“Calm,” Tommy mumbled. “Calm and unruffled.”
“And what will you do if something upsetting occurs?”
“Count to ten.”
“And how will you feel when you reach the count of ten?”
“Calm and unruffled.”
“Very good. When I reach the count of five, you will wake up feeling curiously refreshed, with no conscious recollection of this experience. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. How do you feel, Tommy?”
“Calm and unruffled,” he said. “And curiously refreshed.”
Looking neither calm nor unruffled, Tommy stalked over to where the official was perched. “One,” he said, and swung his racquet at the platform. “Two,” he said, and he continued his count, punctuating each number with a hammer blow to the base of the platform. The racquet shattered on the count of six, but he continued counting all the way to ten as he marched off the court.
“You have the chicken?” Atuele said. “Perfect white chicken. No dark feather, no blemish. Very good.” He placed the chicken on the little altar, placed his hands gently on the bird, and gazed thoughtfully at it. After a long moment the chicken fell over and lay on its side.
“What happened to the chicken?” Tommy asked.
“It is dead.”
“But, uh, how did it die?”
“As it was supposed to,” Atuele said.
Tommy looked around. He was in a compound about a third the size of a football field, just a batch of mud huts strung around an open area that faced the altar, where the chicken was apparently still dead. He’d flown Air Afrique from New York to Dakar, then transferred to Air Gabon, whatever that was, for a harrowing flight to Lomé, the capital of Togo, wherever that was. He’d been granted an audience with this Sorbonne-educated witch doctor, who’d sent him off to buy a chicken. And now the chicken was dead, and he felt like an idiot. What did any of this have to do with tennis? What could it possibly have to do with Thomas Norton Terhune?
“I don’t know what this guy does,” a friend had told him, “and you feel like the world’s prize jackass while he’s doing it, but it’s magic. And it works.”
“Maybe if you believe in it...”
“Hell, I didn’t believe in it. I thought it was pure-Dee ooga-booga horseshit. But it worked anyway. You want to know something? I still think it was ooga-booga horseshit. But now I believe in it.”
How, he wondered, could you believe in something while still believing it to be horseshit? And how could it possibly work? And—
“You need a spirit,” Atuele told him. “A spirit who will live within you, and who will have the job of keeping you serene while you are playing tennis.”
“A spirit,” Tommy said hollowly.
“A spirit. In order to give you this spirit, you require a ceremony. Go to your hotel. Return at sunset. And you must bring something.”
“Another chicken?”
“No, not another chicken. A bottle of scotch whiskey and a box of cigars.”
“That’s easy enough. What are we going to do, get drunk and smoke cigars together?”
“No, they are for me. And bring five thousand dollars.”
“Five thousand dollars?”
“For the ceremony,” Atuele explained.
The ceremony turned out to be ridiculous. Six half-naked men pounded on drums, while two dozen young women danced around, heads thrown back, eyes rolling. Atuele broke an egg in a bowl, poured it onto Tommy’s head, rubbed it into his scalp. He gave him a ball of ground-up grass and told him to eat it, then left him to sit in the circle, and eventually to shuffle around on the dance floor. After an hour or so of this Tommy got a taxi back to his hotel and went to bed.
In the morning he showered, packed, and went to the airport, knowing he’d wasted his money, hoping only that nothing had leaked to the press, that the world would never know the lengths to which he’d been driven or how utterly he’d been made a fool of. He flew to Dakar and on to JFK, then caught another flight to Phoenix for the Scottsdale Open.
Jennifer met him at the airport. “Waste of time,” he told her. She knew only that he’d heard about a secret treatment, not where you went for it or what it consisted of, and he didn’t feel like filling her in. “Lots of mumbo jumbo,” he said. “It won’t work.”
But it did.
At Scottsdale, Tommy Terhune reached the final round of the tournament, losing to Roger MacReady in four sets. He used the same racquet for the entire tournament, and never hit anything with it but the ball. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t once curse himself, his opponents, the largely hostile audience, or the officials, who made their share of inaccurate calls. He was, that is to say, a perfect gentleman.
And he managed all this with no effort whatsoever. He didn’t take a pill, didn’t count to ten, didn’t clamp a lid on his anger, didn’t chant or meditate. All he did was play tennis, and the moment he stepped onto the court each day, a curious calm settled over him. He still took notice when a call went unfairly against him, but he didn’t mind, didn’t take it personally. He stayed focused on his game, and his game had never been better.
Of course, he told himself, one tournament didn’t necessarily prove anything. He’d gone through whole tournaments before without treating the crowd to a display of the famous Terhune temper, only to lose it a week or a month down the line. How could he be sure that wouldn’t happen?
Somehow, though, he knew it wouldn’t. Somehow he could tell that something had happened within that circle of mud huts in Togo. According to Atuele, he now had a spirit invested inside of him, a spirit who took control of his temper the moment he picked up a racquet and stepped onto a court. And that’s just how it felt. One way or another, he’d morphed into a person who didn’t have to control himself because he didn’t experience any anger to begin with. He played his matches, won or lost, and went home feeling fine either way.
Calm and unruffled, you might say.
Tommy played brilliantly in his next tournament. He sailed serenely through the early rounds, fell behind in his quarterfinal match, then rallied to salvage a victory over his unseeded opponent. Then, in the third set of the semis, the audience fell silent when Tommy served, came to the net, and leaped high into the air to slam his opponent’s return. The ball struck near the baseline, but everyone present could see it was clearly in.
Except the official, who declared it out.
Tommy took a step toward the platform. The official cowered, but Tommy didn’t seem to notice. He said, “Was that ball out?”
The official nodded.
“Oh,” Tommy said, and shrugged. “From here it looked good, but I guess you can see better from where you’re sitting.”
He went back to the baseline and served the next point. He went on to win the match and advance to the finals, in which he played brilliantly, beating Roger MacReady in straight sets.
“And here’s Mrs. Tommy Terhune, the lovely Jennifer,” said the TV reporter, sticking a mike in her face. “Your husband was really commanding out there, wasn’t he?”
“He was,” she agreed.
“He played brilliant tennis, and he seems to have triumphed in the inner game as well, wouldn’t you say?”