A Family Portrait

From an early age, in our family, little else but tennis mattered.

This is the story of my life in tennis, but really my life.

I am the son of engineers. Born in California, moved to Tewksbury, Massachusetts, in my first year of life. My father wrote aerospace software. He did critical computer work on the Apollo missions, and later the Space Shuttle. All those pretty space pictures you get from the Hubble Telescope? You can thank my father.

He saved that mission and TRW hundreds of millions of dollars, by working tirelessly to salvage the way overtime and budget project. They were to give him a bonus he could retire on, yet somebody changed their mind. He got a plaque. He was already bitter by then; the snub made little difference.

My parents have no friends, never have. We never had people over for dinner, nor did they ever venture out to socialize. I've never seen or heard them fight. Never heard them raise their voices to each other. Never heard them say a belittling word to each other. I've also never seen them show affection to each other. Never seen them hold hands, kiss or hug each other. Nothing. Maybe it's the German in all of us. They've been married over 50 years now, something is working for them.

They were disciplined and extreme; they worked 9-5 their whole lives. My father would be at work before sunrise though; he liked it better when there was nobody else around. We didn't go out as a family; my mother would cook every night. We would eat the same thing every Monday, spaghetti; a different same thing every Tuesday, enchiladas; Wednesday was pork chop night; and right through the week. Saturday was pizza night. Sunday he would BBQ burgers and steaks. We ate our meat very rare; anything more cooked was uncivilized.

You can thank my dad for the pretty pictures from the Hubble telescope.

They drank piping hot black industrial strength coffee all day; sipped warm red wine from a box every night; smoked two packs of Salem menthols a day for 40 plus years. My father supplemented his diet with a few warm Guinness stouts daily.

As you might gather, my first experiments trying things I wasn't supposed to be trying were memorably unpleasant, delaying my entry in to the world of ingesting intoxicants. I would soon make up for that lost time, and then some.

I have two brothers: Larry two years older, Jerry three years younger. Larry, Barry and Jerry ... don't ask. Both my brothers are obese and do nothing athletically. One lives in Baltimore, one lives in Kansas City. They got as far the fuck away from California as soon as they could, and they ain't coming back. We speak once a decade, whether we need to or not.

In my last conversation with my older brother, he threatened to come to California to harm me physically. I responded by giving him my address and that I would feed him his fucking teeth upon his arrival. No further talks are scheduled.

My father wanted us to be tough, to take no shit from anyone: if a bully ever picked on us, to be able to pop the guy right in the kisser as he would say, then we'll see how tough he is. I was too little to pop my father in the mouth; my brothers were too, so we took to pounding on each other like only brothers can.

We would fight all the time. Mom and Dad would just go on about their evening conversation like we were playing a game of checkers, never tell us to stop, never breaking us up when it got a little hairy. But out of the corner of his eye, my father would watch us fight and eventually, he tired of what he saw and intervened ... with three sets of boxing gloves.

Our house in Massachusetts before the California migration.

If we were going to fight, he wanted us to fight better, with technique. He would clear the living room out, my brothers and I would put on the gloves, and Dad would referee the action as my brothers and I pounded each other senseless. "A haymaker to the bread basket," he loved to scream out in joy as one of us would land a clean shot; left hooks and right crosses with reckless disregard. Fun times ... fun times.

It was divide and conquer in its sickest manifestation. I guess he thought this would help us become more independent, to never have to rely on another to defend ourselves, that somehow this would toughen us up, harden us. Oh, it hardened us alright.

We tried a family reunion some years back. We had not all been in the same room in over twenty years. Nervous we all were. I brought my girlfriend at the time with me for cover, a highly sensitive empathic type.

We were the last to arrive. We walked in the house with gifts for all. We reached the living room where everyone sat quietly watching television and before we even reached my brothers to say hello, my girlfriend spun around and ran out the front door crying hysterically.

She would gather herself momentarily, and we survived the evening. On our drive home I asked her, "What happened back there?" All she could say is, "that was the saddest most haunted house I've ever walked in to in all my life." All I could say in response was, "Yeah."

I was a smart kid with a genius IQ. I tested off the charts in those standardized tests we all took at very young ages. Dad dug that. Our house was full of books: books about great people, biographies, self-made men, special men; my father was fascinated by them. With my high-test scores, he got a gumption maybe I could become one of them too, so home schooling soon began, after regular school of course.

At the family reunion with my older brother, my younger brother, and my empathetic girl friend.

