Interview with Barry Buss
Author of
First in a Field of Two
A Junior Tennis Memoir
A tennis prodigy, Barry Buss and was selected for America’s Junior Davis Cup team, a scholarship athlete and member of the UCLA tennis team. Mr. Buss currently conducts tennis clinics educating families concerning the environment of junior tennis.
MJT: Barry, I want to congratulate you for having the courage to write this book. Your memoir is an emotional and powerful story. It had to be very hard for you to write about your very personal experiences that were hurtful and shameful. What ultimately motivated you to make your history public?
BB: Thank you Michael. I’m not going to lie to you, it was a pretty gut-wrenching experience writing it. I had always had aspirations of being a writer, but whenever it came to recounting this part of my life, I just couldn’t do it. How I came to do it at this time was quite innocent; I had no master plan of writing any kind of memoir of book length. I was just doing my thing on the social media grid and started posting a few personal tennis stories to my network of friends, and to my surprise, the response was overwhelmingly supportive. After a few random posts, I posted the essay on My Cheating Days and things blew up; I was getting very positive feedback from all over the world. It was becoming apparent that I was articulating an experience that so many young aspiring tennis players had gone through themselves and were connecting deeply with. It was the support from my friends that ultimately motivated me to keep going and make my story public.
MJT: How long did it take you to write the memoir? Did the words flow out like a broken dam or fall a drop at a time like a leaky faucet?
BB: It took me 48 years of preparation, and a month to write it. I essentially wrote the entire work in the month of September, writing a chapter a day. I sequestered myself in a hotel room, turned off my cell phone, and became the angry wounded child in the book, reliving every experience detailed within. In retrospect, it was not the healthiest thing to do and I knew I had to finish it fast for I was drowning under the weight of it all. But that was the only way it was going to get done. I feared I would never be able to recapture the mind space I was in while writing it if I took a break to come back to it later.
MJT: I found the most fascinating parts of your story involved the family interaction. Your father’s presence dominated the book but there is barely a mention of your mother. She is really conspicuous by her absence. What was her role in your young life?
BB: Excellent question. In retrospect, she was the wild card in all this. His domination did not end with his children. In all honesty, I barely know the woman at all; have never had a meaningful conversation with her in my whole life, have no relationship with her now and that’s the way it’s likely going to remain. For all my father’s rage and inadequacies, she had the choice of two roles. One would be the behind the scenes soother; make an effort to balance matters out a bit; help put us back together after a particularly over the top episode. The other would be to pile on, either adding to the episodes with her own barbs or just cosign them with her silence. She chose to remain silent. So to answer your question more directly, she played no role at all in my young life and that will always remain a mystery to me why.
MJT: One of the many things about your father that I had trouble understanding was his competition with you. One example was chess matches. He competed with you until you beat him and then he stopped playing you. He did the same with tennis. Can you explain that behavior?
BB: No. Though I’ve spent a lot of hours and money on doctor’s couches trying to figure what would fuel his push and pull behavior with me. Again, communication was so strained with us then and between us now, I can only try to draw inferences as to why, and in fairness to him and my own well being, it’s not something I really want to revisit and litigate unilaterally.
MJT: Your introduction to alcohol came early and fast. You state that by age 14 you were in the early throes of alcoholism. I would like to you to talk about how you were able to hide that from your parents and could you offer suggestions to parents about what signs to watch for in their children.
BB: Obviously at 14 and 15 I would binge drink only on the weekends out of sight from all the authority figures in my life. As I got older and started to drive, it picked up in frequency but even then, I had school, my tennis, and a job so it just wasn’t an option to drink daily yet; that only began at 18 when I went away to college. I got very good at hiding my drug use from everybody; I could somehow manage to get my responsibilities done competently, at least for a while, until my addictions accelerated out of control. And during my high school years my folks had pretty much given up on the parenting thing, so going undetected was really not that difficult in spite of sharing a roof with them all those years.
Prevention is not as complicated as people may fear. It’s as simple as staying engaged with your children in a healthy nurturing manner. Additionally, the parents of today, we are from the generation that inhaled. Parents, and even further, coaches, are pretty hip to the signs of impairment, so early detection of the red flags of someone experimenting with alcohol and drugs is much easier in these times.
