When James Blake was an underclassman at Fairfield High School, he was a shrimpy five foot, three inches. One semester the wrestling team needed someone for the lightest weight division, so Blake was enlisted.
“We went to the wrestling dinner that year, and James got the lightbulb award,” his mother recalled recently with a chuckle.
Betty Blake was sitting on a sofa in the comfortable living room of the family home on a quiet street in the Stratfield section of Fairfield. A trim woman with short hair, she spoke in the accent of her native Oxfordshire in England. Lying on the floor at her feet was Nike, a young, friendly, rambunctious, female yellow Labrador retriever who arrived at Villa Blake in early 2005, a gift from James.
The lightbulb award? “That meant he was the one who spent the most time on the mat looking up at the lightbulbs,” Betty said.
These days bright spotlights shine on Blake. Over a seventeen-day period in late August and early September, he was the hottest player in tennis. He won the Pilot Pen tournament in New Haven and then turned on the U.S. Open with his electrifying upset of second-seeded Rafael Nadal and his prime-time to after-midnight quarterfinals thriller against Andre Agassi.
Several factors made Blake’s 2005 success so appealing. There was his style — wholesome hunkiness tempered by genuine humility. There was his tennis — a fast, flashy game built around the speed of his forehand and the speed of his feet. Then there was his unique route to the pro tour — from Harlem to Harvard by way of Fairfield.
On the pro tour, his career was considered unfinished business. He was exciting, strikingly handsome and a paragon of civility and sportsmanship. While those assests brought Blake high-profile visibility away from the game as a fashion model, they did not help him deliver on his promise as a player. His game had holes, the largest a periodic sense of self-doubt. But as he broke through in New Haven and Flushing Meadows, reaching a new level of on-court certainty, the fans watching learned of the private hell he had emerged from. In the course of a single year he broke his neck, watched his father, Tom, die, and battled a painful, paralyzing virus that threatened to end his career. And they saw, despite it all, that Blake was maturing as a player.
In the days after losing to Agassi 7–6 in the fifth set at 1:15 a.m., Blake partied in New York, relaxed in Connecticut, shared the bill with JLo on The Late Show with David Letterman, sat down with Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes and flew to Chicago to tape the Oprah Winfrey Show before going to Belgium as a member of the U.S. Davis Cup team. Then, in October, he won the Stockholm Open. It was his first tournament victory outside the United States; he was still riding the wave of his late-summer success. He won again in Sydney in January, on the eve of the Australian open. He is now ranked in the top twenty-five players in the world.
Blake, now twenty-six years old, may not have been much of a wrestler, but as his resurgence reminds us, he’s always been a fighter. He’s a born competitor and a tireless worker. Time and again, he’s achieved more than anyone, himself included, ever expected.
The Tortoise and the Hare
Betty Blake moved to the United States from Banbury, England, after high school. She met Tom Blake, an Air Force veteran, on the tennis court at Fay Park in Yonkers. They married in 1975 and in December 1976 had a son they named Thomas. A day short of three years later came their second son, James. The brothers’ earliest formal tennis training was under the auspices of the Harlem Junior Tennis Program at the 369th Regiment Armory at 143rd Street and Fifth Avenue. It was the hub of the Blake family’s tennis and social life when they lived in Yonkers. And it was where James first developed his work ethic.
“My dad was a volunteer there,” he said during the U.S. Open. “He’s the one that helped teach me. They worked us so hard every Sunday we’d go down there . . . It wasn’t about turning you into pro athletes. It was just about learning to work hard and enjoying it, seeing the progress — the first day you did it, you could do thirty push-ups, now a month later you can do forty, and a month later you can do forty-five — seeing that progression, being happy with it, happy with whatever success you have.”
In early 1986, when James was six, the family moved to Fairfield. Tom worked for 3M. Betty earned an English literature and writing degree from Fairfield University while working there, before she shifted to the Tennis Club of Trumbull. Even as they became entwined in Fairfield life, they kept close ties to the New York program.
