Second String

Vikram Nijhawan

Illustrated by Vivan Kamath

Brantford, Ontario would be a footnote in most social studies textbooks, but its few notable names are in prominent places. “Brantford became my thinking place,” said telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, a quote emblazoned on the wall of the town’s downtown public library. Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, who also once called the town home, has a parkway in his name. Somewhere, the name of another once-promising local athlete who didn’t become famous resides in a tennis rag. Years later, I imagine that this former local flips through those yellowed magazine pages, printed circa 1979, and comes across the rankings of all the competitive players in the province. He spots his name beside a number, and runs a finger on the page from left to right. “40. Vivek Nijhawan.” He then stares off into the distance, and wonders what may have been.

Of course, this scene never happened. My father has since lost this magazine, along with the rest of his memorabilia from his former life as a tennis fanatic. The posters of star players that once adorned his bedroom walls. The countless pairs of worn-out Stan Smith sneakers scattered across his floor, long before they became the next generation’s fashionable footwear of choice. The Kodachrome photo slides with imprinted memories from his trip that summer when – long before the presence of a brown man on such premises was considered an automatic security risk – he snuck into the Wimbledon Championships.

Any game that includes ‘love’ in its vocabulary would naturally make for good romantic metaphors, and my father’s tryst with tennis had deep roots. For the men in his family, this was something between a coming-of-age milestone and a hereditary trait. Along with cricket and field hockey, playing tennis was practically a requirement for all immigrant boys at that time; once a luxury they could only partake in during their private school days back in India, now a commonplace activity in Canada. His family came to Canada from Ambala when he was a boy, and they frequently moved across the country as his engineer father took on new jobs: first to Montreal, then to Calgary, and eventually to Brantford. His brother, cousins, and uncles all enjoyed the weekly routine, the satisfying rhythm of returning a ball over the net again and again. What was merely a pastime for them served a far more important role for my father. Sixteen-year-old Vivek Nijhawan had no shame spending his free days in Brantford during the summer of ‘78 as a self-described “tennis bum”.

Every morning, he biked from his family’s home, past the sprawling conformity of suburban small-town Ontario, to the Dufferin Tennis and Lawn Bowling Club. He spent the day rallying with regulars who considered themselves hot-shots. In between playing, he took breaks in the clubhouse, kibitzing with other club members, challenging them to matches with money on the line. Whatever cash he won, he fed right into a vending machine for cans of grape-flavoured Fanta. After a full day, he returned home around 11 p.m., eating whatever dinner his mother had prepared and left in the fridge. He went to bed, ready to do the same the next day. All the while, he counted down the days until the Wimbledon men’s final, waiting for the match on television like a kid would wait for Christmas morning.

His older brother Vinit had already left for Waterloo ahead of his first year of university that fall. In past summers, Vivek visited his uncle and aunt in Ottawa, engaging in his usual delinquency with his younger cousin, Sunil. Whenever these boys weren’t scavenging bike parts from junk heaps, or lifting license plates off the backs of unguarded cars to add to Sunil’s personal collection, they were hitting tennis balls together on the local asphalt courts. But this summer, Vivek was left without any worthy rallying partners.

Tennis, as a solitary sport, has been likened to physical chess. It seems natural that I would inherit my love of both games from my father. After spending many of my teenage years practicing on the court, I became a competent hitter. My sole memento was a red and white Wilson Federer racquet that lasted me until I was sixteen, whose broken remains, much like all of my father’s former tennis possessions, have long since disappeared somewhere in the shuffle between different homes and basements. My father was accustomed to moving around, leaving old places of comfort early on in his life, due to his itinerant upbringing. In absence of a permanent resting place, Vivek had the local tennis court. During those solitary days, his entire world existed within fine chalk lines, grasping for a ball that was often just out of reach.

*

Vivek woke up early on the morning of July 8, 1978. In years past, he had someone to watch the Wimbledon Gentlemen's finals with, like his uncle Jagdish in Ottawa, a fellow tennis enthusiast, the same person who would berate him and Sunil for staying up late to catch midnight airings of Peter Sellers’ The Party or anything else on television. But this year, Vivek sat alone in front of his fuzzy screen, watching two genteel gladiators do battle on a tan-striped lawn in southwestern England. Bjorn Borg, the ice-cold Swedish superstar, swept past his American rival, Jimmy Connors, to win the title for a third year in a row. His tennis supremacy felt like a status quo that would never end.

