In Remembrance of JD

Thoughts on the passing of dear friend and So Cal tennis legend John JD Davis

The Southern California tennis community lost one of its most iconic members last week, John "JD" Davis. I'd like to pen a few words about my former teammate, tennis peer, partner on court and in crime, and most of all, friend.

As with many of us, I first encountered JD on the indigenous hard courts of Southern California. SoCal junior tourneys were mass mobilization events. Entire cities taken over for weeks at a time, with every playable court available used in furtherance of our dreams, to someday compete on tennis' grandest stages

But there was one event at which all of Southern California came together: the historic Ojai Championships, held annually the last weekend of April.

I first saw John as a wide-eyed junior player peering through the fences of Ojai's Libby Park.  A couple of years my senior, JD channeled strong Spicoli Fast Times at Ridgemont High vibes. Long stringy, shocked white hair from too much sun, his skin tanned to a burnt crisp. All that was missing was a VW van, a longboard, and a surfs-up dude.

But JD was chasing a different kind of wave. He was an obscenely talented junior tennis player. Long arms, longer legs, all accentuated by a complete lack of muscle development. You couldn't take your eyes off him and his electric shot-making style. From his earliest ages, he was a human highlight reel, making the inconceivable look routine.  He had the potential to become a generational talent as he racked up title after title against our nation’s best and brightest stars.

But even the most casual observer could tell early on that not all was quite right in JD's world. Four fingers dipped in talent, his thumb pushing hard on the self-destruct button. 

Far from inert, JD's interactivity with society was the most reactive of experiments. An emotionally complicated upbringing, an obscene amount of hype, a brewing tempest of anger, a shyness exposing a fragility he attempted to mask with a too-cool-for-school bravado. It was West LA in the 1980s, fast times in the fast lane, swallowing up the hopes and dreams of far too many.  You could tell John had been hurt as a child, the hows and whys to remain unknown. But what was assured is that whatever happened before wouldn't happen again, not by you or anyone. If that meant pushing you away with his moods or through desperate, painful stretches of silence, he wasn't going to let anyone get too close. For his internal struggles, they were dark, they were heavy, they were intensely private if not secret, and JD was determined to keep them that way.

However, for those select few of us who managed a deeper relationship with John, we wore it as a badge of honor to be on the right side of JD's velvet ropes. Many sought entry, but only a few attained, for he could be exhausting, erratic, volatile, unable to help himself in a world that so badly wanted to envelop him, surround him, nurture him, love him. He would reject that standing offer of love and acceptance over and over again, finding his comfort apart from rather than within the fold of an accepting social embrace.

John, like so many of us, was a chemistry project. Unstable at his core, he sought control in any way he could. Fastidiously clean and hyper-organized, his trunk and dresser drawers were better organized than most Department Stores, his days structured by endless lists of errands and to-do post-its—his overt need for order dwarfed by his internal feelings of being out of control.

All of us who encountered John had one thing in common. We all waited for John. He literally couldn't be on time. I'd be in his apartment, knowing he had a match at the top of the hour, then at ten til, he'd pull out the vacuum and start cleaning or run an errand that could so easily have waited. It was never malicious; maybe he was avoiding the anxiety-ridden unpleasantness of small talk. If you ever practiced with John, all he wanted to do was crack a can and play sets. If you insisted on drilling, he'd literally grab his stuff and walk off. His driving need was to get lost in battle, for in the battle, he felt safe. We all knew the rules. Bottom court at the Riv for maximum tanning, quick warm-up, there would be no working on anything, and no talking on changeovers. Playing sets was his safe space, and you played until JD was done exercising... or, more appropriately, exorcising.

Likely, it was a good deal of both.

For there were tantrums, and when they came, within our racket-throwing subgroup, JD was all legend. There's a particular performative aspect to a player losing their shit on a tennis court, and John had the act down. When John's levee broke, I'll leave it this way. JD had some of the funniest on-court meltdowns in the history of our great sport.

I imagine millennia from now, archeologists digging through the concrete jungle of urban Southern California, deep within the Westwood Find, underneath all strata of geology, will find a strange brownish wooden artifact, and with a scream of Eureka! Up will come to a long-lost Dunlop Maxply, the racket of choice by the once-great UCLA Bruin John Leonard Davis.

I would play a lot of tennis with JD over a 20-year stretch. As teammates, as practice foes, as doubles partners. Near the end of our playing days, it could be so bittersweet. We shared a joke. Who was the biggest underachiever of the decade? With our respective struggles in life, we seemed to be trying to outdo each other. This made reminiscing hard for us, for invariably, we'd reach that pensive moment of how good we had it, how we were atop a vast, beautiful world, yet we let the opportunities slip away, us both carrying the gnawing burdens of what could have been.

But as the cycles of life, I was happy to hear of his move away from LA to the more pastoral settings of the Oregon Countryside with his wife and child. He spoke so glowingly of his daughter, she seemed to bring out the qualities in John that we so wish he'd have shared more with us. Likewise, he was happy for me to hear about my sobriety and health. He joked he lost a lot of money betting the under on my lifespan, but that he'd never been happier to lose a wager in all his life.

And so we left it, our attempts at reconnecting foiled by the hustle and bustle of modern-day life.

So it was with some surprise, a few months back, while teaching a lesson, I saw a missed call from JD. It had been a decade since we last spoke. Preparing myself for bad news, I called back cautiously. And bad doesn't even begin to describe it. He started right in, sharing with me his current state in life and that he didn't think he would make it. He'd lost his marriage, and with that, his daughter, and in his complex inner world, that loss of control seemed insurmountable, with all hope of reconciliation gone.

Caught off guard, I stammered through a series of ineffectual bromides of hope and resilience that probably made him feel worse. However, upon hanging up, I reached out to several of John's childhood friends to get up to date and see if we could circle the wagons and concoct a plan.

And try we did. But something irrevocably broke within John this time. His inner and outer worlds were so painfully out of control that he saw no way back toward equilibrium, his wells of ordering behavior all run dry. So much so that he started calling people from his youth in one last Hail Mary to avoid the inevitable. 

The events of John's passing are unsettling. There's no justification, rationalization, or excuse for terrorizing and physically harming others, and my heart breaks for all those affected by John's actions. I pray they can heal and get on with their lives as best as possible.

But it begs the question of how an event like this comes to pass. People of our generation, we've all more or less rounded third and are heading for home. What it will look like when we eventually cross life's plate is a mystery. What we do know is there is so much indignity in life's homestretch: the losses of loved ones, the loss of health, the challenges of aging, the confusion and terror of losing one's sanity.

I'm struck by an image in the police report of John's final moments, his running from the responsibility of his actions through the baseball fields of an elementary school. That image of my friend, this once beautiful athlete, and his final run haunts me. Elementary school is for the innocent. For so much of the John we all loved was his innocence, his youthfulness, his playfulness, yet all clouded by his refusal to grow up in many important ways, his last moments alive a now fatal game of hide and seek.

A once-promising life full of storybook moments, taken from us in the most nightmarish of endings.

Lives shouldn't end like this, for John or anyone.