lives of their children than has been the case with previous generations? If so, why? How much involvement is too much?

2. Do you think having a highly developed single talent or unique talent is an advantage with regard to college admissions? If so, is this a healthy incentive for young kids, families? What is a good age to embark on specialization?

3. Should professional leagues legalize performance-enhancing drugs or should they continue to attempt to police abuse? Is there another approach?

4. Intensity and full schedules for our youth go beyond just athletics. Do we not value free time for our kids enough?

5. What did you know about competitive athletics, and tennis specifically, before reading this novel? Did the novel change your impression?

6. Is Anton’s father merely benign but misguided, or something worse?

7. Do you feel that fiction is more or less powerful than nonfiction as a means of exploring real world events or issues?

8. What is the moral of this novel?

CHAPTER 1

In the end, man shapes the world, but the world gets the first crack at us. We’re not much more than a puddle before we’re two years old, and then more years to develop so we can survive on our own. Until then we take in more impressions than we give.

A tennis racket lurks in my earliest memories like a sick relative who had come to live with us. When I look at my baby pictures, there it is, resting in my crib in the place of a rattle or chew toy. I’ve talked to some players who say they know exactly the moment when their lives took the hard turn into professional tennis. It’s when they first left home to live full time in a tennis academy or when they first put a coach on payroll or when they first took prize money and officially dropped amateur status.

I had no sensation of milestones and the power to value a moment was never granted to me. My parents had the plan for my life from the moment my mother tested positive with me. Looking back now, I’d say the hard turn for me was when I left school after the eighth grade to play tennis full time and study some with a travelling tutor.

At the time it didn’t feel like a hard turn at all. I’d been told for several years that I’d be leaving school after the eighth grade so it had the reassurance of a promise kept. It was no different from waking up on any other day.

In the average day then, I’d spend seven hours on the court in our backyard in Radnor, Pennsylvania, with my dad blasting tennis balls at me from a machine. The rest of the day we’d talk tennis strategy, watch game film and train with weights.

In the winter we’d leave behind the Main Line suburbs and go rent a place in Florida with a tennis court so we could do the same year-round. Dad was a retired hedge fund manager who made enough millions to retire and focus on my game. Before that, he was on the 1984 US Olympic swimming team. No medals. He was accustomed to winning at everything but no medals in 1984.

By the time I was fourteen, I was good enough to beat the crap out of a decent college player so every few weeks we’d travel to a college where nobody knew me but that Dad had scouted out.

Once we drove down to the courts at the University of Pennsylvania. Dad said, “Get ready to fight, Anton.” We’re Greek. Dad loved being Greek. Ancient warrior-athletes.

For the tenth time, he told me how to approach the court, taunt the players on the college team, bait them into a match, bait them into putting money on the line. He said to me on this trip as he did on every trip, “A friendly game will ruin you. Play with adversity, with animosity. No friendly games.”

I realized this also meant no friends, at least not anywhere near tennis. Tennis is about only hate and suffering.

What Dad saw in me that he didn’t see in my brother Panos was that I could handle the hate. I could suffer. I could take the hate, give some back then take some more. With my brother, the fight would fall out of him. After a while, he’d flip Dad the bird and walk off the court. When Dad saw his absolute mental dominance over my brother was slipping, his efforts turned abusive and physical. I was on my brother’s side but I’m a people pleaser on some level and I wanted a different result and knew how to get it. I stayed on the court.

I took the punishment and by twelve I had used it to become an elite junior player. By fourteen, I was on the Penn campus to humiliate a Division I college player.

Late February is early in the tennis season. It was warm on a Sunday, and the first warm days make you notice for the first time in months that the branches are naked. I would look at the trees and try to imagine them with their leaves back on. Dad knew the team did informal hitting at 2pm and would be on the outdoor courts. I carried my biggest and most ridiculous-looking tennis bag and wore a pristine, white tennis outfit.

Dad said, “Don’t be a little cocky. Be massively cocky. Humble and confident seems real. You need to blow so hard they don’t believe a word you’re saying. And you need to piss them off. Make them crave a match to take you down.”

We parked far from the courts. Dad put five one-hundred-dollar bills in my pocket, then we split up. He walked to a place where he could watch the play without being seen, partly to watch the match and partly to be there to save me if a fight broke out. Dad was 6’4″. His swimming weight was two hundred pounds, but at this time he was two-forty and mostly muscle. He loved asserting his bigness. He had black hair, olive skin and looked old-country Greek, tough and dangerous.