In those pre-Internet days, without access to immediate video replays and video highlight reels, there was true joy in catching fleeting moments of greatness. Vivek and his relatives tried to emulate those styles in their own low stakes gameplay. They all had their heroes: for Vinit, it was Rod Laver, for Sunil, Jimmy Connors. All the players Vivek ever admired shared some underdog status. His initial idol was Ille “Nasty” Nastase, a fiery and entertaining Romanian who held the honour of being the first ever world No. 1 in professional rankings history. But in years to come, he found a new favourite: an upstart from Douglaston, Queens, the son of an American Air Force member-turned-lawyer.

Long before Vivek followed in his father-in-law’s footsteps as a lawyer, something about this biographical parallel attracted him. Nineteen-year-old John McEnroe was already being lauded for his finesse and style. His admirers described him as wielding his wooden Wilson racquet like an artist’s paintbrush. If his critics would ever concede that, it was only to compare him to Jackson Pollock – an erratic brat harnessing an emotional style that led to amusing cocktail conversations at best. But it was a style that spoke deeply to Vivek. McEnroe had already won ten titles on the professional tennis tour, even beating Borg a few times during his rise to the upper echelons.

At certain times, Vivek looked at his poster of McEnroe on his bedroom wall like a shrine, at eye level with that intense gaze. A wild mass of curly hair, barely constrained by his red headband; a scrawny arm that struggled to fill the striped sleeve of his white shirt, holding a Wilson racquet about to connect with an approaching tennis ball; looking as lithe and balletic in his frozen stance as a mini-Baryshnikov in a music box. Vivek stopped short of asking himself “What would John do”? The natural answer to that question – “throwing a tantrum until he could get his point across” – was hardly useful advice. He harboured the possibility of turning pro, but never with the conviction to share that vision with anyone, let alone his parents. They would have discouraged this path anyway, but he was still young enough to entertain unrealistic dreams. His future path was laid out before him by his parents and their parents before them: head off to university, get a degree, find a respectable job, start a family, and support their success. Years before his disbarment, before his legal career ended, before his wife of thirty years would routinely remind him of his failures, he considered the only challenge in his life the opponent waiting on the other side of the net.

Vivek’s parents had been looking for an excuse to send him to India to visit family. They wanted him to “clear his head”, and the summer after high school graduation seemed like the right time. He had an uncle named Baldev who lived in London with his family. They worked for British Airways and lived right under the shadow of Heathrow Airport. Vivek saw his perfect opportunity to watch a Wimbledon match live, and wanted to add a stop to England en route to his trip to India. His parents conceded, on the condition that he pay for his own airfare there. Vivek worked weekend nights after school at K-Mart to earn more money. A weekly ritual of his shifts was swerving to avoid the stampedes of soccer moms chasing after the discounted underwear he’d just finished stocking on the back-of-store shelves. Several weeks later, building up his savings and his anticipation, he had the $800 he needed.

I picture Vivek packing for his trip early on a June morning in the summer of ‘79, preparing to catch a bus, and then a train, to arrive in time for his flight from Toronto’s Pearson airport. He crams a 35-millimetre single-lens reflex camera into a small duffel bag. He looks up at a wall festooned with posters of star players. Johnny Mac’s angry gaze was at eye level. Among his other hobbies, Vivek was a shutterbug. He could admire a good photograph. His goal that summer was to capture a better one for himself.

*

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same”.

Vivek was more well-read than he let on, but he was more an athlete than an academic. Asking him to recite any other line from Kipling’s poem would likely be met with unashamed ignorance. But he knew this particular one by heart. This quote stirred far more in him than Graham Bell’s on the public library wall, since Kipling’s words were enshrined atop the entrance to Wimbledon Centre Court, a message broadcast to the two players before they went to face one another and one of these two fates.

Before he encountered either of those things, though, he had to figure out where he was going. It was Monday, June 25th. The skies were unusually clear for a day in England, as if the country’s infamous climate was in cahoots not to ruin Vivek’s big day. For all his enthusiasm, he was clueless about the logistics of fulfilling his grand plans, so he asked his uncle Baldev how to get to the All-England Lawn Tennis Club. The tube station in Hounslow was a fifteen minute walk from their house. He woke up at 6 AM. and travelled from their home to SW19, arriving at 8 AM, only to be greeted by the first of many quintessentially British traditions: a kilometre-long queue. For two hours, he stood alongside others making their pilgrimage to the Mecca of professional tennis. Two hours later, he made it to the front and paid for general admission. Five precious pounds later, he entered the hallowed grounds.

Like any reputed religious destination, the mythologized grandeur built up around them often falls short when seeing them in person. Still, Vivek couldn’t suppress the sublime feeling of walking the grounds he had, until then, only known and admired from a distance. Courtesy of his uncle, he’d had the chance to walk on the wing of a parked Concorde jet in an aircraft hangar just a few days before. But walking on the finely-manicured Wimbledon ryegrass truly felt like floating on air.

