Everything on the Line by Bob Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page B

anything you want!”
    Ugo nods and taps his heart with his middle finger.
    “And don’t forget,” Giglio concludes, “how hard he worked to make this a reality. He slaved over this amazing cathedral for over forty years, knowing that he wouldn’t finish it in his lifetime. And it’s not even finished now, 119 years after his death. I read somewhere that he spent four entire years studying the ringing of bells so they would sound just right when they pealed up there!”
    It has been an awesome day for the rising tennis star and his coach, filled from dawn to dusk with the magnificent creations of Gaudí: the Casa Battló, the Casa Milà, the Parc Güell, and now, icing on the architectural cake, the Sagrada Família.
    But if Barcelona is the city of Gaudí, it is also the city of Godó.
    * * *
    The Open Seat Godó tennis tournament, first held in 1953, has become the number two clay-court tourney in the world, having surpassed the Monte Carlo Masters event and only behind the sole clay-court major championship, the esteemed French Open, to be contested five weeks hence at Roland Garros in Paris. That will be especially historic, because if they both reach the finals in the Juniors draw of the tournament, it will be the first time that Ugo will play that other young tennis wizard who shares most of the attention of the tennis world nowadays, the fiery American Jack Spade.
    Preposterously and unprecedentedly, Ugo Bellezza and Jack Spade are, at the tender age of fifteen, co-ranked number one in the Juniors division, which is open to players eighteen years and under.
    The host of the Seat Godó is the Real Club de Tenis Barcelona-1899, known for its raucous crowds, its hospitality, and above all its clay. Sure, the clay surfaces at both Roland Garros in Paris and the Foro Italico in Rome are dandy, but if you’re in the market for clay that is thicker, richer, redder, moister, softer, slippier, slidier, glidier, grittier, grainier, and gravelier than any other, well then, the clay right here at the RCT is your man.
    Clay. Or terra batuda, in the Catalan language of this region.Meaning earth beaten to a pulp to make this rich red soft stuff. Beaten to a pulp, like players are when they undergo the ordeal of grueling matches on this surface. Clay. The ultimate tennis test of endurance, hard work, and persistence. Clay. One look at a young man after a match on clay, one look at the red clots of earth painting his arms and legs and apparel—a vermilion testimony to the pain and hardship accrued by slipping and sliding and diving on the crushed brick—will tell you volumes aboutcompeting your brains out and struggling through adversity and testing what you have deep inside. Clay. The badge of honor smeared over one’s body, the red-specked reward for a blue-collar job. The tennis equivalent of Ben Hogan’s dirt, the essence of getting down and dirty and as close as you can humanly be to the soil. Clay. Not surprisingly to real aficionados of tennis, the very building material chosen by God when he presumably formed man out of the ground.
    It is April 2045. Ugo and Giglio are in Barcelona preparing hard for the Juniors tune-up for the French Open. The ninety-third edition of the Godó tournament is now into the finals, and so is the Juniors competition, started in 2030. Ugo Bellezza is in the finals. Jack Spade is in Florida.
    Ugo is now two years older and taller and stronger and quicker. But what is even more imposing than his perfect Michelangelo tennis physique is his perfect Leonardo tennis mind.
    Even at the age of fifteen, he understands perfectly, thanks to Giglio, the spirit of the great man from Vinci. How nature works perfectly, and also man’s place in the universe. The great powers at work in the world—weight, force, movement, impetus, percussion—and how crucial they are to playing the game of tennis beautifully. The mechanics of the human body, its movements both on the ground and in the air. The structure