I saw a couple college kids hitting on the courts and four others sitting on a bench nearby in sweat clothes with racket bags. They looked like nice guys. I would have preferred to say hi, talk with them, hear what school and a normal life can be like, laugh about something. But Dad had taught me that this kind of average life was wasteful, slothful, damaging to a life of excellence. These boys were a breed to be pitied, observed only, like species in a zoo. Do not touch the glass, do not feed the animals.

Anyway, I had a job to do here. Dad had given me a few opening lines.

There were eight guys, all dressed in similar sweat clothes. Some were hitting, most were lounging on courtside benches like actors backstage after the play. I sat down as loud as I could on the bench next to them and said, “Hi, kids.”

They looked at me and smiled. Later I grew to be 6’3″ and strong but then I was 5’10” and a rail with the flat, invisible muscles that active, early teens have. They didn’t say anything.

The grass lawns around the courts were thin and wilted, just starting to come back to life. A squirrel back on his haunches looked up at us from his nut which he held with both arms like a mixing bowl of brownie batter. Remnants of leaves from the fall, rotted to small pieces by the long winter, blew in wisps at the bases of trees and in small piles and soon would return to dust.

I pointed at one of the guys hitting balls on the court. “What a joke that guy is.”

They stopped talking with each other and looked at me.

I said, “I must be in the wrong place. Is this U Penn? I thought this was U Penn.”

“It’s U Penn,” one of them said.

“Well, who the hell are you guys? Where’s the tennis team?” I said.

They looked at each other. “We’re the tennis team.”

I did my best to look shocked, shocked. “Bullshit.” I pointed to the court again. “You can’t tell me that guy plays on a tennis team. Maybe an elementary school team.”

One of them said, “He plays number two singles.”

They found me insulting but also funny. Another of them laughed and said, “Nice tennis whites. Beat it, you little punk.”

I said, “If this is the quality of tennis at U Penn, then you can beat this,” and I stroked the handle of my tennis racket. That was improvised and I felt good about it. “Obviously I can’t get a decent match around here. Where’s Nadal when you need him. Andy Murray.”

One said, “I think there’s a middle school down the street. Go look for a match there.”

I said, “Middle school. That’s funny. Listen, if you don’t want to play me just for the instructional benefit to you, then play me for money.”

“How much money?”

I said, “Five hundred.” I pulled out the five bills from my pocket. This is the hard part. You can sound as ridiculous as you like, but money makes it real.

They were stunned. Nobody took the bet yet. I said, “Is this U Penn or U Pussy?” Dad scripted this stuff and he thought this last line was a gem. It worked. There had already been too much shit-talking and ego involved for it not to work.

The guys on the court had walked over by then to listen. “Who wants to play the kid?”

“I’ll play him,” said the number two singles player who had been hitting.

“Where’s your five hundred bucks?” I said.

Together they had two-fifty so we all waited while one kid ran to the ATM. The courts were a small oasis in Penn’s urban campus and a deli with an ATM was only a thousand feet away. I started hitting rallies with the number two singles player whose name was Jim. I said, “You’re okay, Jim. You look a little better from out here on the court than you did from the bench. You have a heavy ball.”

It was a clear day, sunny, no breeze. It was about fifty degrees out which is great tennis weather once you get moving. A commercial jet flew overhead, low enough that the sound echoed across the sky so you couldn’t sense where the noise was from.

“You’re damn right, squirt,” he said.

I wasn’t hitting my best stuff yet. I’d just get loose for a while before we played the match.

My hand-eye coordination has always been great. Great baseball hitters can write a number on a baseball with Magic Marker and when it comes at them at ninety miles per hour they can read the number. I’ve never tried that but I bet I can do it. Things move to me slower and I get there faster. Take that gift and work it out on a tennis court for seven hours a day and you get me. When the match started I knew I’d shift my game to the next gear and put a beating on Jim that he’d be dying to tell his friends about in a few years every time he’d see me on national television.

I just wished I didn’t need to be such a jerk about it. I didn’t know it then but I resented Dad for making me do this with people. I wasn’t able to name it as resentment, but that’s what it was. Dad never let anyone come to like me. I was trapped in his boot camp, developing an edge that no other fourteen-year-old could match.

There is no question it gave me toughness, a knowledge that no opponent across the net could fathom my training, but it was all built on hate.

We had rallied for ten minutes when the kid returned with the money. We put all the cash in an empty tennis ball can. They made jokes about having their drinking money for the night.

