This Was Goth Tennis: Confessions of a Teenage Champion (PTFO Vault)

For 27 years, filmmaker Mickey Duzyj carried a prideful secret history: He'd been the Dracula version of Ben Shelton in late-'90s Detroit, with his very own bleacher crows, a very special coach… and a deal with the devil. (This episode originally aired October 24, 2024.) • Subscribe to Pablo's newsletter for new episodes, exclusive documents and subscriber-only events https://pablo.show/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 0:58Pablo Torre?

  This episode is brought to you by Apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another, and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps sales teams find the right buyers and reach out to them. It brings prospecting, outreach, and follow-up into one place instead of several separate tools. It's used by sales teams of all sizes,

• 1:42Pablo Torre?

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• 2:01Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so hello, it is me Pablo, entering, invading even your ears because I have done something I have not done before, which is, take the advice of someone who once told me that if people wish to support you financially, if they wish to support your journalism, your very strange future of journalism, meaning your newsroom, your ambitions, your desire to investigate things people don't want you to investigate, you should let them. And so, I am. On Substack, my newsletter, at www.pablo.show, we'll put a link in the show notes of this episode, I have turned on paid subscriptions. And if you didn't know, I have a Substack. Guess what? It's free, and that's still there for you, and it's worth it.

• 2:46Pablo Torre?

  But the paid subscribers who support this show and us will get legitimately cool, personalized benefits to come. We will make it worth your while. Pablo.show is where you sign up. Click the link in the show notes. Help support us, please. Thank you, thank you, thank you on that front. And this, this episode today, is a handpicked episode from deep inside the PTFO vault that we sincerely hope you enjoy. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  I wanted my opponents to be so demoralized by my playing style that they'd utterly unravel in front of me.

• 3:27Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  At an event, at the beginning of something, you do kinda like the bro clap.

• 3:39Pablo Torre?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  And depending on the quality and the purity of the bro clap, that gives you an indication of how well things are gonna go.

• 3:47Pablo Torre?

  Mmm.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Wanna try?

• 3:50Pablo Torre?

  You wanna dap me up before this specific episode?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  I mean, I think it would be fun.

• 3:56Pablo Torre?

  I'm gonna have to lean over these pumpkins.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Okay, come on. Pumpkin dap here.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  That, that, that wasn't great.

• 4:10Pablo Torre?

  All right, so that is the sound of my good friend and PTFO correspondent Mickey Dujie, an award-winning illustrator, and animator, and filmmaker, and fellow dad. Basically, a guy that I have known for years now. Or, at least, I thought I did. Until I read something that Mickey just published online today for Racket Magazine. A story that I immediately wanted to adapt and expand, pretty much as soon as I read it.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  It's a story that I have never told publicly. It's something that I've carried with me for 27 years. So it's a real, kind of, coming-out party for me in a lot of ways.

• 5:00Pablo Torre?

  The last time Mickey was in studio with us, we had sent him out into the field to investigate NBA superstar Nikola Jokic's obsession with horses and harness racing, which was a truly delightful assignment. But this story, the one we are bringing you right now, ahead of Halloween weekend, is different, as this excerpt may suggest.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  To the ominous howl of wind gusting through chain-link fences, the two teams lined up under a gray, overcast sky and waited for their names to be called. The coaches announced the matchups two by two, prompting a quick handshake between opponents and the distribution of a fresh can of balls.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  My high-school tennis matches were macabre performance art, where after extending a veiny skeletal arm for my opponent to shake, I'd slowly turn and drift to our assigned court. Clad in chains while carrying no bag, no water bottle, and no towel, I was a hard-court Jacob Marley and would milk the pain shuffle for maximal effect. Ambling to the net post, I'd begin a ceremony to remove my jewelry piece by piece, softly resting each ring and chain down on the ground. The performance would end with a white headband stretching over the crown of my skull, tightly binding a cascade of shoulder-length hair dyed the color of a raven's wing.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  The match would begin and dark clouds would gather. As if possessed by an unseen force, I'd jerk around the court, flashing my long limbs to return balls hit to my side of the net. In a twisted pageant of endurance, each point would be a battle lasting dozens of shots, virtually always ending with my opponent making a mistake. During changeovers, I'd stand motionless and stare with bloodshot eyes glaring from sunken sockets. Before they could even start to figure out what was wrong with me, my adversary would be back on court, struggling to survive a brand of tennis they had no interest in playing. With their hopes of winning slipping away, the opponent would then notice

• 7:20Speaker 03

  a group of darkly clad spectators gathering like crows on the bleachers. Little did they know that this group convened to witness a ceremonial kill, hastened by the ever more impenetrable web I was weaving over the court. By the time the hurst pulled up, they were more than ready for their body bag.

