“Are you still pissed off at me?” I asked.

 

It is a July afternoon, two years ago. I am sitting in a booth at a Flying Star café near Montgomery and Juan Tabo NE. Across from me is Lorenzo Baca. With his freckled, fresh face and sandy hair, Baca looks as if he stepped off the set of “Happy Days.”  

 

“It was more my family who were mad at you,” he says.  

 

In 2010, Lorenzo Baca was 16 and one of the best tennis players for his age in the Southwest. At only 5-feet-6 inches and a buck-thirty pounds, he nonetheless was a quick-darting baseliner with a heavy forehand and a slingshot serve. Aggressive on the court—“I hated to lose”—he was by his own admission, immature at times.  

 

As a freshman at Sandia Prep, Baca won the 1A-3A singles at the state tournament.  The next year he transferred to La Cueva High School, and captured the 5A singles at state. As a junior, he seemed a shoo-in to repeat as singles champion. Led by the youngster his teammates called “Zo,” the La Cueva boys were expected to cruise to a team title, which would be their 10th in a row. 

 

None of that happened.

 

I was then a sports writer for the Albuquerque Journal when on May 3, 2010, a Monday, I received a story tip. Lorenzo Baca would not compete for the state title.  I visited with Dick Johnson, the La Cueva boys coach.  “We’ve lost our best player,” he said.  He went on to explain that Lorenzo Baca had been caught with marijuana. The state tournament would begin in a couple of days. “He’s ineligible,” Johnson said, his voice a combination of distress and confusion. “We will certainly miss him.” 

 

Baca was suspended from school.  He would be able to return to La Cueva for the fall semester provided he successfully completed a 45-day school probation period.

 

Informed of the news, Randy Harrison the Journal’s sports editor, said I needed to do a story.

 

The following morning, when my story appeared, Lorenzo’s mother, Susan Baca, angrily let loose on the telephone.  “He’s only 16!” she cried.  “How could you do this! Why did you do this!”  

 

I told her I was sorry about what happened to her son, but that I was simply reporting the news. She would have none of it.

 

At the time, many people were under the impression that Baca had the marijuana in his pocket on the La Cueva campus when he was stopped.  Or that he was smoking it in the boys’ bathroom at school. Neither was true.

 

“It doesn’t matter now,” he said, after taking a sip of a Pepsi. “But I wasn’t on the La Cueva grounds. I was parked on Wilshire Boulevard, near school, when an APD officer approached me.  He took me into the school in handcuffs and marched me to the principal’s office.”

 

He was never a drug addict or a dealer, Baca makes clear. “I was just a recreational user who did something terribly foolish.”  

 

At the state tournament, the Bears were edged in team play by Mayfield High School, 5-3 in the semifinals.  With Baca in the lineup, La Cueva would have surely won.

 

Meanwhile, Lorenzo Baca disappeared. “I locked myself in my room for three days,” he told me.  That his parents were then going through a divorce only added to the turmoil. He refused to use that as an excuse for his behavior. 

 

“Why did I do what I did?  I was stressed, I was depressed and I made wrong choices.”

 

He chose not to play tennis his senior year, though he graduated with his class in 2011.  “I didn’t pick up a racket for 13 months,” he told me. “I was ashamed.  I felt my life was ruined.”  

 

Before then, his life had been tennis.  His first lesson came at the Lobo Tennis Club, at age 4. His instructor was Kathy Kolankiewicz, then the UNM women’s coach.  He started playing competitively at age 8. By 9, he was traveling to tournaments in the Southwest. Soon he was going to age-group events across the country. David and Johnny Kowalski worked with him at the Lobo Club. So did Johnny Parkes. 

 

“He had the tools to be a very good player,” Parkes recalls.

 

As a young teen, Baca competed with players who would eventually have fine professional careers. He faced Jack Sock at the 14 nationals in Little Rock, Arkansas. Sock went on to win the men’s doubles at Wimbledon and an Olympic gold medal in mixed doubles.  At another 14s nationals, this one in Fresno, Calif., he battled Denis Kudla. Kudla reached the fourth round of the men’s singles at Wimbledon in 2014.

 

“I was on a path to do something in tennis,” Baca said. 

 

The article in the Journal altered that path. Baca says he lost a coaching job he was promised at Albuquerque Academy.  He applied for a coaching position at Bosque School and was turned down.  Earlier, Bart Scott, then a UNM assistant in charge of recruiting, had shown interest in Baca.  When the story appeared, all such attention vanished. 

 

“Those things hurt,” Baca said.  “As a kid, I had been a ballboy for Bart when he played for the Lobos.”

 

After high school, Baca sought a completely new environment.  He applied to Mesa Junior College in San Diego and was accepted. “I packed up my car and left town.  I wanted to get far away.” He played tennis for the California school and gave some lessons. After a year there, he knew it was time to come home.

 

In the summer of 2011, I telephoned Baca. My intention was to do a story on him for the USTA Southwest Section website.  He agreed to meet me, but then he never showed.  His mother had talked him out of it. She questioned why he would even consider talking to me. 

 

“She has my back,” Baca told me. “All my family does.”