Communication and education are also greatly enhanced. Even then though, kids are kids, and they are going to fall prey to peer pressure and general youthful curiosity and will likely experiment with substances they know they should not. The topic is just so much more complicated than some simple Just Say No platitude. Knowing this, it’s imperative that lines of communication are available to the child to bounce whatever they are doing off a parent or a respected mentor type figure who can monitor their activities. The overwhelming percentage of those who experiment will not have problems, but if one is showing the beginning signs of a developing problem, it’s crucial to make all efforts to get on top of it early. If it’s going on in the shadows, like the depiction of my using in my book, by the time it was detected it was far too late for me to stop.
MJT: While we are talking about parental advice, what would you say to parents who believe their child is gifted in a particular sport? How can they make it a positive experience for the entire family?
BB: The difficulty in your question is most every parent believes their child is gifted in sports. Sadly, many of my peers in the tennis coaching industry in particular, seize on this vulnerability and sell these unsuspecting families some serious lines of bullshit about how they are going to make their little Johnny a champion if they just pay him his fee often enough. And these poor families don’t know any better, how would they if they didn’t play the game themselves at a serious level. So my best advice to families who think they have a gifted athletic child would be to educate yourself as rapidly as possible about the terrain of the sport your child has a passion for. And shop around. Seek a lot of opinions regarding the athletic prowess and potential of your child. The chances of the first coach you encounter being the real deal with full knowledge about how to groom a gifted child is minimal so shop around and in time one will begin to learn how the respective sport is taught and choose accordingly.
How to make it a positive experience is an important question. The emphasis on so many childhood sports journeys is what the athlete or family can get from the experience (a scholarship or a professional career) instead of focusing on what they can get out of the experience. Developing a healthy bigger picture attitude of the endeavor is crucial and much of that is hinged upon how we define success. Success can’t be about winning. In a sport like tennis, 128 enter a tournament, 127 lose. But invaluable life skills are available to all to be won along the way for all who partake in the journey. You can only be your own best. Which means being able to exert great effort day in day out in developing a complex set of skills that are often exasperating to learn. Not unlike most facets of life. And understanding that all we can control is our preparation, our attitude, and our effort There are no guaranteed outcomes in sport, so making yourself the success and not the outcomes is the most healthy balanced approach. For there is a lot of life left when our peak athletic abilities crest. The skills learned in personal achievement will carry on quite profitably throughout ones adulthood if this attitude is maintained throughout.
MJT: Your behavior in junior tennis and at UCLA seemed like you were screaming for help but couldn’t find the words. If you were a freshman at UCLA today and behaved the way you did then how would it be treated? Would the consequences be different?
BB: The awareness amongst the college coaches of this present era is quite heightened from my playing days 30 years ago. Many of today’s coaches treat their players like their extended family; it’s a very safe and nurturing environment at many of the campuses across America. Resources are also abundant now for troubled student athletes. Today, if I rolled on to a campus doing what I was doing back then, I would fail a drug test right out of the gate and services would be available for people like myself who had problems in that area. If I couldn’t get that part of my life under control, I would be soon released from my team and my scholarship. Coaches have teams to run; it’s stressful enough when all the players are in good health and form. To whom much is given, much is expected. If someone is struggling with substance abuse on a college sports team, they need help, not sports. The two just can’t cohabitate for long without causing serious problems for all parties involved.
MJT: Tell us about the tennis clinic project that you are working on now.
BB: My business partner Wade Murphy and I have developed a two hour presentation we plan on doing at various tennis clubs throughout Southern California where we invite tennis parents and their tennis playing children to the courts. Once there, we have a series of drills and fun skits we do to at its core to help the parents understand what the kids are going through when they are playing competitively, and for the kids to better understand what it’s like to be a parent up there in the stands watching your own flesh and blood compete at our demanding sport. We’re very excited to roll this out in the months to come. It’s fun but with some valuable takeaways for all parties involved to help them better navigate their way through the challenging junior tennis terrain.
MJT: Where can people buy your book and how can they get in touch with you if they want to arrange a clinic?
BB: First in a Field of Two is available on Amazon or through me personally. Our email address for the clinics is my email at Barrybuss1964@yahoo.com Our clinic website should be up soon.
