Hiding Inside the Baseline: Part 3

I enrolled at Nick’s with two rackets, two pairs of shoes, and $10.

I enrolled at the NBTA on Labor Day of 1980, with two rackets, a couple pair of Kmart shoes, and 10 bucks to my name. In the 30-plus years I have been away from the academy, high performance tennis training has come a long way.

For myself and the dozens of other talented teens who descended upon Bradenton back then, we were not these perfectly polished finished products. We all had a great deal of upside still to go before we reached that plateau in tennis where a player has to work unimaginably hard just to get a little better.

What Nick did, whether by master plan or just idiot savant, was throw a bunch of hungry talented teens together and have us compete with each other all day everyday in essentially every area of life. We competed with each other academically, socially, on the court competitively and most importantly, for Nick’s attention.

If you got picked to be on Nick’s court, that meant he saw something special in you, that you had what it took to be a winner, for that was what Nick was all…