 

Returning to Albuquerque he went to work as loss prevention specialist for Sears in Cottonwood Mall. His assignment was to watch for shoplifters. The marijuana incident did not get in the way. 

 

“I didn’t have a police record, I wasn’t arrested, I never went to jail.” 

 

The job at Sears was OK, but he sorely missed tennis.

 

Jeremy Dyche, a good friend, had started a tennis academy at Jerry Cline Tennis Center. Dyche invited Baca to join his staff.  He would work with promising youngsters.  And for two years, that’s what he did. 

 

“Tennis was fun again,” he said. He had even begun to play it again. 

 

In February 2012, Baca took a job at Highpoint Sports & Wellness. Jeremy Dyche had become tennis director there and he wanted Zo to assist him.  Baca jumped at the chance.

 

“I loved what I did there,” he said. Baca gave lessons to everyone at Highpoint, from peewees to groups of senior women.  He also worked with junior players, such as Sara Kuuttila, a glittering star at La Cueva, just as he once was. 

 

“Zo works non-stop at the club,” Dyche told me that spring. “You won’t find a member or player walk off his court without a smile and something learned.” 

 

Things were suddenly looking up. Dick Johnson, who stayed in touch, helped him get started on being USPTA certified.          

 

Baca looked back on that day in 2010 as a “big wound.” It was a gash, clearly self-inflicted. “I made a youthful mistake.” he admitted. “I was young and stupid. I’ve been trying to redeem myself ever since.” 

                                                               

In 2015, I wanted to write about Baca. When I suggested this to Dyche, he wasn’t so sure.  I argued that Baca had turned his life around and what happened to him could be a valuable lesson for kids.

 

At my urging, Dyche took the story idea to management at Highpoint. The club’s higher-ups did not want to see such a story to go public. I knew Highpoint belonged to a corporation and that most corporations were mainly interested in one thing: the bottom line. Someone at corporate headquarters apparently advised management that the behavior of a young man who made a mistake would likely get back to parents in the club and thus possibly do harm to the club’s revenue stream.    

 

At that point, I decided to forget the story.  As a reporter of some years, I had experienced similar situations. On occasion stories fall through. There was nothing I could do about it.

 

One morning in mid-June of this year I was cleaning out my computer files when I happened to come to notes from that initial interview with Baca. I wondered what had happened to him;  I asked around, but no was quite sure. Finally, I messaged Baca on Facebook. I left my phone number and asked him to contact me. Frankly, I didn’t think I would hear from him.   

 

But then he called. 

 

I told him I wanted to talk to him about where he had been and what had he done since we had first talked.  He agreed to meet me. Once again we went to that same Flying Star.

 

As soon as he sat down, I noticed Baca seemed content with the world, fulfilled in some deep way.  “How have you been?” I asked.

 

Enthusiasm filled the air. “I’m doing well, I’m happy,” he said. I believed him.

 

He had eventually split with Highpoint, he told me. He could not support himself on what he was earning there. “I had house payments and car payments to make. So I left.” 

 

He went back to being a loss prevention specialist, this time at Burlington Coat Factory in Montgomery Plaza. He missed tennis. Missed it mightily.

 

Then in April of this year, Baca told me, he received a telephone call out of the blue from Tom Rios, a freelance tennis instructor who teaches at city courts.  Baca had known Rios for a decade or more. 

 

Rios told Baca he wanted to chat with him in person. The two met at a Chile’s restaurant.  What drills do you use when you teach tennis? Rios asked. How would you direct, say, four people on one side of the net?  Rios nodded at his answers then said he had an opening. He needed someone to work 32 to 35 hours a week. This would be a seven-day-a-week job.  He would start at 7 a.m.  

 

“You will always need a game plan when you teach,” Rios added.  “There will be no winging it.” Rios stressed the importance of remembering faces and names.

 

“Do you want the job?” Rios finally asked. 

 

Can Federer hit a forehand? 

 

“It’s tiring,” Baca told me, “but I love it. I give lessons every day.  I’m so beat at night I’m in bed by 9:15 or 9:30.” He gives private lessons, semi-private and clinics. 

 

His tennis life was now on the right path. But something was missing from his life and had been for a long time. That something turned out be a religious faith. As a youth, he had been baptized in the Catholic Church, but he had been away for a very long time. Hungry for spiritual nourishment, one Sunday morning, on the spur of the moment, he entered First Christian Church, on Montgomery NE near Morris.  

 

He had never been there before. He laughs about it now. “It was the closest church to my house!” 

 

One the members of that church, a total stranger, gave him a hug when he came through the door for the first time. Baca knew it immediately: He had found what was missing. Surprisingly, his two sisters and his mother and father now attend the church.   

 

This summer Baca, now 25, will join other members of First Christian on a ten-day mission trip to the city of Zacatecas, in north-central Mexico. There they will help a small congregation build a church.

 

His new-found beliefs, he told me, let him now see the positive in people.  “I try not to judge anyone.  I am more at peace with myself, more forgiving.”

 

Then this: “I cherish the lesson I learned that day seven years ago.” 

 

 

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