A guy about fifty years old in sweat clothes had taken a seat in the bleachers. I thought he was probably the coach. I didn’t see Dad but I knew he was there. I knew he was smiling like a hunter with a doe in his crosshairs.

Jim graciously let me serve first without spinning for it.

I got to my spot on the baseline and said, “These are good.”

“No practice serves?” said Jim.

“No.”

Jim shrugged. It was his last relaxed gesture.

At fourteen, I could already serve a hundred miles per hour. More impressive than the speed was that my service form was perfect. It was beautiful, and I could place the ball anywhere I wanted. Anyone watching knew that with a few years and a few inches I’d be serving one-forty.

I uncorked an ace up the middle. It landed an inch inside the T. Jim didn’t move. His knees flinched to the middle but his feet never moved.

I looked to the bench. It was a Susan Boyle moment. Shock and awe. There was no apparent correlation between the performance and the package. Other than the team, the coach and my hidden father, there was no one around to see my quiet victory. The coach was already walking down from the bleachers like Simon Cowell ready to offer me a recording deal except this guy was no billionaire and I had no interest in a college scholarship. I knew I’d never go to college. I didn’t even go to the ninth grade for Christ’s sake.

If poor Jim had harbored any hope of playing pro tennis, it died that afternoon. He realized there was another class of player out there and he couldn’t handle the fourteen-year-old version of it.

Jim had a steady game with few errors but his ball had no pop. He couldn’t push anyone around. He would just hang around and make his opponent beat him but his ball set up exactly the way I liked it. I got to balls early, stepped into my shot and ripped my swing as hard as I could. When I was older I’d hit harder, but that day was the hardest I’d ever hit in a match to that point.

I beat Jim 6-0, 6-1. I gave him a game in the second set because I’m not as ruthless as Dad and the goodness I felt from doing it meant more than the criticism I would get for it on the ride home.

They were all so amazed by the severity of the beating that they forgot to feel hustled. They handed me the can of cash and gave me some pats on the back. They were sure they’d watch me win matches at the US Open in a few years.

The coach walked over to talk with me. I glanced up and saw Dad sitting in the bleachers. He’d come out of hiding and looked relaxed. He didn’t care about the money, but he did need to make sure I didn’t get hurt.

The coach smiled at me and said, “What’s your name, son?”

“Anton.”

“How old are you Anton?”

“Fourteen.”

“Where do you play?”

“Mostly my backyard. Some satellite tournaments.” I knew he was about to praise me and I was excited to hear it. Dad never praised me.

The coach looked around and saw Dad and knew exactly. Then the coach surprised me. “I don’t expect to see you around here again. Ever. I don’t like hustlers. Get going now.”

I picked up my massive tennis bag and started for the bleachers.

Then the coach said, “Anton,” and he walked over to me, still out of earshot of Dad. He put a hand on my shoulder and looked nice again. “Balance.”

“Balance?”

He said, “Don’t think about what I’m saying all at once now. But every once in a while, when you have a decision to make, think about balance.”

“Okay.”

“Good luck,” he said.

Copyright © 2017 by Douglas Brunt

A Conversation with Douglas Brunt

Could you tell us a little bit about your background, and about when you decided that you wanted to lead a literary life?

Like many people I know, as a kid I had a dream of triumphantly publishing novels to great literary acclaim and leading the romantic life of a writer on a rustic beach, working from dawn to the late morning once I’d dulled a dozen pencils, then swimming and drinking rum in the afternoons and evenings for inspiration. But as a practical matter, I pursued it with the same whimsy as I did my other far-out dreams, which, incidentally, were to hoist the Wimbledon trophy and to quarterback the Eagles to a Super Bowl victory (Nick Foles beat me to it). It just never occurred to me that any one of these was a real goal to pursue. I chased other goals.

Running my own company was a lifelong goal, right behind a Wimbledon title. So I had a business career, initially as a consultant, then as an investor, then leading a technology company for ten years. I find there is a lot of overlap between entrepreneurship and writing, and I enjoyed my years as a business entrepreneur. Most of them.

The company had a dysfunctional board of directors, which always causes headaches for the CEO (me, in this case), and I had extended travel nearly every week at a time when my wife and I had just welcomed our first baby.

The three of us were walking in Central Park one weekend afternoon (actually, our baby was flat-out in a stroller), and my wife remarked that I didn’t seem happy, that I was more short-tempered than usual, not slowing down and enjoying the good moments, especially the moments with our growing family. It was clear that my job was at the heart of the problem, so we talked about making changes.