The Blake brothers were raised in a very close home that celebrated the active mind and good manners even more than athletics. They each kept a list of the books they read. James started around age six with Green Eggs and Ham and A Fly Went By.
“We bribed them,” Betty said. “Tom gave them $25 when they had 100 books on the list. It was a lot in those days.” As in all things when they were young, Thomas, older and more studious, set the pace.
The family’s competitive urges spilled over to board games, particularly those that focused on words and knowledge. A family photo shows the brothers dueling over Trivial Pursuit, at breakfast on Christmas morning no less. When it came to cards, James loved Hearts. But he hated losing to his brother at anything. Thomas “always used to beat me when we were kids because he was bigger, stronger, smarter and faster,” James said.
His mother once recalled: “How often I used to breathe a silent prayer, ‘Please let James win.’ He cared so much. How can you be so competitive in a board game, or even a game of chance? I don’t know, but James was.”
The boys had the classic tortoise-and-hare relationship, said their father. Thomas would grow to a strapping six foot, five inches, while James topped out at six foot, one. “James has the younger brother’s ‘I’ll catch up’ mentality,” Tom told Peter Bodo of Tennis magazine. “His great talent is keeping his nose to the grindstone, doing whatever it takes — striving, working, struggling — to get to his goal.”
As a family, the Blakes always practiced and played tennis together. Betty won the town singles title in 1987. Tom was an accomplished and highly respected player on the local level in league play at such venues as the Westport Tennis Club. When Tom felt his sons had outgrown his teaching acumen, James and Thomas began working with teaching pro Brian Barker at the Tennis Club of Trumbull; James was not yet a teenager. Barker has been his coach ever since.
Until his last year of junior tennis, although he was regionally and nationally ranked, Blake often struggled. At one stage, he lost in the first round of the national championships in his age division three straight years. He also was losing the battle with his temper. “I was not always a gracious loser,” he admitted.
Barker suggested pulling James out of junior tennis until he reformed his behavior. Betty agreed. As she watched him go down in defeat, she could feel the tension build inside her. “I used to worry so much, ‘Oh my God, the ride home is going to be terrible tonight,’ ” she said with rising animation in her voice. “He’d get in the car and pick up whatever. I remember one time there was this ballpoint pen. He threw it, took it all apart, destroyed it. Then he’d start complaining. ‘I lost to a guy with a Mohawk.’ ”
Tom, however, said they should let James work his way through it, which he did, eventually emerging as the country’s No. 1–ranked eighteen-and-under player in 1997. Blake played four years of high school tennis, going unbeaten as a junior and senior. Many of the kids on the national junior circuit were surprised when they heard that Blake played for his school. They didn’t bother with it because it wasn’t enough of a challenge.
High school presented a different set of challenges for Blake. First, there was the specter of matching his brother; Thomas was a senior when James was a freshman. “I was Tom Blake’s little brother,” James said. “He was a very popular guy, straight As, great athlete, always a big kid.” James also got As but had to grind for them.
Second, there was the issue of dealing with his height and his health. “I was pretty shy my first few years in high school because I was so small and wore a back brace,” he said. If being a tiny teenager weren’t hard enough, at age thirteen Blake was diagnosed with scoliosis, curvature of the spine. At the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children in Springfield, Massachusetts, Blake was fitted with a Boston brace, a custom-molded plastic corset that extended from the top of his hips to his armpits. He wore the brace for eighteen hours a day until he left Fairfield for Cambridge to attend Harvard.
Blake wore shirts and pants a couple of sizes larger than normal, both to accommodate the brace and to camouflage it from his fellow teens. The device also restricted his movement. “I just had to be extremely active for the six hours I wasn’t in the brace,” he said. “That would be the time when I was training for tennis.”
