Photograph by Anthony Behar
If he were the 322nd-best baseball player in the world, Blake Strode would probably make around $3 million. The 322nd-best football player? Maybe even more. But the 322nd-best tennis player?
He’s made less than $60,000.
In three years.
In May, the St. Louis native is getting ready to hit Europe. If it weren’t for his sponsors, he would probably never leave the tarmac. It’s still not the best financial move—especially when you consider that he continues to defer the place waiting for him at Harvard Law School—but he’s thisclose to an automatic invitation to the US Open Qualifying Tournament. Given that Strode needs to jump 20 to 30 spots in the rankings to be invited, an even bigger question looms if that doesn’t happen.
Does he attempt the impossible—again?
See, there’s this little tournament that anyone with a tennis racket and a dream can enter. Two years ago, the United States Tennis Association created the US Open National Playoffs, allowing anyone who bought an annual membership and ponied up the entry fee to compete. The winner receives an automatic invitation to the US Open qualifier—and only has to beat out several thousand players to get to the Open.
Good luck.
Then Strode won the whole thing. Twice.
It might as well have been called the Strode Second Chance Tournament during the past two years. Coincidentally, the year before it started, he was given a coveted automatic US Open qualifier invitation. After graduating from the University of Arkansas in 2009, Strode was considered a top prospect and was tapped by the tournament as a player to watch.
During the opening match of the ’09 US Open qualifier, however, he lost in straight sets. “I was intimidated,” he admits. “I was just happy to be there.”
He pauses. “I learned from it,” he says.
The next year, he learned that an automatic qualifier invitation wasn’t coming. So it was either try this new thing called the National Playoffs or wonder what might have been. He chose not to wonder.
Strode made easy work of opponents at the start of the 2010 US Open National Playoffs, but that changed when he made the final 16, squaring off against the winners of each U.S. region. “I knew seven or eight of these guys—had at least heard of them,” he says. “It was about to get tougher.” Still, when the dust settled, he was in the finals of the National Playoffs.
Then he lost the first set of the finals to Cecil Mamiit.
“Not just that,” Strode says. “It was on the Tennis Channel! I’d never been on TV before. I could even hear the announcers talking about me during the match. It was weird.”
Strode found himself down, but he soon settled in.
“The adrenaline cost me that first set, and then I just…got into it,” he says. He and Mamiit went to a tiebreaker in the deciding third set. After the two dueled for nearly three hours, just a few points made the difference. Strode remembers serving a few times on match point and not getting it. Then, all of a sudden, the set was his.
“I felt relief,” he says. “I was excited. I wasn’t going down in straight sets in the first round of the qualifiers this time.”
He eventually lost to Croatia’s Ivan Dodig in straight sets during the second round of the 2010 US Open qualifier.
“But that’s progress,” he says. “I wasn’t just happy to be there.”
Despite this improved showing, Strode again didn’t receive a qualifier invitation last year. So he went out and beat everyone in the National Playoffs—again.
“I was the favorite, and I felt like the favorite, to be honest,” he says. “I did it in a very workmanlike way. In the final, I took it in straight sets.”
During the 2011 US Open qualifier last August, he again lost in the second round—though he managed to hold on for three sets before going down. “But the person I lost to, [Jonathan Dasnieres de Veigy], made the US Open,” he says. “If not for him, it might have been me.”
By now, you might notice a pattern in Strode’s approach: finding the positive in his performance, seeking growth where he can.
That attitude began with his St. Louis coach, Paul Walker, who believed Strode could be elite years ago, when he began practicing at Forest Park’s Dwight Davis Tennis Center. “He just showed me how to improve every part of my game,” Strode says. “He talked about great things for me from the start.”
It also came from Strode’s parents, who, like so many other “tennis families,” committed money and time to the sport. “We were a middle-class family,” he says. “Sacrifices had to be made if I was going to get to go for my dream.”
But don’t think Strode plays because he thinks he owes someone. He plays because he loves it. He always has.
“I can remember, we were on vacation in Daytona Beach, Fla., and tennis just happened to be on,” Strode recalls of a family trip when he was 5 years old. “I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’” Not long after, he was playing tennis whenever he wasn’t at school. “In the summer, I’d play six hours, all day, sometimes coming back at night.”
Today, he carries the resulting strong serve and forehand, along with the speed that gives him the most pride—“I love to get to balls no one thinks I can, return them, and watch my opponent be shocked”—and he hopes those skills will finally get him to the US Open.
A fourth-year improvement would follow suit with his days at Pattonville High School. There, he didn’t win a state tournament until his senior year, after losing in the finals the year before. He saw the same kind of progression in college, with a much-improved semifinal finish in the NCAA tournament during his final year at the University of Arkansas.
Then, of course, Strode continued his tennis education, delaying the transition to a new career at Harvard Law. One could argue that being admitted to that hallowed institution was running the table again—especially considering how many applicants apply for those few coveted spots. “I remember thinking, if I had a long shot for the law schools I applied for, then that was it,” he says.
It’s clear that Strode enjoys beating the odds as much as the person on the other side of the net.
Eric Butterman is a sportswriter who’s written for publications like the Sporting News and ESPN.com and profiled tennis great Venus Williams.
