Everything on the Line Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Everything on the Line

  Praise for Everything on the Line

  Dedication

  * * *

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Everything on the Line

  By Bob Mitchell

  Copyright 2013 by Bob Mitchell

  Cover Copyright 2013 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  Everything on the Line

  By Bob Mitchell

  “Everything on the Line has a line about everything—it’s a fanciful, exuberant valentine to tennis and the people who play it.”

  —Mary Carillo, CBS, NBC, ESPN commentator, winner (with John McEnroe) of French Open mixed doubles title, Peabody Award winner

  “Although few novelists have touched pro tennis, knowledgeable Bob Mitchell makes a big splash with Everything on the Line, filled with surprises and humor, set in a future Obama presidency (Malia’s). In a fierce rivalry for No. 1, an American and an Italian (he with a Stradivarius racket!) battle across the planet.”

  —Bud Collins, Boston Globe, ESPN, Tennis Channel, dean of American tennis writers, member International Tennis Hall of Fame

  “Bob Mitchell’s novel, Everything on the Line, is a complex, rich, challenging story weaving together the author’s vast knowledge of tennis, history, art, and poetry.”

  —Peter Bodo, senior editor and chief columnist, Tennis magazine

  “An eclectic intellect, a generous heart, and a distinctive passion for art and sports make Bob Mitchell a true ‘Tennaissance Man.’ Check out this book and see for yourself.”

  —Joel Drucker, ESPN, author of Jimmy Connors Saved My Life

  “A great, futuristic read on the way the game of tennis is headed.”

  —Marty Riessen, five-time member of U.S. Davis Cup team, winner of U.S. Open and French Open doubles titles

  To Susan Love, whose name not only evokes tennis,

  but also what I feel for this amazing woman.

  There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights

  are stronger in the contrast.

  —CHARLES DICKENS

  You are not next to God if you win. And if you lose,

  you are not next to the devil.

  —BORIS BECKER

  1

  Showdown

  IT IS UTTERLY CONCEIVABLE—WHO COULD PROVE OTHERWISE?—that between busting his hump creating all the land beasts plus man and woman on the sixth day and catching some z’s on the seventh, the Almighty somehow found the time to fashion a little patch of heaven on earth in district SW19, borough of Merton, just south of London, England.

  Wimbledon.

  From above, the eye slow-zooms down toward, and rivets its view upon, the crown jewel of this verdant paradise, a multifaceted emerald that goes by the name of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.

  Circumscribed by Church, Somerset, and Bathgate Roads, the regal complex beams up to the heavens its splendor, as the pair of eyes that are Centre and No. 1 Courts, together with the mouth-shaped lake in adjacent Wimbledon Park, cherubically form between them the appearance of a gigantic, man-made Smiley Face.

  * * *

  Motionless, both bodies lie prostrate on the lawn, barely two metres from each other. On one side of the net, dressed entirely in black, lies Jack Spade, the twenty-three-year-old American phenom. On the other, clad entirely in white, sprawls Ugo Bellezza, the twenty-three-year-old Italian wunderkind.

  The two greatest superstars of all time have just consummated the most delicious rally in the long and storied history of tennis to necessitate a fourth-set tiebreaker in the gentlemen’s finals at Wimbledon. One hundred twenty-three times, improbably, the yellow felt-surfaced ball has crossed the net until, in a paroxysm of balletic thrusting and parrying, the antagonists terminate the exchange—first with Bellezza lunging parallel to the ground to retrieve Spade’s dying cross-court drop volley and dumping a delicate volley of his own that barely clears the net, then with the American diving heroically to strike a second magical cross-court volley into the open lawn just vacated by the Italian.

  Hair is standing up on the backs of 13,998 necks and shivers are traveling down 13,998 spines, as if the spectators seated here today had just stuck their index fingers in 13,998 electrical sockets.

  On this hot, sultry Sunday afternoon of July 6, 2053, there is only one word, culled from the some 616,500 in the English language, that could adequately describe the struggle being contested within the lines of this very special 78’ x 27’ rectangular patch of grass.

  Titanic.

  Suspending credulity, the score, indicated on the green scoreboard with gold numbers, now reads:

  From every possible criterion—it is the closest, most fiercely contested, and longest in duration and in games and points played through nearly four sets of any Open-era Wimbledon finals ever—this match, even before its climactic ending, has turned into an extraordinary spectacle.

  But this particular spectacle on this particular day on this particular revered rectangle of grass is more than simply out of the ordinary. To everyone present—spectators, linespeople, ball boys, ball girls, netcord judge, chair umpire, players—it feels as if this competition were almost preordained, as if these two net prodigies were somehow destined from birth to be meeting on this monumental stage right here and right now, as if there were something almost transcendent about this titanic struggle that is rendering it more meaningful than merely a fierce rivalry, and of greater stature even than the game itself.

  It is almost as if something way beyond bragging rights and a golden trophy and the official title of number one in the world and the unofficial title of Greatest Player of All Time were at stake.