I had been toying around with the manuscript of what was to become my first book. With all my time on planes and at terminal gates waiting for planes, I had started writing to pass the time. This was still just a whimsical endeavor in my mind, until that walk in Central Park.

Which books influenced your life and inspired you to become a writer?

I like to read a few books in a row by the same author, especially these days because, as a professional matter, I get a perspective on the arc or design of the writer’s career. I liked to read this way even before becoming a writer myself, though, so the reading choices in my life have come in phases defined by the author (unless pressed into reading choices by an English professor).

My early days were Frog and Toad, then the Hardy Boys, then anything by Tolkien followed by anything by Ludlum. Then Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dickens. That takes me to about the middle of high school, when I began to discover more writers not already made famous by my high school curriculum. I enjoyed John Irving, Kingsley Amis, and have always admired the breadth of the career of Michael Crichton. From The Great Train Robbery to Jurassic Park to Rising Sun to Disclosure. He wasn’t afraid to take on vastly different topics. He died too young. I’d love to see what he’d be working on now.

More recently, I’ve loved books by Jess Walter, Colson Whitehead, and Jennifer Egan, among many others.

What was the inspiration for this novel?

At the time of writing this reading group guide (February 2018), my children are eight, six, and four years old. When I had the idea for writing this novel, they were four, two, and a few months, and I was picking up our oldest from his nursery school, where the teacher was introducing chess to the kids. They weren’t really learning the game yet, just the names of the different pieces and how the pieces move around the board. Our son was enjoying this, and I said to another parent in the hallway as we were waiting for the kids to get their jackets on, “Our son is having fun with this. Maybe chess will be one of the things he sticks with.”

The other parent said, “Oh, no! You don’t want that. Trust me. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a chess parent in New York City?”

I said, “No. What’s it like?”

He said, “We have a seven-year-old boy who’s into chess. Every Saturday morning, we’re up early and out to some school gym or cafeteria that’s been set up to host a chess tournament. He plays, we wait, he plays again, we wait, he plays again, we’re there all day. I bring my phone, the newspaper, and a book. Sunday we do it all again. The following weekend, all over again. That’s my life now. Chess tournaments for seven-year-old kids.”

“That sounds horrible.” And I thought to myself that that would never work for our family. But maybe there’s a book in there.

I have lots of friends who have kids slightly older than our own who have gone through travel sports leagues for soccer or lacrosse. I don’t remember any such thing as travel sports leagues when I was growing up in the 1970s, but it seems now that kids won’t make the middle school teams and certainly not the varsity teams if they don’t get involved at an early age. What’s more,

at an early age, the kids need to pick what the one sport is going to be. There’s been a push toward early single sport specialization and I wanted to explore this push through fiction.

I picked tennis as the way in because for a gifted player, tennis is among the sports that require the most extreme dedication and sacrifice.

Can you tell us about the research you did before writing this novel?

I’ve been a fan of tennis my whole life, so I had a baseline of knowledge about the sport. I also do a lot of research for all my books, and while I read numerous sources of secondary research, I find the best information comes from primary sources. For this novel, I interviewed more than a dozen people connected to the sport, ranging from tennis greats James Blake and John Isner to great players you would never have heard of but who had the intense youth experience committed to tennis (attended the famous Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Florida) and just never cracked the top 1000 in world rankings. In many ways, the stories from the players who never “made it” to the top of the sport were the most interesting. Their stories were the most raw.

Once I was out on the book tour after publication, I tapped into another community that has an important perspective on themes in the book. I estimate that after each talk I’d give at a book event, seven of every ten people who approached to speak with me were grandparents, and they each had the same thing to say: “I never get to see my grandkids.”

The feeling was that the young grandkids were scheduled out, through the weekdays and the weekends, and unless one gets to the sidelines of a soccer game on Saturdays, there will be no grandkid sightings. They were sad about it, and it was sad to hear. I wish I had picked up on this perspective before I wrote the book because I would have explored it in the story. Just goes to show that writers keep learning, even after publication day.

Are you working on another book? Can you tell us what’s it’s about?

I handed in Trophy Son to my editor in December 2015, so I’ve been working on the next one for a while now. The new book is a murder mystery, which is different from anything I’ve done before. It’s Agatha Christie meets F. Scott Fitzgerald. Who wouldn’t want to read that?