The experience “gave me perspective,” he once said. “I’d be sitting in the brace, thinking, ‘This is a pain.’ Feeling sorry for myself. Then I’d walk in and there were people with so much more serious injuries. I thought I was lucky to be able to walk out.”
Life Beyond Tennis
In today’s game, most tennis players who aspire to go pro don’t even think of going to college, much less an Ivy League school. In fact, many of them spend their high school years at a sun-belt tennis academy where, as Betty said, “we knew school would become secondary.”
Blake takes real pride in the fact that he had a normal public school education at Stratfield School, Fairfield Woods Middle School and Fairfield High School (now Fairfield Warde). He has returned several times to speak to students, stressing hard work and becoming a “well-rounded person.” Blake cites Arthur Ashe — with his impeccable character and many good works in the world outside the game — as his role model, and he now preaches Ashe’s message to kids, even if he phrases it more like Yogi Berra: “Education is still the most important thing. It’s really a no-brainer.”
It wasn’t clear to Blake or anyone else that he had pro potential, but even so, forsaking college was never an option. When Westport Magazine first profiled Blake in its inaugural issue in September 1998, Tom Blake told writer Timothy Dumas, “Our message to James is: ‘Think about your life beyond tennis.’ ”
Mirroring his entry into Fairfield High, James was a freshman at Harvard when Thomas was a senior. Thomas was ranked No. 1 on the team until he had a season-ending injury. James quickly ascended to the top spot. As a sophomore, in 1999, he was the No. 1–ranked college player in the U.S. It was obvious that he had outgrown college tennis and the time was right, the family agreed, for him to try the tour. That’s when he established residency and a training base in Tampa, Florida, although he owns a house in Fairfield.
In 2002 Blake won his first ATP Tour tournament, in Washington, D.C., defeating Andre Agassi along the way. In April 2003 he reached his highest weekly world ranking, No. 22. By then, however, Blake was falling into a trap that snares many players when they reach a higher plateau: He was more concerned about not losing than about winning, which made him rein in the natural aggressiveness that got him into the top 30 in the first place. His serve and backhand were liabilities. He also had been busy away from the court, posing for fashion layouts in such publications as GQ and the New York Times Magazine. His results dropped off and his ranking began to fall.
There were murmurs around the tour that Blake wouldn’t turn things around until he jettisoned Barker, who did not have the international playing and coaching credentials of many of the tour gurus. But Blake, who has said Barker will have to quit before he fires him, knew his problems were of his own making.
Two months after reaching No. 22, Blake had a meltdown in a second-round loss at Wimbledon, after which he said, “I got down on myself too quickly. I’m down a set and a break or something and my head’s constantly looking at my shoes and my shoulders are slumped. It’s a pattern that needs to be broken … .
“At twenty-three years old, it’s pathetic that it comes down to something a fifteen-year-old should be able to figure out. I’m disappointed that it’s probably the reason I’m not ranked higher or I’m not as good a player as I could be.”
One year later Blake learned that his on-court issues were minor compared with what life could throw at you.
His trials of 2004 began in May: He fractured the C7 vertebra in his neck when he ran into a net post while practicing in Rome. As Blake was recuperating at home in Fairfield, once again wearing a brace — this time on his neck, for six weeks — his father was losing his battle with stomach cancer.
In one way, Blake said, that time in Fairfield was a blessing in disguise. With his neck healing, James would work out, pick up lunch and go over to the family house to sit with his dad. Father and son talked to each other from the heart. In his final days, Tom reminded his son, “Just go out and play your best.”
Then, James said, his father “told me he was proud of me.” He knows his father’s affirmation applied whether he was winning or losing. Tom passed away that July.
As if the injury and losing a beloved parent weren’t enough, several days after his father’s death, Blake awoke with shingles. The zoster virus struck in reaction to the physical and mental strain he had endured. It attacked a main facial nerve, not only causing a painful, unsightly rash, but leading to balance, hearing and taste disturbances, as well as paralysis of the left side of Blake’s face. Even his vision was affected: The blinking response in his left eye went haywire.