Vivek soon encountered yet another tradition: play only began at 11 AM, giving him time to explore. He watched players ranked in the top fifty practising on the outside courts, many not much older than himself. He relished the distinct sound of the trademark Slazenger balls hit back and forth, like a velvet slapshot. He took some pictures, hoping to cleanly capture the iconic silhouetted panther brand in motion.

A player coming through a side entrance caught his eye. Running late, with a nonchalance that only comes from someone who takes comfort in knowing that his glory days are done, someone who has nothing on the line except the prospect of having a good time.

“Owen Davidson!” Vivek shouted without thinking.

The twenty-five-year-old Australian turned around, an expression of surprise, and later amusement, forming on his ruddy face. Now long retired from singles, Davidson was just a doubles player, and he was late for his match. A player barely ranked in the top fifty getting recognized was a rarity, but Vivek knew them all by heart. Davidson looked slightly feebler, more normal in person than in a magazine picture or on a television screen. The Australian turned around, waved, and fled off to his match. Catching Davidson was a bonus, but he wasn’t the player Vivek had come to watch. That honour could only belong to the tempestuous New Yorker scheduled to play on Wimbledon Centre Court.

Or so he thought. Vivek lined up for a Standing Room spot on Centre Court, but soon learned that McEnroe had a bye in the first round, and wouldn’t play until Wednesday. He left the queue in a huff, venturing near the back of the tournament grounds, now with plenty of time to kill. He sauntered around, his mind flashing back to a memory of taking a ride in a limousine as part of his first-place prize in a Southern Ontario Monopoly Championship some years ago. As he and his mother were chauffeured along Toronto’s grimy, endless Yonge Street in the luxury car, enjoying soft drinks from the built-in mini fridge which had long since lost their carbonation, Vivek wondered whether this was truly the best the ‘high life’ had to offer. He’d seen just about every attraction at Wimbledon, and fresh strawberries and cream were of little interest to him. But what he saw next did; behind one of the white hospitality tents, in a corner of the stonewall fence circling the tournament grounds, a curious onlooker who squinted at just the right time could catch sight of a boy planting his feet on the finely-manicured lawns, as if descending from the heavens.

If the boy’s plain attire gave the impression that he couldn’t afford a ticket, what happened next confirmed the assumption. The trespasser looked back at the two-metre-high stone fence he had just jumped over, like McEnroe inspecting the line where his opponent’s ball had just landed before berating the umpire for a bad call: a scrutinising gaze that anticipated excitement. Moments later, another boy appeared on top, joining his friend on the hallowed grounds. Both boys shifted their eyes side-to-side, like inmates in a line-up trying to avoid being shanked in the poshest prison imaginable. Luckily for them, neither the lethargic guards circling the grounds, nor their German shepherds, hard edges had softened from pampering, were anywhere nearby. They moseyed into the grounds with a honed authority, passing as insiders who belonged there from the beginning.

Years later, “Ideas Man” became an honorific among Vivek and his friends – an obscure reference to Michael Keaton’s wise-guy character in the film Night Shift. Whoever suggested boosting a shopping cart from the local grocery store to construct a makeshift go-kart? He was dubbed “Bill Blazejowski, the Ideas Man” for the day. The one who made the most inane observation, while the lot of them were getting high as kites in one of their backyards on a lazy Saturday afternoon, then forced to eat a dog biscuit by his peers as punishment for his stupidity? “Ideas Man”. The cut-off bar for receiving this title wasn’t set high, but if Vivek was asked, the progenitors of this noble tradition, the original “Ideas Men”, were the two British boys standing right in front of him.

Vivek cautiously approached them. He wanted to know how they had done it. One of them gestured vaguely to the outer perimeter from which they had just entered.

“There’s a newspaper box just there,” he said softly, retrieving his fallen hat, and brushing off loose blades of grass. “Sometimes SW19 gets unexpected deliveries”.

A wry grin formed on his face. Even someone as prone to deadpan remarks as Vivek had to get accustomed to British wit. Vivek would have thought the kid looked fit to hand out newspapers on a street corner in 1923. But the comment piqued his curiosity. Vivek exited the grounds early. He walked around the outer perimeter to an unguarded corner, and came across a red newspaper box, filled with copies of The Daily Mirror and all the other tabloids, publications housing writers whose fingers were resting on their typewriters to report on McEnroe’s latest on-court controversies. The box was less than a metre high, but Vivek was tall enough that if he stood on top of it, he could easily grip the edge of the fence and hoist himself over.

Vivek arrived back early at his relatives’ home that evening. As they sat around the dinner table, they asked him about his day. He shared the highlights but neglected to mention his two new British friends. He went to bed that night, reassured that in just a few hours, he’d achieve his dreams, and save five pounds, preparing to meet whatever ‘Triumphs and Disasters’ lay in his way.

