VERO BEACH — It was hardly by the skin of his teeth that Mardy Fish managed to thrill the locals at Grand Harbor’s tennis facility Friday. But he did lose the skin off one knee.
Newly crowned No.7 in the world and No. 1 in America, Fish had just walloped the world’s former No. 17, Sam Querrey, 6-3, in a match delayed by a misting rain. Now, a dreary drizzle slickened the courts again.
Fish was playing with no less than the glorious Serena Williams – former No. 1 woman in the world – as his doubles partner.
The two were up against Melanie Oudin, fresh off her first Grand Slam win playing mixed doubles at the U.S. Open, and Mike Bryan, who with his twin brother Bob, is considered by some to play the best doubles game in tennis history.
Suddenly, caught up in the lighthearted yet poundingly competitive spirit of the moment, Fish dove headlong for a shot close to the corner of the net, and skidded on his side to a dead stop.
The crowd’s collective openmouthed delight quickly turned to concern. A hush fell over the stands as fans waited for Fish to recover.
“Hey, Mardy, what do you think this is?” chided courtside emcee-cum-referee Brett Haber, Emmy award-winning sports writer and broadcaster, trying to break the tension.
Going all out for shot in an exhibition match with no one but his neighbors watching could have knocked Fish out of key training time in the only free month of the grueling tennis season.
Clearly Mardy Fish is not a guy to pull his punches for the hometown fans.
And this event was a win not for him but for his charity, scoring major bucks for the Mardy Fish Foundation, helping 2,000 local public school kids in afterschool programs.
Getting awkwardly to his feet, he gingerly stretched the shredded knee, walked stiffly to the sidelines for a towel, and with Serena stepping over in a show of concern, dabbed at the mess he had made, a bloody scrape the size of a tennis ball.
“Suck it up, buttercup!” hollered one toughie in the crowd, when it became obvious Fish wasn’t seriously injured.
The wisecrack went over like a winning Fish drop shot.
But with that skid, Fish’s generosity suddenly rose above glad-handing with mad tennis fans, lauding Vero Beach for his childhood memories and clapping for school kids in his program as they tap danced to Michael Jackson.
As Haber pointed out, one false move could have yanked him from the upcoming season. Or for that matter, any of the other stars who signed on to help his cause.
Then, a voice came from the sidelines.
“Be careful, Mardy!”
That may have been the voice of Sally Fish, Mardy’s mom, who the day after the exhibition flew up to Indianapolis while daughter Meredith delivered her first baby.
There was a time when the Fish family had two tennis stars; Meredith, who like brother Mardy, went to Beachland Elementary, headed over to Riverside Park many afternoons to practice with their dad, Tom Fish, the tennis pro at one time or another at virtually every club on the island, and now the Windsor pro.
“He was an incredible dad,” says Carol Rodgers, whose children went to Beachland with the Fishes. “He was always at Riverside doing lessons with his kids for hours and hours, even after he had taught all day at his job.”
Rodgers’ son Derek played Little League with Mardy and her husband Pat was their coach.
Sitting in the stands with Sally Fish, Carol Rodgers recalled Mardy’s pitching.
“He always had such great precision,” she says.
Baseball was Tom Fish’s sport too, as a kid, until the coach “demoted” him.
“Obviously, I thought I was better than he did. Then I looked and right next to the baseball field were the tennis courts. I thought to myself, I’m going to play tennis.”
Tom Fish was 13 when he picked up his dad’s racquet and started smacking balls up against the garage door.
“I got really excited once I started playing,” he says. //But even back then, Tom Fish saw himself as a tennis coach.
“I had a dream of teaching tennis, not so much playing.
“In those days, it was a kind of elitist sport – professional tennis only happened in 1968, so before that it was just for amateurs. I didn’t have the money to travel around the world and play – my dad is a product engineer.”
He went on to play tennis for the University of Minnesota, but after a year, got a job teaching tennis, and that was that; he has taught ever since.
Even so, it is Sally, he says, who has the gene for athleticism.
“She’s an incredible athlete, but she never knew it until she met me,” he says. “She’s really competitive.”
For a while, Sally played with what Tom calls the “killer housewife girls,” a group of mostly beachside moms who got together at the courts at Riverside a couple of times a week.
She soon moved on to league play and individual tournaments.
Sally Fish herself says Mardy reminds her intensely of her father, who at 6-foot-5, two inches taller than his grandson, was a great athlete in a number of sports.
“Marty never met him,” says Sally sadly; her dad died before Mardy was born. “I see him in Mardy for sure, even the funny personality.”
It was golf that first captured Mardy’s heart, when at 2 and still in diapers, he picked up a club in his left hand and kept it there, an early indicator of his backhand-to-be, Sally says.
Family friends remember thinking Mardy just wasn’t into tennis, when at 6 or 7, he would spend hours chipping away, throwing a fit when his dad traded his golf club for a tennis racquet.
By then, Mardy was fast friends with Joshua and Jarrod Owen, twin sons of Steve and Mitzi Owen.
The Owens “were like second parents to me,” says Mardy Fish.
Jarrod Owen, now an insurance agent with Warren Insurance, was a state doubles champion in tennis for Vero Beach High School, and played for Florida State University, along with Meredith Fish.
Mardy played golf with Jarrod’s brother Josh (who later changed his name to Jake), who won his first tournament at 15 and expected to become a golf pro until a wakeboarding accident while at FSU injured his shoulder, and he picked up a guitar instead.
In 2005, he signed with RCA and went on to become a country music sensation, with the title track off his third CD, “Barefoot Blue Jean Night,” becoming his first No. 1 hit single on the country music chart.