• 7:44Pablo Torre?

  Mickey, what are we gonna call today's episode, do you think?

• 7:49Speaker 03

  There's really only one answer to that, Pablo. This was golf tennis.

• 8:14Pablo Torre?

  Mickey, I want to set the scene for those who are maybe just listening to this Theater of the Mind performance that we're engaging here today, because the studio is now decorated.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  It feels appropriately spooky. I feel right at home.

• 8:29Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, this has never been done. We've never celebrated Halloween in studio this way. What is your relationship with Halloween as a concept, as a holiday?

• 8:41Speaker 03

  I love Halloween. At various points in my life, I felt like I maybe was celebrating Halloween every day of the year.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  This is me dressed as Dracula as a young man. I was a little bit of an odd kid. I don't want to say I was weird and super dark, but I was imaginative and maybe a little bit different.

• 9:05Pablo Torre?

  And in that photo, completely unsmiling.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Well, come on, if you're gonna go, go all the way. I don't know if Dracula was really a...

• 9:13Pablo Torre?

  I was a Care Bear. We have that photo.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Spookier in a different way.

• 9:19Pablo Torre?

  Even more disturbing, in retrospect, actually.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  So I grew up in suburban Detroit, in a northern suburb called Warren. And we're talking, you know, mid, late 90s now, when I was in high school. And as is kind of known now through films like Eight Mile, or people knowing about the origin story of Insane Clown Posse and the Juggalos.

• 9:45Pablo Torre?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Detroit could be a very cold and almost Gothic place. And I mean Gothic, almost in the tradition of kind of Southern Gothic novels. Like, I'm thinking like Flannery O'Connor type of thing. I would say, much like Detroit is known for this overcast, just perpetual cloud layer that hangs over the city for half the year. That's really how my childhood felt as well.

• 10:17Pablo Torre?

  Something that made me feel like a bad friend is truly the depth to which I knew nothing about what you're here to tell us about. And I do want to introduce with some visual aids here, what you looked like in high school. How would you describe yourself?

• 10:34Speaker 03

  I was very tall. I was emaciated, thin. I didn't really talk much. I had almost like a translucent skin.

• 10:44Pablo Torre?

  Gaunt is a word that comes to mind as I see this photo of you and I believe your sister?

• 10:48Speaker 03

  That's, yeah, that's me and my older sister. People described me as looking like the main character in Dazed and Confused if that character were starving to death.

• 10:58Pablo Torre?

  Yes, Mitch.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  Mitch.

• 11:00Pablo Torre?

  Mitch, just really needing a meal.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  The reason I existed in this almost cartoonishly skeletal, withdrawn way was because I was dealing with a lot of stuff inside my house as well. My dad was...

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Very wild and very abusive. And being the person that I was, I didn't look like other kids. Maybe I didn't act like other kids. I'm not sure exactly the type of person that my dad wanted me to be, but I wasn't that person. And so it seemed like every quality that I had was repulsive to him. And he took it out on me. And there was a lot of physical abuse. By the time I was 15, I felt like I really had to fend for myself. So everything that I was into was really, I know this is starting to sound a little like therapy-esque, but it was trying to kind of escape this reality that I was having a very hard time coping with.

• 12:01Pablo Torre?

  So you will be unsurprised to learn, if you have ever seen Mickey's work in the present tense, which does include, by the way, the original illustrations that were weaving into the TV version of this episode over on YouTube and the DraftKings Network, that he was an incredibly skilled artist as a teenager. He was an illustrator of repute even back then.

• 12:23Pablo Torre?

  But one of the other things that I didn't realize at all about Mickey, beyond the horrors of his home life, is that he was also a varsity athlete. As a sophomore at Warren Mott High School, he was a varsity tennis player, a truly promising one, in fact, with documented, real potential, which meant that the other tension that he was stuck navigating was between the world of sports, on the one hand, and this considerably darker world that I needed more help understanding.

• 12:56Pablo Torre?

  Because I'm a city kid, because I don't think I knew any Goths in high school. Not, not true Goths. Maybe some Goth-adjacent characters. If I were to swing the door open

• 13:10Pablo Torre?

  to your art room in high school, what would I see?

• 13:14Speaker 03

  I got in with the Goths because... The toughest kids at my high school actually were the gay goths, who I met in my high school art room. The leader of the gay goths was a guy named Dale. He was a senior, he had long, black hair. He was the lead singer of a goth band.

• 13:35Pablo Torre?

  What's the name of the band?

• 13:36Speaker 03

  They were called Seraphin.

• 13:37Pablo Torre?

  Perfect.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  They were great.