*

Vivek woke up two hours later on Tuesday, June 26th. He stepped off the tube near Wimbledon, made his way to the grounds, and looked on with sympathy at the poor sods who had already gathered in a mass to form a minimum two-hour queue. After a surreptitious glance around, he made a wide circle around the grounds, and then approached the bright red newspaper box, standing isolated on the expanse of grass, like a homing beacon guiding his path.

One more cautionary glance from side to side. As if sleepwalking through his time in the queue and at the ticket booth, he found himself on Wimbledon Centre Court. Toffs had their front-row seats, but he and the other ‘groundlings’ were consigned to the upper-row Standing Room Only section. The green battlefield was bare but for the patches of faded grass where balls had most frequently dropped in prior matches. A brief thought, more a reaction, crossed Vivek’s during that painful waiting period: the feeling that it was wrong to ruin something so pristine. He aimed his camera onto Centre Court to preserve a copy for himself.

After what felt like a lifetime, the two combatants finally walked onto the court side-by-side. There he was. That wild mass of curly hair, with a Wilson T-3000 strapped over his back. His already slender physique looked somehow more wiry in the flesh. Ample cheering, with some jeering, began to peal over the audience. McEnroe’s opponent and compatriot, Terry Moor (No. 61 in the world), trailed him. The first round would be an American civil war. As two left-handers from the East Coast, it wouldn’t only be a battle of matching nationalities, but also of styles. Vivek looked at Moor with sympathy, as one would look at the last-picked kid on a school sports team, or an ill-equipped gladiator being presented for public slaughter. McEnroe had already thrashed Moor at a tournament in San Jose earlier in the year. No one expected this bout to be anything more than a warm-up before McEnroe reached round two.

Both players assumed their sides of the court. The customary coin toss to decide who served first. There was some casual chatter amongst the peanut gallery about McEnroe “knocking on the door” this year, about how this tournament was his for the taking.

Vivek felt someone nudging his shoulder. He turned around and saw a young girl. Trying to get a closer look at the action. With minimal resistance, she eventually nudged her way past him to get a better view.

“First set, McEnroe to serve”, announced the chair umpire.

The crowd’s enthusiasm petered out. Johnny Mac took his position. He began his characteristic service ritual: bouncing the fuzzy albumen ball on the court once and then rocking it along with his back-and-forth racquet swing, in a scissor motion, visualizing the perfect shot. So was Vivek, up in the stands, with his camera in hand. He was too used to watching the final from a grainy television screen; now, he was trying to line up a far better view from his camera lens. The only thing obscuring his view was the girl in front of him.

McEnroe fired off his first serve, rushing to the net to follow up with a deft volley. It landed into the net just as his feet approached the threshold of ‘No Man’s Land’.

Years later, my father can’t remember the details of that match beyond the feeling of sheer exhilaration of McEnroe’s victory. He remembers little of his conversation with that girl or what she looked like. The brilliant volley-shots that McEnroe made didn’t stick like a highlight reel on his mind like they would for an Internet-age brain trained on constant replays.

He didn’t watch the Gentlemen’s final on television that year, but read about the result two weeks later, in a newspaper in India, with the Wimbledon purples and greens rendered black-and-white in the article photo. McEnroe was eliminated in the tournament’s fourth round. Bjorn Borg won the Championship, of course. In his ever-changing world, perhaps Vivek took bittersweet solace in knowing that even though his hero lost, at least some things remained constant.

*

Every generation of sports lovers has its artists. For my father, it was McEnroe, and for me, it was Roger Federer. The Swiss star’s retirement announcement in 2022, after a prolonged injury-induced hiatus from the court, felt timely in a year that already seemed to be defined by other endings. My father and I watched Federer’s final exhibition match on TV on a Friday night in late September – the family home half-emptied of furniture, on its way to being sold to new owners, in the middle of my parents’ separation.

My father had told me his Wimbledon story for years, but its significance never struck me until we were watching the end of another tennis era together. I’d never known tennis without Federer. Watching his final match at the Laver Cup in London, miles away from our house, in its state of domestic purgatory, I wondered how my father once felt on those hallowed Wimbledon grounds, witnessing McEnroe in his prime years. Fleeting greatness that no lost or forgotten photo could accurately capture – an image that he would always remember, even as its contours blurred with time. When I imagine in that moment, for maybe the first time he was aware of it, he saw beautiful potential fulfilled inside a lined world.

***

About the Author:

Vikram Nijhawan is an Indo-Canadian arts and culture writer who is currently living and studying in New York City. He enjoys writing literary journalism and profiling local emerging artists working across various creative mediums. He has previously written for Hazlitt and This Magazine.