Today, Mardy’s Tennis and Jake’s Music Fest is a Vero tradition, attracting thousands and raising thousands of dollars for their foundations.
Jake has designated a portion of festival funds to go to St. Jude’s Hospital, as well as to Mardy’s foundation which supplements after-school programs in the county’s elementary schools with equipment, supplies and a small stipend for teachers.
Eventually, their hope is to build a charter school, Tom Fish says.
As for the Fish children, they started at St. Edward’s on financial aid when the family first came to town in 1986.
When the aid ended, though, they transferred to Beachland, which Tom Fish views as “an excellent school,” and continued at Gifford Middle School.
Fish made his annual pilgrimage Friday to an elementary school where his foundation has a program. This year it was Vero Beach Elementary.
Its student body includes many of the most financially challenged in the county.
The kids were beside themselves, sitting on bleachers outside awaiting his arrival.
One 10-year-old, Camden Lane, was trembling visibly, frantic for an autograph, until finally her teacher, Pam Jones, sent her off to get one.
“I thought she was going to pass out,” said Jones.
“I love tennis. It’s my favorite sport,” said Camden, brushing away a residual tear.”I started playing two years ago, and I’ve been really bad at it. But now I know I can play just like Mardy Fish. I watch him all the time.”
“I’m very proud and honored to spend my birthday with you,” an ever low-key Mardy told the crowd, after a rousing rendition of a hip-hop song, re-written with “jingle” in the lyrics, and accentuated with bongo drums bought by Fish’s foundation.
“It’s very special for us to come home,” he said. “You’re growing up where I grew up, and it’s great now that we’re grown up and we can give back, to see where it’s going and all the fun you’re having.”
After Mardy’s freshman year at Vero Beach High School, he transferred to a private school outside Tampa, Saddlebrook, a good school says Fish with an excellent tennis academy.
Briefly, Mardy came back to VBHS.
But when the family of his friend Andy Roddick came up with the idea of a sort of tennis group home, he moved to Boca Raton and enrolled in Boca Prep.
“He was pretty much gone,” says Tom Fish, wistfully.
“It was difficult for him,” says Tom Fish. “Actually, Mardy’s a homebody. He loves his own dad and his own home. He loves his mom and dad and he loves his dogs. That’s one thing with the video conferencing: he wants to see his daschunds.”
The Fishes are currently housing three – all “cast-offs” from their kids.
Meredith Fish went to Boca Prep as well, then to the International Tennis Academy in Delray for her junior and senior years of high school.
She enrolled at Florida State, transferred to Flagler College, and about a year before graduation, she was recruited to work for Tennis Channel founder Steve Bellamy.
Things have worked out well. A best girlfriend introduced Meredith to medical resident Joey Mackey, now a practicing ophthalmologist. Thursday evening, at an elegant reception at Windsor for donors and friends, all the Fishes were clearly tracking Meredith, who’d been having contractions earlier in the day.
Later in the weekend, with Jake’s concert in indefinite rain delay, Tom Fish said they were hoping to get out of town Sunday, with the new Fish expected on the scene by the early part of the week.
Today, the Fishes see each other mostly at tournaments.
Sally and Tom Fish get to L.A. a couple of time a year, where Mardy lives with his wife of three years, 31-year-old attorney and model Stacey Gardner, an L.A. native.
Stacey is designing costume jewelry with her own sister, selling it on the website www.laurenlynne.com.
The two met through Meredith, who befriended a sorority sister of Stacey’s while working at the Tennis Channel.
It was shortly after Stacey had won a role as a “suitcase model” on the television show “Deal or No Deal,” a job she got when she was spied by the show’s producer having lunch with a girlfriend, celebrating having just taken the California bar exam.
Mardy and Stacey Fish have a new house under contract in L.A.’s Westwood Hills neighborhood, hoping to close any day and get the decorating underway.
The couple leaves Dec. 29 for the Australian Open which starts Jan. 16.
“I like being home, but it’s a sacrifice I’m happy to make,” she says of the travel required for tournament play. “I feel Mardy is a late bloomer, and I want him to get to make the most of his career.”
As for having a Fish of their own, Stacey is in no hurry. She says she’s been around Roger Federer’s twin baby girls and they’re adorable.
“But it’s hard if you’re trying to rest for a game and there’s a baby crying in the next room.”
As for Mardy Fish, who celebrated his 30th birthday with multiple cakes and birthday songs in a jam-packed schedule of Mardy Fish Foundation activities, he only wishes he could come back when his days are empty, imagining his old house on Honeysuckle and hanging out at Riverside Park.
“I love this place,” he says. Thursday night, Joe Pappalardo, the volunteer tennis coach at St. Ed’s, and his wife Gloria opened their Windsor home to several dozen donors and friends.
While Christmas songs fought the din of best-of-friends conversations, the reed-thin and stunning Stacey Fish appeared in lawyerly blazer topping a metallic knit micro-miniskirt and towering heels.
Two 60-somethings loudly whispered one to the other, clearly for Stacey’s amusement.
“Oh, I was going to wear that.”
“Good thing you didn’t. I hate it when y’all dress alike.”
Meanwhile, Mardy diligently circulated, earnestly thanking his guests, no doubt hoping to win over new donors to his foundation, but in a tone understated to the point of shy.
“Jake and I come here selfishly,” he began. “Because we don’t see each other a lot, even though we’re still the best of friends. We’ve both moved around basically our whole lives. But this is our home. This is the community that gave us so much.”
“Jake and I have a blast here. I just wish I could come and just hang out,” he said later. “All my memories are here, ever since I first started remembering.”