• 13:39Pablo Torre?

  I believe this is-

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's their album.

• 13:41Pablo Torre?

  An album cover.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's Dale right in the front with his long, black hair.

• 13:45Pablo Torre?

  Yes, half in shadow is Dale's face. Black and white, pink text, Seraphin, new, asterisk, for some reason, born. Copyright 1997.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  The lyrics of his songs were so awesome. "If you see me bleeding, it's just my heart trying to cry."

• 14:07Speaker 03

  "Wearing the night just like skin, I was the shadows' phantom."

• 14:13Pablo Torre?

  So good. I mean, pretty badass.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh my god. Dale is incredible. Yeah.

• 14:22Pablo Torre?

  How are you updating yourself as your initiation into this tribe becomes that much more complete?

• 14:28Speaker 03

  I decide to dye my hair black.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  My eyes were suddenly opened to a whole universe of goths that I hadn't noticed, that were lurking through the school. Some of that is by design. The goth aesthetic and ethos is not to really, you know, be front and center, but it is to kind of lurk through corners and shadows.

• 14:58Pablo Torre?

  All of this is foreign to me.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Let's start with describing what Dale and their closest friends were. They regarded themselves as military goths. They're wearing combat boots, they wear a lot of shiny buckles, but a lot of plain shirts. Some mesh, but not a lot of mesh.

• 15:18Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna ask, how much mesh is there?

• 15:20Speaker 03

  A little bit of mesh.

• 15:21Pablo Torre?

  Okay.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  So, I would say the style icon for military goths is probably post-Misfits Glenn Danzig. Mother, Dale was really channeling that.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  The most visible of the Goths were the Victorian Goths. Much more sartorial in their dress.

• 15:42Pablo Torre?

  Classy.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  They're wearing the satin, the velvet, the corduroy ruffles. We're talking some artistic flourishes, like a top hat.

• 15:53Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, like people who maybe would like to be considered a count of some sort.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And I think the style icon that I would say for the Victorian Goths, Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula.

• 16:05Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  You know, the cane, the shades.

• 16:08Pablo Torre?

  A high-class Goth.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  So then, after the military Goths and the Victorian Goths, was a little group near the jewelry-making station called the Fairy Goths. The Fairy Goths were much more fantasy-inclined.

• 16:25Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  You know, dark fairies, maybe into Lord of the Rings. A lot of them were wearing prosthetic ears.

• 16:33Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, Elvin, Elvin Goths.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Wearing fake wings.

• 16:38Pablo Torre?

  Gossamer Goth wings.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Totally. But some kind of wings and prosthetics.

• 16:43Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, a slightly more whimsical Goth.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  Definitely. Could still be really effed up and dark, but a little bit more whimsical.

• 16:54Pablo Torre?

  How were your folks feeling as they're observing young Mickey, under 100 pounds, now covered in various bits of arcane jewelry, hair jet black? What did they think of this?

• 17:12Speaker 03

  They weren't excited about any of the changes that they saw, whether it was me dying my hair, me only dressing in black. And they were especially not excited that I turned my bedroom into like a dungeon of darkness, where I got rid of anything that was light-colored. There were a lot of those drip candles that I positioned next to, you know, some plastic skulls that I got.

• 17:41Pablo Torre?

  Check.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  My mom, I remember her looking at a...

• 17:46Speaker 03

  What was formerly a fish tank stand that I turned into my kind of candle altar. And she called it my satanic altar, which she was not, not really thrilled about.

• 17:58Pablo Torre?

  I mean, at this point, hard to blame her for presuming that maybe you were worshiping, you know, the devil.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, but there was not.

• 18:06Pablo Torre?

  Were you worshiping the devil?

• 18:08Speaker 03

  I, I was not. And I think that, I just want to say that this is a big misconception about Goths. If I could be so bold and speak on behalf of the Goth community.

• 18:18Pablo Torre?

  Are you going to cancel me for assuming that you were worshiping Satan?

• 18:23Speaker 03

  No. So in my experience, all of the Goths, this wide taxonomy that I described to you, we were all really sensitive people, artistic people, who loved paintings and poetry and sharing things with one another. Most Goths had an incredible sense of humor, which is, humor is not exactly associated with the Gothic way, but it's true. And it was a real loving subculture of, of people that looked out for one another. But no, we weren't doing any other satanic rituals.

• 18:56Pablo Torre?

  Yes, yes, yes. Hashtag not all Goths. The juxtaposition of that is such a part of your life. And also, come springtime, Mickey, it's time for you to take the court, like tennis. I'm presuming now that your dad was not super involved in your athletic career.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  No, safe to assume, yeah.

• 19:18Pablo Torre?

  So who was?

