--:-- Pablo Torre: If you're a Chicago business looking to give back locally, Garden Ears is your kind of non-profit. We work in under-resourced schools across the South and West Sides, helping students grow fresh food and learn about health, sustainability, and equity. Your corporate sponsorship supports hands-on education, youth mentorship, and the transformation of school gardens into vibrant green spaces. Learn more about sponsorship opportunities at GardenEars.org and let's grow something together.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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. 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 going to find out what this sound is.
--:-- [Sound of a "bro clap"]
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: At an event, at the beginning of something, you do kind of like the bro clap. Oh, yeah. And depending on the quality and the purity of the Bro Clap, that gives you an indication of how well things are going to go.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Want to try? You want to dap me up before this specific episode?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: I mean, I think it would be fun. I'm going to have to lean over these pumpkins.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Okay, come on.
--:-- [Sound of an awkward dap]
--:-- Pablo Torre: Pumpkin dap here. That wasn't great.
--:-- Pablo Torre: So that is the sound of my good friend and PTFO correspondent, Mickey Duget, 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.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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.
--:-- Pablo 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.
--:-- [Reading from Mickey's article]
Pablo Torre: "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. 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 hardcourt Jacob Marley and would milk the pained 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. 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 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 hearse pulled up, they were more than ready for their body bag."
--:-- Pablo Torre: Vicky, what are we going to call today's episode, do you think?
--:-- Vicky: There's really only one answer to that, Pablo. This was goth tennis.
--:-- Pablo 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. It feels appropriately spooky.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: I feel right at home.
--:-- Pablo 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?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: I love Halloween. At various points in my life, I felt like I maybe was celebrating Halloween every day of the year. 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. And in that photo, completely unsmiling.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Well, come on, if you're going to go, go all the way. I don't know if Dracula was really...
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: I was a Care Bear. We have that photo.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Spookier in a different way. Even more disturbing, in retrospect, actually.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: So I grew up in suburban Detroit in a northern suburb called Warren. And we're talking, mid-late 90s now when I was in high school. And as is kind of known now through films like 8 Mile or people knowing about the origin story of Insane Clown Posse and the Juggalos.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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.
--:-- Pablo 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?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: I was very tall. I was emaciated thin. I didn't really talk much. I had almost like a translucent skin. Gaunt is a word that comes to mind as I see this photo of you and I believe your sister.
--:-- Pablo Torre: That's me and my older sister.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: People described me as looking like the main character in Dazed and Confused if that character were starving to death.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yes, Mitch.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Mitch. Mitch just really needing a meal. 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 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.
--:-- Pablo 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 we're 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. 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. Because I'm a city kid, because I don't think I knew any goths in high school. Not true goths. Maybe some goth-adjacent characters. If I were to swing the door open to your art room in high school, what would I see?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: What's the name of the band?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: They were called Seraphine.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Perfect.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: They were great. I believe this is... Yeah, that's their album. An album cover. Yeah, that's Dale right in the front with his long black hair. Yes, half in shadow is Dale's face, black and white, pink text, seraphin, new, asterisk, for some reason, born. Copyright 1997. The lyrics of his songs were so awesome. "If you see me bleeding, it's just my heart trying to cry. Wearing the night just like skin. I was the shadow's phantom." So good.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I mean, pretty badass.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Yeah. Oh, my God. Dale is incredible.
--:-- Pablo Torre: How are you updating yourself as your initiation into this tribe becomes that much more complete?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: I decide to dye my hair black. 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 be front and center, but it is to kind of lurk through corners and shadows.
--:-- Pablo Torre: All of this is foreign to me. Let's start with describing what Dale and their closest friends were.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I was going to ask, how much mesh is there?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: A little bit of mesh.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: So I would say the style icon for military goths is probably post-Glenn Danzig-era Danzig. Dale was really channeling that. The most visible of the Goths were the Victorian Goths. Much more sartorial in their dress.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Classy.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: They're wearing the satin, the velvet, the corduroy ruffles. We're talking some artistic flourishes like a top hat.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yeah, like people who maybe would like to be considered a count of some sort.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Absolutely. And I think the style icon that I would say for the Victorian goths, Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: You know, the cane, the shades. A high-class goth.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: So then, after the military goths and the Victorian goths, was a little group near the jewelry-making station called the fairy goths.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: The fairy goths were much more fantasy inclined. Dark fairies, maybe into Lord of the Rings. A lot of them were wearing prosthetic ears.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yeah, elven, elven goths.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Absolutely. Wearing fake wings.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Gossamer goth wings.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Totally. But some kind of wings and prosthesis.
--:-- Pablo Torre: A slightly more whimsical goth.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Definitely. Could still be really effed up and dark, but a little bit more whimsical.
--:-- Pablo 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?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: They weren't excited about any of the changes that they saw, whether it was me dyeing 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 some plastic skulls that I got.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Check.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: My mom, I remember her looking at 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 really thrilled about.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I mean, at this point, hard to blame her for presuming that maybe you were worshiping the devil.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Yeah.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Were you worshiping the devil?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Are you going to cancel me for assuming that you were worshiping Satan?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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 not exactly associated with the gothic way. But it's true. And it was a real loving subculture of people that looked out for one another. But no, we weren't doing any satanic rituals.