Unable to smile straight or sit in a chair without worrying about falling out of it, Blake hunkered down in his home here and speculated about his life. “Every different scenario was going through my head,” he said. “At times I was thinking, I wonder if I’ll be able to play again.
I wonder if my face will ever come back to normal … Would I be able to be happy if my eye never came back to normal and I really couldn’t be athletic at all for the rest of my life? Could I find a way to still be happy? All those I tried to answer yes. The reason is, even at my lowest, I still had friends. Maybe I would never hit a tennis ball again, but they didn’t care.”
His friends rallied around Blake, keeping him company, keeping him distracted, keeping him from feeling sorry for himself, at times with witty honesty about the way the shingles made him look.
What engenders such steadfastness? First, everybody — including a veteran tennis writer who has seen every kind of jerk there is on the pro tour — agrees Blake is a genuinely nice guy. Second, “he goes the extra mile for all his friends,” said one of those friends, Andy Jorgensen, a teaching pro who lives in Fairfield. “Most tennis players forget where they came from, but he never does. He’s pretty much heart and soul a Fairfield kid.”
In the early autumn of 2004, Blake attempted a comeback. Playing in a tournament in Florida, he swung at a forehand and whiffed. He could only laugh. He knew he was not ready. So he went back to work on the practice court and in the gym, rebuilding his strengths and reducing his weaknesses.
Finally in good health, Blake exhibited a new maturity when he returned to the tour. It was an outgrowth of the events of 2004, he said: “It’s not something I could have learned on the practice court or even in a match, really. It was just a matter of seeing that there are a lot of worse things in life than losing a tennis match.”
Indeed, “James has become much more of a positive person,” Jorgensen said. Jorgensen is part of Blake’s loud J-Block cheering section. He and several other members of the group live near Blake. At Blake’s Pilot Pen and U.S. Open matches, they usually sat well above the court. Meanwhile, calm Betty and demonstrative Thomas are fixtures in James’s courtside player’s box. Thomas, a Harvard economics graduate whose highest singles ranking was No. 264, is winding down his career and has spoken of perhaps going to work on Wall Street.
Until he beat the swashbuckling Spaniard Rafael Nadal, the nineteen-year-old winner of the French Open, at Flushing Meadows, Blake was “more known for the noble loss than the big win,” a veteran tennis writer said. The Agassi match was a reminder that Blake still can stumble when trying to finish off a higher-ranked opponent. Blake held a winning lead in the third set, a winning lead in the fifth set and a winning lead in the fifth-set tie-breaker. The match won instant acclaim as an Open classic. Blake hid his disappointment with characteristic graciousness immediately afterward. “I wish it had gone my way,” he said, “but I think in a year, or even in a day or two, I’m going to look back and say, ‘You know, that was a lot of fun.’”
Two weeks later in the Davis Cup match against Belgium’s Olivier Rochus, Blake squandered an advantage in the first set by hitting four double faults in one game, then blew a lead in the second set. He turned into the old, panicky James Blake in the third, braying at the heavens between points while winning just a single game.
But Blake got up off the mat once more. He sequestered himself in Tampa, practicing and training for the autumn European indoor circuit. The payoff was immediate. Stockholm was his first event after the Davis Cup match, and in the semifinals, he avenged his defeat against Rochus.
At its low point, Blake’s world ranking sank to No. 210. The day after the Stockholm final, it was back at No. 22. Pro tennis’s smart and loyal Fairfielder, having fought his way back from the most daunting phase of a young life defined by challenges, was no longer wrestling to prove to his peers or to himself that he belonged among the game’s elite. “I really had no expectations at the beginning of the year,” Blake said at the end of his autumn swing through Europe. “I was happy just to be playing … But the U.S. Open was really the turning point. Now I know I can do it and, on any given day, can beat any player in the world.”