Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [6]
Ironically, it wasn’t until he took his most serious step as a fledgling tennis pro that his commitment finally switched for ever to becoming a drummer: enrolment, at sixteen, in Nick Bollettieri’s now world-famous – then the first of its kind – tennis academy in Florida. Says Lars, ‘When you grow up in [tennis] circles it’s almost like you get dragged into it. I can’t remember ever sitting there and making like a super-conscious decision about being a professional tennis player; it was what I knew. It wasn’t until a little later, after I finished school, and we moved to America for me to actually pursue this tennis thing more full-on – out on my own, out of the shadow of my dad’s wing – that I realised that not only did I not have the talent to really follow in his footsteps, but I certainly didn’t have the discipline. You know, you’re sixteen, you’re just having a couple beers, you’re having your first experience with girls and other things, and all of a sudden it’s like, I gotta be out there six hours a day hitting fucking tennis balls back and forth? It just got a little…too disciplined for my tastes.’ He laughed.
In the end, he spent less than six months in Florida studying with Bollettieri. ‘I went the first year in 1979 after I finished school – to kind of see if I wanted to do that. I was still kind of infatuated with it enough. That was the first year [it opened], way before Monica Seles or [Andre] Agassi or Pete Sampras or any of the other guys [that went there].’ A top-ten-ranked junior in Denmark, coming to America proved a rude awakening. Moving from Miami to Los Angeles, ‘I was gonna go to this high school ’cos my dad was very close with Roy Emerson, the tennis player. And so I went to the same high school as [Roy’s son] Anthony Emerson and I was gonna be on the tennis team with him. Well, guess what? I wasn’t one of the seven best players at the high school. I didn’t actually make the fucking tennis team at high school! That’s how competitive it was. It was pretty crazy.’ There were other discouragements. Torben was tall; Lars was short, just five foot six, a marked disadvantage. Yet Bollettieri himself believes now that with proper application Lars might have made it as a wealthy mid-level tennis pro. ‘He could move extremely well and had a lot of ability.’ And while ‘We knew Lars was not going to be as tall as his father, nor did we expect for him to really bulk up’, the real problem was ‘he was not dedicated to the rigorous work it would require’. Or as Torben put it in a 2005 interview with Leigh Weathersby: ‘[Lars] was very interested in tennis at that time, but he was also very interested in music. After a year he still wanted to go out and listen to the concerts and I think at the Academy they were not so keen that he stayed out, so he was reprimanded there for keeping some late hours.’ At which point, Lars told me, ‘I sort of realised that maybe this tennis thing was gonna get kind of set to the side and maybe this music thing was gonna be more of a full-time thing.’
If a natural adolescent interest in girls, beer and the occasional puff on a joint were all key factors in moving Lars away from the wooden racquet and more towards the full metal racket, the young Ulrich’s disaffection with tennis also coincided with a moment in rock that was about to write its own noisome chapter in musical history: the self-styled and cumbersomely named New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM). ‘It was March 1980,’ Lars would later recall, ‘and I walked into a record store in America, searching for the latest Triumph album or some such shit, and I was over at the import bin poking around. Now this was still before I was truly aware of what was going on in England, so when I came across an album called Iron Maiden I had no idea who or what they were. The front cover illustration of “Eddie” [the mummified corpse that would adorn all the formative Maiden record sleeves] could have been done by any one of a hundred bands, but the exciting live shots on the back of the sleeve really stood out. There was something