Word: couriered
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Although the top ranking means millions of dollars a year, plus celebrity status in places on this planet where a football or baseball is just a demonstration of geometric forms, the rest of the U.S. seemed largely unaware of Courier's climb, the fastest in the sport's modern history...
Americans are apt to get to like Courier. He plays with a baseball cap tugged over his barbered (not styled) reddish-blond locks. It is almost impossible to see his bony, big-eyed, broad-mouthed face without envisioning him atop a tractor. He is athletic but not graceful, a meat-and-potatoes player who got ahead by hard work. Says ex-champion turned TV commentator Fred Stolle: "Grit and determination, they're his trademarks." Adds Stolle's broadcast partner Cliff Drysdale: "Courier is a bulldog...
...occasionally obscene, usually amounted to a hard look at an unwelcome call or a pumped fist, Jimmy Connors style, when things went his way. Now, at 21, he has learned from coach Jose Higueras that champions don't waste even that much energy overreacting. When a string popped on Courier's racquet at a hideously inopportune moment in the Australian final -- on a break point against Edberg that could have settled the second set -- Courier gave a barely perceptible shrug and strolled over for a replacement. Crowds there admired his tenacity and saw him as a fighter, a McEnroe without...
...anything about. You just play your best each week and see what that wacky computer spits out." He is keenly aware that getting there does not ensure staying there. The complex formula makes it possible to win a tournament yet lose ground to a just defeated opponent. But Courier seems to have the sturdy frame, stubborn persistence and stoic temperament to hover somewhere near the top for years...
Already, during the past year no other tour player has come close to his consistency in high-pressure circumstances. Of the half a dozen biggest events on the men's tour -- the four Grand Slams, the tour finale and the Lipton International in Key Biscayne, Fla. -- Courier won three and made the finals of two others. Says novelist Eliot Berry, whose book about the past two years on the tennis circuit, Tough Draw, will be published in August: "Tennis is in significant part a game of intimidation. Although Courier is well behaved, his physical and mental toughness make him very...