• 19:20Speaker 03

  I should say that the tennis courts, much like the art room, was this haven for lost souls. And the tennis court at my school, which was Warren Mott, a giant suburban high school, the tennis coach, his name was Larry Hart.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Probably the most bizarre character that I've ever met. Larry was about six foot two inches, rail thin.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Back in the day, there were these kind of sport glasses that were called Rex specs, which were very, very thick and durable. He was wearing something adjacent to those that were somehow even bigger and uglier than Rex specs. Somewhere along the way, way before we met him, he busted out his two front teeth. And so he had cheaply gotten fake teeth, but they were like the size of chiclets, like overly huge for his head.

• 20:20Pablo Torre?

  He'd gotten the Rex specs of teeth?

• 20:22Speaker 03

  That's right. He had long curly hair that was always kind of unwashed, unkempt. His head was perpetually topped with a foam trucker hat, which if he ever took it off, like when we were saying the pledge of allegiance or anything, it would reveal a completely bald head that was super pale, which stood in contrast to the rest of his skin, which was super tan because all he did was play tennis.

• 20:51Pablo Torre?

  Yes, we're seeing on this photograph, you can see on YouTube or the DraftKings Network, the aforementioned Larry, cap upon head, Rex specs on, teeth glistening, skin tan, windbreaker, donned.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  This guy had not a lot of clothes, but what he had were about, you know, 10 different tracksuits that he would kind of cycle through. And they all also seemed kind of unwashed and reeking of sweat.

• 21:22Pablo Torre?

  To what extent did he connect with the art room kids? To what extent did he connect with goths in that way?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Larry had this great quality to him, where he was very much like a camp counselor in that he accepted anyone who wanted to come and play tennis. People who were kind of just like exploring different parts of their identities, sexualities, a lot of nerdy kids, a lot of really religious kids, other kids that were dealing with a lot of stuff at home. It was kind of a motley crew of people that would hang around the tennis courts. And I liked that, so I fit right in.

• 22:05Pablo Torre?

  Did you ever get a sense in your conversations with Larry, did you ever get a sense of what his previous life had been before he was this character that was known around town and around your school?

• 22:17Speaker 03

  One of the things that makes Larry so compelling as a character, but also as a human being, is that he's very mysterious. He would never really talk about his personal life or his private life.

• 22:37Pablo Torre?

  And this is where I should make clear that what made Larry Hart such an emergent father figure to Mickey wasn't simply the way that he treated people, which did stand in extremely stark contrast to Mickey's actual father and the abuse that he was suffering at home. It was also the fact that Larry had become genuinely invested in developing Mickey, a skeletal teenager who was obviously searching for community, and specifically, developing Mickey into a better tennis player. Because Larry, for all of his mysterious quirks, took his current life, his calling, extremely seriously.

• 23:19Pablo Torre?

  He had high standards, he had rules, he had a philosophy. And he was widely respected, it turns out, throughout not just Detroit, but the entire state of Michigan,

• 23:32Pablo Torre?

  as a coach.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  I can tell you, there was a moment, though. I got a glimpse into some potential former life of his, which was after practice one day. Larry came up to me and he, we were just chatting and he asked how my winter went, you know. Told him a little bit about the art room. You know, he could see that I had a new look going on. You could see that I'm wearing, you know, all types of rings and chains and bracelets and everything. And I don't know what compelled me to tell him this, but I was telling him about some of the new music that I was being introduced to. And my favorite in that moment was this new band that I had discovered

• 24:19Speaker 03

  through my friends called The Sisters of Mercy.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  One of the great 70s goth bands from England.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  I listened to this album, First and Last and Always, Black Planet, Amphetamine Logic, like really dark, twisted, great stuff. And I just, I don't know why, but I just said, "Oh yeah, I've been listening to Sisters of Mercy." And Larry's eyes lit up and he looked over at me and he said, "Oh yeah, man, they're great. I love The Sisters of Mercy." And he rattled off the name of a couple albums and he said, "You know, I actually used to follow them when they were out on the road."

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Like I used to like go to a lot of their shows. He was such a mystery, but this was really out of left field. There was a look on his face that he almost realized that he disclosed something that he didn't actually want to say.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  I never forgot that moment. It was really odd.

• 25:34Pablo Torre?

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• 26:35Speaker 01

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• 27:06Pablo Torre?

  And so you, as his athlete, as his student, give me the scouting report. What's Mickey like?

• 27:15Speaker 03

  I'm pretty athletic, so...

• 27:17Pablo Torre?

  You got good reach?

• 27:18Speaker 03

  Good reach.

• 27:19Pablo Torre?

  Wingspan?

