She tapped her fingers against the steering wheel and murmured, ‘C’mon, c’mon,’ to the traffic light. Her dad had no patience with traffic lights either, or children who took too long to put on their shoes, or romantic scenes in movies, but he had all the patience in the world when it came to coaching.
Brooke remembered how he used to watch and analyse a student, eyes narrowed against the glare – he refused to ever wear sunglasses on the court; it had been a historic moment when he let Brooke wear them in a fruitless attempt to combat the migraines – and then he would beckon the player to the net, holding up one finger while he thought it out: What do I need to say or do to make it click in this kid’s head? He never gave the same lesson twice.
Brooke’s mother had been good with the group lessons, keeping the little kids running and laughing （she wore glamorous oversized sunglasses when coaching, although never when playing）， but she didn’t have the passion or patience for one-on-one coaching. She was the businesswoman, the brains behind Delaneys, the one to start the pro shop, the café, the holiday camps.
Joy made the money and Stan made the stars, except they’d lost their shiniest star: Harry Haddad.
Stan could have taken Harry all the way and much further, although some would argue that three grand slams were as far as he was ever going to get. Not her dad. He believed Harry could have flown as high as Federer, that Harry would be the Australian to finally break the Australian Open drought, but they would never know what could have happened in the parallel world where Harry Haddad stuck with his childhood coach, Stan ‘the Man’ Delaney.
The light changed and she put her foot on the accelerator, thinking of her poor parents and how they’d be feeling about this news. They must surely know. The announcement was made last Tuesday. If they hadn’t seen it on the news, someone in the tennis community would have told them. It was strange that her mother hadn’t called to talk about it, and to worry about Brooke’s dad and how he’d feel seeing Harry back on the court.
It was painful to watch her dad watch Harry Haddad play tennis on television. He quivered with barely contained tension through every point, his shoulders up, his face a heartbreaking combination of pride and hurt. The whole family had complicated feelings about their most celebrated student. Multiple Delaneys Tennis Academy players had done well on the circuit, but Harry was the only one who’d made it all the way to the Promised Land. The only one to kiss that magical piece of silverware: the Gentlemen’s Singles Championship Trophy at Wimbledon. Not once, but twice.
Brooke’s dad had discovered Harry. The kid had never held a racquet, but one day Harry’s dad won a one-hour private tennis lesson at Delaneys Tennis Academy in a charity raffle and decided to give the lesson to his eight-year-old son. The rest, as Brooke’s mother liked to say, was history.
Now Harry was not just a beloved sporting icon but a high-profile philanthropist. He’d married a beautiful woman and had three beautiful children, one of whom had been very ill with leukaemia, which was when Harry became a passionate advocate for childhood cancer research. He raised millions. He was saving lives. How could you say a bad word about a man like that? You couldn’t.
Except Brooke could, because Harry hadn’t always been a saint. When he was a kid, back when Brooke and her siblings knew him, he was a sneaky, strategic cheat. He used cheating as a tactic: not just to score points but to rattle and enrage his opponents. Her dad never believed it. He had always suffered from tunnel vision when it came to Harry, but then again, nearly all adults used to have tunnel vision when it came to Harry. All they saw was his sublime talent.
While playing a match against Brooke’s brother Troy when they were teenagers, Harry kept blatantly calling balls out that were plainly in. Troy finally snapped. He chucked his racquet, jumped the net and got in a couple of good hits. It took two adult men to drag Troy away from Harry.
Troy was banned from playing for six months, which was better than he deserved according to their father, who took a long time to forgive Troy for shaming him like that.
And then, just two years later, Harry Haddad betrayed Stan Delaney when he dumped him as a coach after he won the Australian Open Boys’ Singles. Brooke’s dad was blindsided. He had assumed, with good reason, that he was taking Harry all the way. He loved him like a son. Maybe more than his own sons, because Harry never questioned a drill, never rebelled, never sighed or rolled his eyes or dragged his feet as he walked onto the court.
It was supposedly not Harry’s but his father’s decision to leave Delaneys. Elias Haddad, Harry’s photogenic, charismatic father, was his manager, and there in the player’s box at every match with a beautiful new girlfriend by his side. Brooke and her siblings never believed that Harry wasn’t involved in the decision-making process to dump their dad, in spite of the heartfelt card he sent their father, or the earnest, disingenuous way he spoke in fawning magazine profiles about his gratitude for his first-ever coach. Her dad never let himself get that close to a player again. He was beloved by his students and he gave them his all, except he kept his heart safe. That was Brooke’s theory, anyway.