  2

  Wager

  HIS POINTY, LOBSTER-RED NOSE HOVERS above the elegant Riedel wineglass, the cavernous nostrils twitching and greedily sniffing the sensuous bouquet of a $10,000 Barolo. As his gnarled but dainty left hand rotates the glass with erotic swirls, he grins lustily, the ghoulish smile exposing his forked tongue and all twenty-eight of his ghastly yellowed teeth.

  At long last, Satan takes a sip.

  “Damnation, this is fine!” he chortles with his best Jack Nicholson impression, winking to the august white-bearded gentleman seated across the table from him.

  Clad in His finest formal white linen robe with purple and gold piping, God winks back solicitously and sips His San Pellegrino.

  The two antagonists are dining tonight—a blistering Thursday evening
in October, 2043—at a cute little Italian place in Purgatory, an agreed-upon neutral site. The sign above the door outside the trattoria, badly scorched by millennia of flames and smoke, says SPERANZA E POMODORO. EST. 3333 B.C.

  An unthinkably buxom blonde sashays up to the table. “May I take your orders, gentlemen?” she coos.

  Satan’s beady red eyes wander from his wineglass to the waitress’s bounteous décolletage, a globule of drool forming in the left corner of his mouth.

  “Hell, yes!” Old Horny answers. “I’ll have my usual, a plate of raw Bhut Jolokia peppers to start out with, and then the Devil in carne—”

  “That’s the raw liver, fava beans, and…a little Chianti on the side,” the waitress recites from memory. “E per Lei, signore?” she continues, casting her eyes upon God.

  “Uh, I think I shall go with the pasta e fagioli this time, then a nice little insalata mista.”

  “Still the ever-righteous eater, eh?” Satan asks God rhetorically.

  “Yep, wouldn’t want any of My creatures slain on My account.”

  “So, how ’bout them Cowboys?” Satan asks, flicking a piece of errant ash off his bright scarlet Salvatore Mondobasso turtleneck shirt.

  “Well now,” God answers, “since they moved from Dallas to Sioux Falls in 2034, they have certainly come upon hard times.”

  “How the mighty have fallen,” Satan sighs.

  “Spoken like a true expert!” God retorts, with a sly wink.

  “You always have to get that dig in, don’t you?” Satan says, his left eye twitching like the devil.

  The bodacious server reappears with the soup for God and the peppers for Lucifer, who stuffs one of the scorching red-orange beauts—clocking in at over a million Scoville Heat Units—into his gaping maw. His already vermilion face deepens from lobster to beet.

  “Which brings us to our favorite topic of conversation,” Satan says, rubbing his fire enginered hands together.

  “Ah, yes,” God agrees. “Good or evil: Which will ultimately prevail on Earth?”

  “So,” Beelzebub says, “as I was mentioning last time we chatted, leave it to humans to allow the basest in them to bubble up and infect the world. It never fails, even with the best of people. Which is why good will never, and evil will always, prevail—”

  “With all due respect,” God interrupts, “as you well know, man is born good into this world. Have you not read the writings of one of My celestial children, Jean-Jacques Rousseau?”

  “Mais si, bien sûr,” Satan protests. “But have you not read the writings of one of my tenants of the nether regions, Thomas Hobbes?”

  “Listen, going on like this is pointless,” God says. “Is it not clear to you, after all these millennia, that man, whom I Myself have created with My own hands, is a noble creature, full of love and compassion and hope and humility and—”

  “Well then, smarty-pants,” the Devil ripostes, “if man is so good, then why in hell is there such evil and hatred and vice and mean-spiritedness that constantly run rampant throughout planet Earth? Huh?”

  Scratching His head and sipping His mineral water, God parries, “I admit that there are always some rotten apples in the bunch down, er, up there on Earth, but, by and large, man is good. Take, for instance, My blessed child, Jesus of Nazareth—”

  “Then how about Attila the Hun?” Satan retorts.

  “Buddha!”

  “Genghis Khan!”

  “Joan of Arc!”

  “Hitler!”

  “Florence Nightingale!”

  “Charlie Manson!”

  “Gandhi!”

  “Mussolini!”

  “MLK!”

  “Stalin!”

  “Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu!”

  “What the hell?—”

  “Gotcha! That was Mother Teresa!”

  “Hardy-har-har,” Satan bellows. “So then, Mr. Perfect, how ’bout we settle this thing once and for all?” he continues, draining an entire glass of Barolo in one gulp to douse the conflagration started by the last of his Bhut Jolokias. The curvy waitress reappears, clears the table, brings the secondi piatti.

  So. Is this what I, the Lord Almighty, really want to do? Settle this thing once and for all? Is it worth flushing everything I have done for man—all I have created, all I have sustained—right down the commode? And what if—what if it turns out that the Monarch of Hell is right after all, that man is inherently…

  After an excruciating three minutes, God responds. “Okeydokey, Mr. Big Shot, you got yourself a deal. So what exactly did you have in mind?”

