The Patriot

New York-born James Blake talks about his love for tennis, his country, and his hometown Grand Slam

By Peter Bodo

Almost a year ago, James Blake, a largely unknown 21-year-old, stood in the middle of Louis Armstrong Stadium, experiencing decidedly mixed sensations.

"A few times, I actually got the chills," says Blake, a native New Yorker, contemplating the way the adulation of the overflow crowd kept washing over him, driving him on, as he grappled with the mission of winning just one more set, and thus his second-round match, against Australia's Lleyton Hewitt.

The other sensations - the muscle cramps and the overpowering nausea Blake felt as he gasped air that tasted as hot as the blast of a furnace - were pure agony. And while they ultimately played a role in an exhausted Blake losing that five-set battle with Hewitt, they did not prevent him from using the US Open as a career springboard.

Within months, Blake, who is 6-foot-1 and 170 pounds, played a starring role in the emotional first U.S. Davis Cup tie since the terror attacks of September 11. On a callow, inexperienced team lacking Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi (Andy Roddick was the other singles player), an extremely poised Blake posted a solid win in his first singles outing, over India's veteran Leander Paes.

Also in the fall, Blake reached the semifinals of the ATP Tour event in Tokyo and won the Knoxville Challenger. By the end of the year, his ATP Entry System ranking had improved over 125 places, to No. 74. This year, he's defended his new status and entrenched himself comfortably and firmly on the big tour. Thus, he has a good reason to relish his upcoming US Open main-draw appearance, only the third of his budding career.

"My feelings about the Open are so positive," Blake says. "When I won my first-ever main-draw match in a Grand Slam at Flushing Meadows last year [over David Sanchez], I just wanted to stay there forever, drinking in the atmosphere. And during that Hewitt match, I remember vividly the feeling of playing so well in front of a large crowd that, not too many years ago, I was just a part of."

Becoming a hometown hero in the biggest hometown of them all would be reward enough for Blake. But in the upcoming Open, he will have the opportunity to seize an even larger and more prominent role. These days, American fans are searching for new heroes to fill the shoes of Sampras and Agassi. And while Roddick, last year's international sensation and Blake's Davis Cup teammate and close friend, is a few lengths ahead of the pack, Blake has shown a great willingness to learn and improve.

As U.S. Davis Cup captain Patrick McEnroe says of Blake's 2001 season, "James' rate of improvement has been remarkable. And he's just starting to realize how much better he can get."

It's hardly surprising, then, to discover that Blake is a perfectionist in baggy shorts and a blow-out Afro - a disciplined, intelligent, diligent, open-minded student of the game. He is the product of a bi-racial marriage; father Tom Blake is an African-American; Blake's mother, Betty, is from Oxfordshire, England. Blake also has a brother, Tom, 25, who is an aspiring pro, a Harvard graduate cut from the same cloth despite having a fundamentally different personality.

"Our kids are like the tortoise and the hare," says Tom Sr. "And James definitely is the tortoise, the plodding one with the 'I'll catch up' mentality. He tries his damnedest at everything, he struggles, but he's not afraid to work."

But in sports, Blake was a natural, with eye-hand coordination - now so manifest in his artful, touch-laden game - first surfacing on a baseball diamond.

Although the Blake brothers grew up in suburban Yonkers, N.Y., they learned their tennis in Harlem. Tom Sr., whose only job since he left the Air Force has been as a salesman for IBM, regularly donated his Sundays to the innovative Harlem Junior Tennis Program, a training program open to all kids provided they could maintain at least a "C" average in school. When Tom Jr. and James outgrew the program, they gave back to it, serving as volunteer instructors well into their teens.

By then, the Blakes had moved to the verdant precincts of Fairfield, Conn., and recruited former ATP Tour pro Brian Barker as a coach for Tom and James. Although James was small (he was 5-foot-3 going into his junior year in high school, then grew 9 inches that summer), he became, in his own words, "a scrapper who had to learn how to create and win points without relying on a big serve or other weapon."

That's another way of saying that Blake won with his mind and his determined spirit. But those two tools were severely hampered early in Blake's development by an explosive temper and low threshold for frustration. "I was one of the bigger brats out there," Blake says. "If my coach [Barker] hadn't worked so hard to convince me that it's not the end of the world just because you miss a tennis shot, I might have burned out and quit the game, or my parents might have made good on their threat to make me sit out a year of competition."

With Barker's counsel, Blake eventually got a grip on his temper, and the improvemnt it wrought in his game helped him mature in his mid-teens into a well-behaved, cool competitor. In all other ways, Blake already was an exemplary youth. And, showing extraordinary poise and self-assurance, he was a popular student-athlete at Fairfield High School. "I just kind of got to know everyone," he says. "I had been taught by my parents from an early age that being bi-racial meant that I could be liked by everybody."

Like most kids, Blake fantasized about being a pro athlete. But he also was a realist, and he recognized that he may not have had more than the considerable amount of talent required to be a top-level college player. "When I was 14 or 15, and not even making Nationals, my thinking was that I'd like to be a good college player," he says. "I just wanted to work hard to achieve that, or whatever goal I did set."

Some of Blake's goals were academic, and those were fully realized: Encouraged by his brother Tom, the top dog on a strong, underrated Harvard tennis team, James also enrolled at the prestigious Ivy League university. There he surpassed all expectations and, playing right behind his brother Tom at No. 2, he helped the Crimson earn the No. 17 national ranking in his freshman year, 1997. By the end of his sophomore year, Blake was ranked the top college player in the country. At that juncture, Blake realized that depite the familial emphasis on education, he might never get a better chance to leap onto the pro tour. He left Harvard with a mixture of regret and hope.

The main lesson Blake learned while absorbing the requisite defeats early in his pro career was that even though he had always distinguished himself as a worker, he would have to work harder yet, and on more aspects of his game and fitness, if he hoped to make a breakthrough on tour. Barker, Blake's coach, has helped him make that transition. So did one of the great players of the last generation, the legendary worker Jim Courier, as well as Patrick McEnroe.

"It's hard when you come out of college, where you essentially dominated," McEnroe says, "and then realize that on the tour, you're not only not going to dominate, but you're going to go back to the drawing board. James was willing to do just that, and we've seen how he's stepped it up."

Evaluating his progress, looking ahead to this month's festivities at Flushing Meadows, Blake says: "My game has improved partly because my normal rally shots have gotten heavier. That's due to the amount of time I've spent in the weight room. I no longer need to use all my energy just to hit a heavy ball - now it has a lot more topspin with less effort, which gives me that much more control. Beyond that, I'm a dfifferent player now than a year ago just by having that much more experience and confidence."

Because of the tragedy visited upon New York just two days after Hewitt won the US Open men's singles title last year, this is likely to be as emotionally charged and sentimental a tournament as we're apt to see. And that will be notably so for James Blake, because of what the event has always meant to him, what it did to launch his career last year, and not least because the stadium is named for the man he cites as his hero, Arthur Ashe. Like Ashe, Blake has taken special pride in representing his nation, both in Davis Cup and in his national championships.

"My notion of patriotism is pretty simple," Blake says. "I feel like I've grown up with many luxuries afforded me just because of the country I was born in. I feel extremely lucky to be in this situation, and if all I'm asked to do as repayment is to represent the nation playing a game I love anyway, well, that's a no-brainer. Nothing, not even the events of September 11, will change my feelings about the US Open, and how proud I am to play in it."