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Uh, lanky. Pretty quick, and good coordination, but still pretty raw. High-upside prospect. But by my second year, I feel like I had put a couple more things together. I have to say that after this strange episode with Larry, with the Sisters of Mercy connection...

• 27:41Speaker 03

  One night, I was looking through, and Larry was big on giving like handouts of Xerox's articles, strategy articles. And one night, when I was home, I'd been like smoking some weed. I was looking at these articles. And I had this moment that was almost out of body, where I saw the strategy of these articles almost kind of come together, where I saw this conjured dark power coming from this new strategy. And I went to Larry the next day at practice, and I said, "I want to rebuild my entire game." He was like, "If you put in the work, like, let's do this."

• 28:25Speaker 03

  And so that began my transformation.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Through the Midwestern spring's wind and rain, Larry taught me how to keep points alive. Step one: Develop an ability to hit 100 balls in a single rally. Step two: Evaluate the risks associated with each of my shots, favoring ones I hit at the highest percentages. Step three: Learn to neutralize my opponent's biggest weapons against me. We started with a technique to diagnose an opponent's strengths and weaknesses during warmups, after which I'd relentlessly hit balls at their weaknesses. In the event they didn't have a conspicuous weakness, I was taught to keep the ball deep in the middle of the court, to make it more difficult for opponents to hit severe angles against me. In moments when opponents would move into the net, I was taught to either hit a heavy topspin shot to their feet

• 29:17Speaker 03

  or to softly lob a ball over their heads, forcing them to retreat and restart the rally. My lung capacity increased week to week, and despite the fact I was still skeletal, my rallies with Larry could now extend to 200 shots. As my legs churned and lungs ached, a long repressed rage burned through my insides, drowning all my emotional pain, my parents, the disgusting body I saw in the mirror, leaving me only with the capacity to focus on the neon ball in front of me. The longer the points lasted, the deeper the burn penetrated, and in moments when I'd noticed Larry weakening, a predatory extra gear would kick in to extend the rally in our shared misery.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  We'd continue these sessions well after sundown, reacting mostly to the sound of the ball off one another's strings, and while spinning the ball back again and again, I'd catch myself smiling in the dark. Tolerating pain had become my superpower. By the time the season started in April, I was ready to [bleep] some kids up. I didn't just want to win. The perverse scoreline I dreamt of was to lose zero games, commit zero errors, and hit zero winners. I wanted my opponents to be so demoralized by my playing style that they'd utterly unravel in front of me. I wanted them to know and be haunted by the knowledge that they'd actually played and lost a match against themselves.

• 30:44Pablo Torre?

  Can I just jump in here to observe that it sounds unbelievably awful to play tennis against you?

• 30:50Speaker 03

  I should say that the persona that I would take on court was that I was really like an angel of death.

• 30:59Pablo Torre?

  I get that vibe.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  And that we could do this the easy way, or we could do this the hard way, but I'm walking out of here with the dub.

• 31:09Pablo Torre?

  I think I had underestimated how self-loathing was an ingredient underneath all of this. The idea that you didn't like yourself, your skin, even as much as you were now embracing your new appearance, it was compensating or seeking to remedy a pain that then became instrumental to your strategy of how to actually beat kids at tennis.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  I think that I can connect to other people who felt, or feel, even listeners of this show who might feel this, like disaffected, angry, and that society had kind of rejected them. That burns inside, and...

• 31:51Speaker 03

  I think what I've come to understand for me personally is that for a lot of years, the anger that I was feeling on the surface was really masking

• 32:03Speaker 03

  a really low self-esteem and a low self-worth. You know, it feels like cartoonish to say today, but when I was a kid and getting, you know, beaten up by my dad, he would say to me like, "You're not a real man." Like, he would say that to me as he was beating me up. And that's like, of course, I'm like a kid, you know?

• 32:25Pablo Torre?

  I'm a literal child.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. But I think the effect of that over time was that I actually didn't love myself. I thought I was unworthy of love. And that can be really insidious. So in this new tennis strategy, I found this kind of nuclear reactor inside of me that was fueled both by this anger and this self-loathing. And the fact that I could now use this as some sort of twisted weapon to take my revenge on the world, I found that twisted and delightful.

• 33:03Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, to be clear, you were beating kids and then drawing like tombstones in your notebook?

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Part of my passive aggressiveness, I'm not proud of all this, but part of my passive aggressiveness in that time was that I wanted from like the very lineup of our teams for the opponent to think that I was a total joke, that I didn't look like a tennis player at all.

• 33:33Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  That I was gaunt, thin, I didn't even have a water bottle or a towel. And I, I mean, aside from being fueled by all this other stuff, I was fueled by the sideways looks and the snickering that they would do when they would underestimate me.