We had encyclopedias everywhere. He would tell me to read them and we would discuss later. We had The Great Books Collection, chronicling the history of intellectual thought, and we would read them together: Archimedes, Socrates, Plato, Euclid was his favorite.

Dad was a mathematician. He would try to teach me Euclidian Geometry out of The Great Books. I was all of 6 or 7 at the time. He had me working through complex geometric proofs with an abundance of pop quizzes thrown in there. I got some answers right, I got some answers wrong, and I got yelled at a lot for that.

Got called stupid, numb nuts, a screw, for not being able to answer what fucking X was. So many mixed feelings about all the mixed messages. I knew I was different from an early age, smarter than everyone else, but Dad decided I didn't have it. He decided I wasn't smart enough, didn't have the right stuff in Math to be special, so the math lessons stopped, and my passion for mathematics would fade.

But being told I was stupid and thick and worthless would stick. I became an egomaniac with an inferiority complex; a hybrid of what I would accomplish balanced out against what he said I was. We would do this dance for many years.

Euclid: my dad's favorite author in intellectual history.

Euclidian Geometry safely put away, the year was 1972. There was an important world championship chess contest going down that year, Bobby Fischer /Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland. Dad was a tournament chess player with a masters rating at one point and I had won the battle amongst my brothers for chess dominance, securing his obsessive attention once again.

It was my job to watch television in the afternoon and as the chess moves came in over teletype and were shown on the screen, I was to transcribe them all down and set up the pieces on the board accordingly, so after work he and I could play out the adjourned games ourselves.

Sometimes I would get them all right. Other times I would miss a move or two, which made playing the games out impossible, and that didn't go over well. But on the days I would get them all down correctly, we would play chess often deep in to the night; just me and Dad alone and a part of me loved this. I was 8 years old.

At first he would slaughter me, then I began to hold my own somewhat, and before long I was giving him a run for his money. And not long after that, he was looking to enter me in to tournaments. He started by giving me the chess bible titled MCO, or Modern Chess

Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972: my dad and I finished their games.

Openings, telling me which open to learn that day and to play it in that evening's game with him. And then it happened.

At age 9, I beat him straight up, and we never played again. He decided I didn't have it, that I wasn't good enough, that I didn't have the right stuff to be special at chess and that I should quit, which I did.

Then he was off to the next obsession, woodworking. He would build all the furniture in our house, but not with me; I lost that round to my brothers and they got his undivided attention for that phase. I would wait that phase out in my room. Alone.

A year later I qualified for admission to Mensa. I was 10. It cost ten dollars a year, but I didn't have the money to join. My father wouldn't pay for it. I never asked him why. How could that not have been special enough?

But again, he became captivated with the idea that I might have something going for me mathematically, so began the home schooling again. Come Sunday night he would give me a math book to read. Abstract Algebra was the one that stands out in my mind. He would say read this and I'll test you on it next weekend, and I would.

When I did not have total mastery of the subject matter, more chastising, more belittling, more acknowledgements that I didn't have "it"; it being the right stuff to be special. His patience would run out, and it was banishment to one's room again, another in a long series of events that made me want only two things in my young life: to get the fuck out of that house as soon as I could, and upon growing up, to do everything in my power to not be like him.

My dad felt tennis was the activity where I could find greatness.

Enter tennis. I had some game; not a pretty game, not a complete game, but I could always hit a tennis ball. A little bit of a late starter, I started at age 9, and played my first tournament at 10; won my first junior tournament at 11. That was also the year I beat my Dad for the first time. We never played again. I continued on to win the Men's adult open at my club at 12, and by the time I was 13.

I had nobody decent to practice with anymore. But my father saw in me something, that I had a chance, a chance to be special, special in tennis. So we moved from the suburbs of Boston and came west to the mecca for all of junior tennis: the South Bay area of Greater Los Angeles, Southern California.

I wasn't the biggest kid, or the strongest kid, or the fastest kid. My mother played no sports; my father played every sport, none of them exceptionally well, but he had some athletic gene pool to draw from. I wasn't the smartest player, I wasn't the coolest player, I wasn't the mentally toughest player, but I could always hit a tennis ball. And when I was hitting 'em well, nobody really wanted to play me, and Dad saw that. He saw something he liked, that maybe this was the activity I could be special in, because the rankings didn't lie.

I was amongst the best in the country from an early age, and though it would take to the end of my junior career to break through to the elite level of American junior tennis, he saw something in me that he thought I could make it; that this was the activity I could be great at. It would take his full undivided attention to make that happen, so from that point forward, it was on, he was all in. With me. With me and my tennis. Little else would matter in the years to come.

A Family Portrait

By Barry Buss