--:-- Pablo 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.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: No. Safe to assume.
--:-- Pablo Torre: So who was?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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. Probably the most bizarre character that I've ever met. Larry was about six foot two inches, rail thin. Back in the day, there were these kind of sport glasses that were called Rexpecs, which were very, very thick and durable. He was wearing something adjacent to those that were somehow even bigger and uglier than Rexpecs. Somewhere along the way way before we met him he'd busted out his two front teeth and so he had cheaply gotten fake teeth but they were like the size of chiclets, overly huge for his head.
--:-- Pablo Torre: You'd gotten the rec specs of teeth.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yes, we're seeing on this photograph, you can see on YouTube or the DraftKings Network, the aforementioned Larry, cap upon head, Rex Spex on, teeth glistening, skin tan, windbreaker donned.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: This guy had not a lot of clothes, but what he had were about 10 different track suits that he would kind of cycle through. And they all also seemed kind of unwashed and reeking of sweat.
--:-- Pablo Torre: To what extent did he connect with the art room kids? To what extent did he connect with goths in that way.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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.
--:-- Pablo 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?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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.
--:-- Pablo 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. 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 as a coach.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: I can't 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 we were just chatting and he asked how my winter went, told him a little bit about the art room. He could see that I had a new look going on. He could see that I'm wearing 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 through my friends called the Sisters of Mercy. One of the great 70s goth bands from England. 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 a name of a couple albums and he said, "I actually used to follow them when they were out on the road. I used to 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. I never forgot that moment. It was really odd.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And so you as his athlete, as his student, give me the scouting report. What's Mickey like?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: I'm pretty athletic. So you got good reach, good reach wingspan, 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, one night I was looking through, and Larry was big on giving handouts of Xeroxed articles, strategy articles. And one night when I was home I had been 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, let's do this." And so that began my transformation.
--:-- [Reading from Mickey's article]
Pablo Torre: "Through the Midwestern Springs 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 warm-ups, 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 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. 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 f*** 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."
--:-- Pablo Torre: Can I just jump in here to observe that it sounds unbelievably awful to play tennis against you?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: I should say that the persona that I would take on court was that I was really like an angel of death.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I get that vibe.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I think I'd 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.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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 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 a really low self-esteem and a low self-worth. It feels like cartoonish to say today, but when I was a kid and getting beaten up by my dad, he would say to me, "You're not a real man." He would say that to me as he was beating me up. And I'm a literal child. 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: To be clear, you were beating kids and then drawing tombstones in your notebook.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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 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. That I was gaunt, thin. I didn't even have a water bottle or a towel. And 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: So when your opponent snaps, what does that sound like?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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 losing his goddamn mind. He went to the back fence to pick up the ball and he punched the fence and gouged his hand open on a burr that was sticking out of the fence. So blood is gushing down his arm. And I remember just standing there at the net and saying, "Do you want to stop?" And the guy was so furious that he said, "F you, let's keep going."
--:-- Pablo Torre: This does sound like a lyric in a seraphim song.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Yeah, and I remember that day, we kept playing, he keeps bleeding, his blood actually got all over the balls that we were using, and I remember thinking that was really cool.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I also have to imagine that your hair has died, right? Again, as you say, there is a ceremony of de-ringing yourself, all of this. 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?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: To the ceremonial side of things, I'll just say that if I could have actually emerged from a coffin next to the court, I would have done that. So much of this, get the dry ice, get the whole thing going. So I was really milking the performance for all it was worth. I will say that taking all the metal off before playing was pretty smart just because sweaty metal gets a little tiring.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Sounds like it'd get hot.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Yeah. But I also noticed periodically that as I was really sweating, because I was having to re-dye my hair. So occasionally there would be fresh dye. And when you're out sweating in the afternoon sun, the dye could drip off, almost like a Giuliani.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I was going to say, like Rudy Giuliani.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Yeah. Like noted vampire Rudy Giuliani. Yeah, that was the original Giuliani, which I think that it only added to the disturbing pageantry of my performances.
--:-- Pablo Torre: So you go all the way to the regional tournament, is my understanding here. And what is that moment like? I imagine in any good sports movie, States is on the line.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Yeah.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And so at regionals, with that hanging in the balance, how does it go?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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 Grosse Pointe 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 going to 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 Grosse Pointe North. Grosse Pointe North, depicted in that movie *Grosse Pointe Blank*, John Cusack, that 90s movie. So I get the sense of like goth versus prep.
--:-- 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: So you won.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: I won.
--:-- Pablo Torre: But you were a wreck.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: 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 losing to some dicks who were going to rub our nose in it. What I found in that match is that the player that I beat, his name is Andrew, this guy showed the greatest sportsmanship of really anyone that I had played against that season. He did not sneer at me. He did not 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 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: He wasn't playing up to central casting.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: That's right. In this case, even though I won this tournament and 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 felt really ashamed of the way I was operating.