• 33:50Pablo Torre?

  So when, when your opponent snaps?

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:53Pablo Torre?

  What does that, what does that sound like?

• 33:56Speaker 03

  So there was one time where a guy was so angry playing against me, I remember for four and a half games, he didn't even score a point on me. He was like losing his goddamn mind. That he went to the back fence to pick up the ball and he punched the fence and gouged his hand open on like a burr that was sticking out of the fence. So blood is gushing down his arm.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  And I remember just standing there at the net and saying,

• 34:26Speaker 03

  you know, do you wanna, do you wanna stop? And the guy was so furious that he said, F you, let's like, let's keep going.

• 34:33Pablo Torre?

  This does sound like a lyric in a Seraphin song.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I remember that day, we kept playing, he kept, he keeps bleeding. His blood actually got all over the balls that we were using. And I remember thinking, that was, that was really cool.

• 34:54Pablo Torre?

  I also have to imagine that your hair is dyed, right? Again, as you say, there is a ceremony of, of deringing yourself, all of this.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:04Pablo Torre?

  When you are exerting yourself, because also this is sports and it is hard, and you are trying really hard. What does that look like?

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Well, to, to the ceremonial side of things, I'll, I'll just say that if, if I could have actually emerged from a coffin next to the court, I would have done that. So much of this, you know, get the dry ice, get the whole, the whole thing going. So I was really, you know, milking the performance for, for all, for all it was worth. I will say that taking, taking the, all the metal off before playing was, was pretty smart, just because, you know, sweaty metal, that's, that gets a little, little tiring.

• 35:49Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, it sounds like it can get hot.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. But I also noticed, you know, periodically, that as I was like really sweating, because I was having to like re-dye my hair. So occasionally there would be fresh dye, and when you're out, you know, sweating in the afternoon sun, you know, the dye could like drip off, you know, almost like a, like a Giuliani moment.

• 36:16Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, like Rudy Giuliani.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:18Pablo Torre?

  Like noted vampire Rudy Giuliani.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was the original Giuliani. Which, you know, I, I think that it only, it only added to the disturbing pageantry of, of my performances.

• 36:33Pablo Torre?

  So you go all the way to the regional tournament, is my understanding here. And what is that moment like, right? So I imagine in any good sports movie, states is on the line.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:47Pablo Torre?

  And so at regionals, with that hanging in the balance, how does it go?

• 36:53Speaker 03

  We'd had a really good season, but Warren Mott had never made it to states because every regional was won by the perennial powerhouse of Gross Point North, which is the fanciest, richest, whitest suburb outside Detroit. So they were in our regional and we thought, despite having a good season, that it was all gonna end that day. So the tournament starts, it's a three-round tournament. The first round, I beat a guy that I had already beaten during the season pretty easily. And then the second round, I got through pretty easily as well, setting up this epic finale between none other than Gross Point North.

• 37:35Pablo Torre?

  Right. Gross Point North, depicted in that movie Gross Point Blank, John Cusack, that 90s movie. So I get the sense of Goth versus prep.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  I took a narrow 5-4 lead, but Nosferatu was fading in the sun. I knew I didn't have anything left for a third set, so using the last of my energy, I forced myself into the net again and again, desperate to finish. At 40-30, I hit a hard approach shot and watched him throw a high lob up into the sun. As I craned my neck to find it, pupils shrinking and vision flooding white, I jumped back, stretched my limbs as long as my tendons could bear, and swung on instinct. I felt the ball catch just inside the frame and watched it land cleanly into the open court. It was all over, and I was a wreck.

• 38:27Pablo Torre?

  So you won.

• 38:30Speaker 03

  I won.

• 38:33Pablo Torre?

  But you were a wreck.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  I'll tell you why I felt that way. It was because this season, just like the previous season, was going to end with us, you know, losing to some dicks who were gonna like rub our nose in it. What I found in that match is that the player that I beat, his name is Andrew, this guy like showed the greatest sportsmanship of really anyone that I had played against that season. He did not sneer at me, he did not, you know, take the bait of any of my microaggressions. And the shame that I felt and the wreck that I felt at the end of that match really came

• 39:17Speaker 03

  from how I realized that so much of this twisted strategy that I was using was about how I was provoking other people to judge me while at the time, all I was really doing was judging and projecting onto the type of person that he was, which in reality was not true at all.

• 39:41Pablo Torre?

  Right. He wasn't playing up to Central Casting in this case.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  That's right. Even though I won this tournament, and I have to say, our team also collectively won the tournament and we all got to states. In that moment of what should have been such celebration, I just, I felt really ashamed of the way I was operating.

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• 42:06Pablo Torre?