  “Well,” Satan answers, “how ’bout if we have this humongous showdown between the two opposing forces, say, in a winner-take-all athletic competition?”

  God furls His bushy right eyebrow and places His chin between right thumb and forefinger, the two pudgy digits burying themselves deep into His milk-white Monty Woolley beard. “Yes, I think that could work—”

  “So, let’s say you handpick your player and I’ll handpick mine, and we shall see which one prevails,” the Devil says with a wicked grin.

  “Sounds good to Me,” God says. “Let us make Our picks and let nature—man’s nature—take its course—”

  “Yes,” Satan cuts in, “and whichever force wins, that will be it, once and for all. And—”

  “I get the picture,” God says, “so it’s a bet, and good luck, and may the best man win—”

  “Or the worst,” Satan corrects, inhaling a giant gob of smoke from his post-appetizer eleven-inch Cohiba Esplendidos Cuban cigar and expelling it toward his adversary’s face in the form of three perfect rings shaped like inverted pentagrams.

  “You are so competitive!” God says, destroying the smoke rings with one violent swipe of His mighty right hand.

  “Damn right!” Satan snortles through a yellow smile.

  “But We haven’t decided on a mano a mano sport, a perfect battleground on which this ultimate struggle shall be contested,” God says.

  “Right you are. How ’bout chess?” the Devil suggests.

  “Naaah, way too boring. And besides, it was already used by Bergman in—”

  “Oh yeah, The Seventh Seal,” Satan agrees. “Well, how ’bout pool—”

  “The Hustler—”

  “Righto. Newman and Gleason. Ummm…bowling?”

  “Nope,” God says. “First of all, Barack ruined it for everyone during that 2008 campaign stop fiasco in Altoona. And We also need to choose a sport that tests all of man’s physical and mental abilities, and, most critical of all, that requires him to draw on everything that is inside of him—”

  “Golf!” Satan exclaims.

  “Getting warmer,” God says, “but we need something more active, a sport with lots of movement and running and that requires that our combatants break a sweat.”

  “Boxing!” Beelzebub yelps. “The sweet science!”

  “Wrong again, My horned one,” God says, “way too violent.”

  A petulant Satan sulks, takes another long puff from his Havana stogie, lets a thin billow trickle off his forked tongue.

  “Let Us see,” God continues. “It must be a sport that tests man to the max, a sport that pits him against an equally worthy opponent in a pitched battle of which Papa Hemingway would be proud, a sport that requires every human skill imaginable—stamina, speed, quickness, creativity, resourcefulness, resilience, anticipation, technique, power, finesse, mental agility, physical strength, patience, flexibility, cunning, intelligence…”

  The two antagonists look at each other and come to precisely the same conclusion at precisely the same instant.

  “Tennis!”

  As they swallow their last bites of dinner and shake hands in a symbolic gesture that seals the deal, the bombshell slinks up to the table with the check.

  “Let Me take that,” God offers.

  “Not a chance in hell,” Satan hisses with his best Vincent Price impression, whipping out his Purgatory Club credit card. “This one’s
on me.”

  The Devil smiles lustfully one last time at the busty server, signs the check with his little goat-head scribble, and he and God exit the establishment together.

  “You realize,” God says, looking upward, “that if—that is, after—I win Our little bet, whenever We dine together there will be no Purgatory or Hell, so We shall be supping at one of My favorite places in the Heavenly Realm, perhaps Thy Gill Be Done or Blessed Are the Leek.”

  “I fear that you’re mistaken,” Satan contradicts. “For it is I who am going to win, and thereafter there will be no Purgatory or Heaven, so we’ll be dining at one of my favorite haunts in the Dark Kingdom, maybe The Cloven Hoof or Pants on Fire.”

  After bidding each other adieu and audiable, Satan takes the down elevator and God the up.

  3

  Sprezzatura

  ONE GAZE AT ITS INSPIRING PANORAMA is all it takes to tell you why Florence was the city at the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance.

  It is not that, visually, it is imposing like New York. Or drop-dead gorgeous like San Francisco or Rio. Or breathtaking like Paris or classical like Rome or stately like London.

  Florence, in a word, is balanced.

  From above, this Tuscan jewel is neither a large city nor a provincial town.

  Man-made baptistery and bell tower, campanile and cupola, spire and steeple—sprouting up like rogue mushrooms—meld with the natural splendor of rolling hill and grapevine and cypress tree and olive branch.

  As the eye descends, the burnt orange of terra-cotta rooftops, a warm baked-earth orange, immerses Firenze in temperance and harmony, this neutral, balanced color that lies on the cusp, not too hot and not too cool, this color of transition and mediation that embodies an architectural style known as Mediterranean, a word fittingly derived from the Latin for “middle of the earth.”

  At ground level, quaint and narrow streets counterbalance broad and yawning piazze. And a vibrant citizenry coexists with the venerable ghosts of its illustrious Florentine forebears, the likes of Dante, Boccaccio, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Leonardo, Galileo, Raphael, and that whole Medici crowd.