--:-- Pablo Torre: So Larry, as the coach here, as the leader of this band of underdogs that had made it to states, how does your dynamic at states unfold, given that now it's time to actually win this thing?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Larry was so excited because he had never taken a team to states before. We really leaned into the fact that our team was called the Marauders. We leaned into the fact that we were these 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. Though we may have come out on top in the regional tournament, states was a whole other beast, and we were pretty solidly outclassed.
--:-- So I took it upon myself to try to foster closer connections with my teammates. In the ways that I had kind of perfected or 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: A hotel party thrown by Mickey in this phase of your life. How stoned did you guys get?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Brought the weed, brought some swisher sweets or black and milds or something. 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. So we 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: It felt like a real betrayal of his trust in us. Larry is someone who always preached living by a code. The code was sportsmanship, but the code was also how you conduct yourself. 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 him and the code, we were all kicked off the team and none of us were going to be able to take the team bus the hour and a half drive back to where we lived. So we all needed to call our parents to pick us up. I remember just sitting on the bed in my hotel room feeling like I ruined everything.
--:-- It is one thing to fuck up, and it is another thing to genuinely disappoint someone that you wanted to be proud of you. That was a new feeling for me because I had felt, prior to that, so on my own and unwilling or afraid to trust in a father figure. It's hard to even talk about it now because 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 fucked it up.
--:-- So that was the end of the season. We lose at states, we all get kicked off the team, and it's the end of the school year. We got back to Warren and didn't see Larry for a bit. We were finishing our school years. I spent a lot of time in the art room. Everyone's kind of cleaning up and taking their art projects home. Dale is going off to pursue stardom. He's graduating. 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. There was no charm in sharing that with them.
--:-- I remember seeing my teammates in the hallways, my tennis teammates, and a lot of them were saying, "Screw Larry, who needs to be on the tennis team? He overreacted." That didn't feel better for me either. So one day after school, I remember looking out the back of the school. There was a big parking lot and behind it was where the tennis courts were. He was packing up the team 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 your code brought to my life was something that I really did not want to betray.
--:-- Pablo Torre: What did Larry say?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Not the greatest eye contact guy. He was just kind of 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, are we gonna hit some balls or what?"
--:-- Pablo Torre: I want to do the thing that happens near the end of any good movie about high school. I want to page through your yearbook, knowing how bleak that it otherwise might be, and just follow up on some of the key characters here. Where are they now? Where is Dale? When's the last time you saw Dale?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Dale kind of fell off the radar. 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. 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. When I saw him, I had to go, so it was a very brief interaction.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Were you going for some bulk candy yourself?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: I may have. I can't remember. A scoop of Sour Patch Kids into a plastic bag. Maybe jelly beans, black jelly beans. But he said, "Oh, before you go, I want to show you something." And he pulled up his shirt to show his back. 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: What did you draw?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: It's all these lizards on a twisted branch. I was into that, I guess, in the 90s. But he got it, it was up on his neck too and all the way back. I was like, "Oh my god." I've tried to find him as part of this story. 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. If any of the members of Seraphim are out there, we are interested in reuniting the band. Let's have a show.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And as for Larry, when was the last time you saw him? When was the last time you guys got to connect?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: I would see Larry whenever I would come into town. I lived in New York for 24 years, so I would only see him when I would come into Detroit to visit my parents for holidays. Really, the last time that I saw him was at an engagement party when my wife and I were going to get married. It's quite a number of years ago, 15 years ago.
--:-- Pablo Torre: So this photo is the last time you saw him.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: This was the last time we got together.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And just for people who are tracking your evolution, you are not a goth in this photo, Mickey.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: No. Right after that season, 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Where are you in the record books? What's the part of your high school lore that you are most proud of?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Larry was known to keep meticulous records. So I do know exactly where I place in the record books. I would say I'm not at the top for total wins. Maybe top 20 for total wins. But there's one record that Larry said, and I believe it, that will never, ever be broken. I hold the single season double bagel record. That is for the 1997-98 goth tennis season where I won 11 matches, 6-0, 6-0.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Man. Watching you actively become this person in this photograph, given where we started this story, is a palpably remarkable thing to me, your friend, who knew none of this shit. I want to read something to you that Larry gave me when I graduated. It has the header, "Reflection of Success."
--:-- "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."
--:-- Where is Larry now, Mickey?
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Larry passed away a couple years ago. Being the private person that he was, he didn't tell anyone that he was battling cancer. 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. Many of us convened at his funeral and spoke about our experiences with him. He was buried in a Warren Mott tennis sweatshirt with his tennis racket.
--:-- These days, I am a dad of two little boys who are 12 and 9 years old.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Those boys are as odd and precocious and—
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: As lanky. 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. 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Mickey Duzyj, a great dad and a real man and a former goth. Happy Halloween.
--:-- Mickey Duzyj: Same to you, Pablo.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Fade to black. This has been *Pablo Torre Finds Out*, a Meadowlark Media production. I'll talk to you next time. We'll see you next time.