  Larry, as the coach here, as, again, this leader of this band of underdogs that had made it to States, how does your dynamic at States unfold? Given that, well, now it's time to actually win this thing.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  So Larry was so excited because he had never taken a team to States before. We really leaned into the fact, I mean, our team was called the Marauders. We leaned into the fact that we were these kind of underdog pirates taking this state tournament by storm. But I should say that it was clear to all of us, including to Larry, about 10 or 15 minutes after we got to the tournament, we started to see the quality of play, that though we may have come out on top in the regional tournament, States was a whole other beast and we were pretty solidly outclassed.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  So I took it upon myself to try to foster closer connections with my teammates. And in the ways that I had kind of maybe perfected or kind of exercised in my winter with the goths, I thought nothing would be better than after we all got ceremonially slaughtered at states to throw a great hotel party.

• 43:35Pablo Torre?

  So a hotel party thrown by Mickey in this phase of your life, how stoned did you guys get?

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Brought the weed, brought some, like, I think either Swisher Sweets or Black and Milds or something, you know? There might have been a clove cigarette in there. I remember Larry, he went off to a local sports bar to watch the Red Wings. They were in the playoffs that year. And so we, you know, did the usual kind of washcloth over the smoke detector, towel under the door, and we lit up. It was going great until Larry came back early and busted all of us.

• 44:24Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, disappointing your coach slash father figure, who had just invested this trust in you guys, had helped you become the best version of yourself as a tennis player. That sounds like a different wrinkle in your emotional memory here.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  It felt like a real betrayal of his trust in us. And Larry is someone who always preached living by a code. And the code was sportsmanship, but the code was also how you conduct yourself. And the word came down to all of our hotel rooms about an hour after he came back from the bar that because we had betrayed...

• 45:10Speaker 03

  Him and the code that we were all kicked off the team. And that none of us were going to be able to take the team bus. Like the hour and a half drive back to where we lived. So we all needed to like, call our parents to pick us up. And I just, I remember just sitting on my, on the bed in my hotel room and feeling like, I ruined everything.

• 45:39Pablo Torre?

  It is one thing to [BLEEP] up. And it is another thing to genuinely disappoint someone that you wanted to be proud of you.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that was a new feeling for me. Because I had felt, prior to that, I had felt so on my own. And unwilling or afraid to trust in a father figure. And it's, it's hard to even talk about it now. Because I, I felt like I'd been burned so many times. And now here was someone who had really invested in me and seen the best in me. And I was the one that [BLEEP] it up. So that was the, that was the end of the season.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  We lose at states. We all get kicked off the team. And it's the end of the school year. So we got back to Warren and didn't see Larry for a bit. We were finishing our, our school years. I remember, I mean, spending a lot of time in the art room. Everyone's kind of cleaning up and taking their art projects home. You know, Dale is going off to pursue stardom. He's graduating and.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  You know, as much as I had let my new friends in on what was happening with me in tennis, how things ended with Larry was something that I feel like I couldn't communicate with them or that there was no charm in sharing that with them. And I remember seeing my teammates in the hallways, my tennis teammates, and a lot of them were saying like, you know, screw Larry, you know, like, who needs to be on the tennis team? Like, he overreacted. And that didn't feel better for me either. So, one day after school, I remember kind of looking out the back of the school,

• 47:44Speaker 03

  and there was a big parking lot, and behind it was where the tennis courts were. And he was packing up the team's stuff for the season. It was summertime. So, I walked over, and what I said to him was that, "I'm not here to be reinstated to the team, but I wanted to tell you that you deserved better than what we all did and what I specifically did at States. What you and what your code brought to my life was something that I really did not want to betray."

• 48:27Pablo Torre?

  What did Larry say?

• 48:30Speaker 03

  Not the greatest eye contact guy. He was just kind of like looking at all of the gear, and he was probably thinking about the year as well. But I saw a softness then come over his face. He kind of cracked a smile, and he just looked over at me and he said, "So, like, are we gonna hit some balls or what?"

• 49:06Pablo Torre?

  I wanna do the thing that happens near the end of any good movie about high school. Okay, and I do wanna, I wanna sort of page through your yearbook, knowing how bleak that it otherwise might be, and just follow up on some of the key characters here.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Where are they now?

• 49:25Pablo Torre?

  Where is Dale?

• 49:27Speaker 03

  Dale?

• 49:27Pablo Torre?

  When's the last time you saw Dale?

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Dale, uh, kinda fell off the radar. And, uh, just quickly, the last time I saw him was in a very strange place, which was at a shopping mall of all places, a couple of years after he graduated. And, um, you know, he was still doing the music thing, I think, on the side, but his day job was working at one of these bulk candy stores. And, uh, when I saw him, I, I had to go, so it was a very brief interaction where-

• 49:58Pablo Torre?

  Were you going for some bulk candy yourself? You wanna just put a, a-

• 50:03Speaker 03

  I may have. I can't remember.

• 50:04Pablo Torre?

  A scoop of Sour Patch Kids into a plastic bag?

• 50:09Speaker 03

  Maybe jelly beans, black jelly beans. But he said, "Oh, before you go, I wanna show you something." And he, like, pulled up his shirt to show his back, and his entire back is covered in a tattoo of a drawing that I did for him in high school. It's not my greatest drawing.

• 50:28Pablo Torre?

  Wait, what did you draw?

• 50:29Speaker 03

  It's all these, uh, like, lizards on, like, a twisted branch. I was, like, into that, I guess, in the 90s. But he got it. It was, like, up on his neck, too, and all the way back. And I was like, "Oh, my God." And I've, I tried to find him as part of this story.

• 50:45Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  I know that he's changed his name, and he lives in the LA area, but I'm still looking for him. Dale hit me up.

• 50:52Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, Dale, if you're out there, if any of the members of Seraphin honestly are out there, we are interested in reuniting the band.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Let's, let's, let's have a show.

• 51:02Pablo Torre?

  And as for Larry, when was the last time you saw him? When was the last time you guys got to connect?

• 51:10Speaker 03

  I would see Larry whenever I would come into town.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  I lived in New York for, you know, 24 years. So I would only see him when I would come into Detroit to visit my parents for holidays.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  Really, the last time that I saw him, though, was at an engagement party. When my wife and I were gonna get married. Now, it's quite a number of years ago, or 15 years ago.

• 51:39Pablo Torre?

  I didn't know, so this photo is the last time you saw him?

• 51:43Speaker 03

  This was the last time we got together, yeah. And, uh...

• 51:47Pablo Torre?

  And just for people who are tracking your evolution, you are not a Goth in this photo, Mickey.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  No. I should say that right after that season, kind of after I put that chapter behind me, I cut my hair, retired my jewelry, and continued my high school career. I'm happy to say I was reinstated to the team. I played for Larry for two more years and had great seasons. We went to States another time.

• 52:15Pablo Torre?

  Boy, are you... Where are you in the record books? What's the part of the... Of your high school lore that you are most proud of?

• 52:23Speaker 03

  Well, I should say that Larry was known to keep meticulous records. So I do know exactly where I place in the record books. You know, I would say, you know, not at the top for total wins. I would say maybe top 20 for total wins. But there's one record that Larry said it, and I believe it, that will never, ever be broken, which is that I hold the single-season double-bagel record. And that is for the 1997-98 Goth tennis season, where I won 11 matches, 6-0, 6-0.

• 53:00Pablo Torre?

  Man. Like, watching you actively become this person in this photograph, given where we started this story, is now a palpably remarkable thing to me, your friend, who knew none of this [BLEEP].

• 53:17Speaker 03

  I want to read something to you that Larry gave me when I graduated. It has the header "Reflection of Success."

• 53:28Speaker 03

  A coach can never make a great player of a youngster who isn't potentially great. But a coach can make a great competitor out of any child. And miraculously, coaches can make adults out of children. For a coach, the final score doesn't read so many points for my team, so many for theirs. Instead, it reads, so many men and women out of so many boys and girls. And this is the score that is never published. And this is the score that coaches read to themselves and in which they find their real joy when the last game is over.

• 54:08Pablo Torre?

  Where is Larry now, Mickey?

• 54:12Speaker 03

  Larry passed away a couple of years ago. Being the private person that he was, he didn't tell anyone that he was battling cancer.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  And he suffered without the support of the community and players that he had invested so much in. I never got a chance to say goodbye when he was alive.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  Many of us convened at his funeral and spoke about our experiences with him. And he was buried in a Warren Mott tennis sweatshirt with his tennis racket. You know, these days, I am a dad of two little boys who are 12 and nine years old. Those, those boys are as odd and precocious and

• 55:08Pablo Torre?

  As lanky?

• 55:10Speaker 03

  Definitely as lanky as their dad was. I like to think that as a dad, I allow them to be the people that they are. Rather than trying to mold them or scold them into something that they are. And so much of that attitude, that ethos, comes from Larry and the code, the coaching philosophy and the level of attention and care and tolerance that he showed all of us as a coach. So in that way, Larry Hart lives on.

• 55:52Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. Mickey Dujie, a great dad and, and a real man and a former Goth. Happy Halloween.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  Save to you, Pablo. Fade to black.

• 56:09Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

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• 57:03Speaker 04

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