“I said, ‘Fine, you get me a job. I’m so sick of this. I’m tired. I’m burned out. I want to do something else,’ ” Chase said.
The next day, Chase Koch woke up to discover that his father had packed his bags for him. Chase would be leaving for the summer. A driver arrived to give Chase a ride. They would travel four and a half hours due east of Wichita, to a tiny town called Syracuse.
Within thirty minutes of leaving Wichita, the land flattened out and grew desolate. There was very little to interrupt the landscape of open grassland except for the occasional oil derrick. Two hours outside of Wichita, a person can feel totally marooned in the center of a prairie. Two hours after that, Chase Koch arrived at his destination.
Syracuse was home to one of Koch Beef Company’s largest cattle feedlots, a centerpiece of the doomed company’s effort during the 1990s to reinvent the agribusiness sector. Chase could smell the place from miles away. Roughly fifty thousand cattle milled around in muddy pens beneath a grain silo, which was one of the tallest structures in the Syracuse skyline. Chase Koch was dropped off and shown to his quarters. He would live in the single-wide trailer of a guy named Kelly Fink, the feedlot’s manager. Fink told Chase that he’d be sleeping on the couch for the summer. Chase set down his things, and tried to settle in. Fink slept down the hallway, in the trailer’s single bed.
Chase suspected that his father had given Kelly Fink specific orders to break Chase’s spirit. Chase was assigned to shovel shit and pick weeds. “The first two weeks, I was just bitter, because they handed me a shovel and said, ‘Go shovel out that stall and then go pick all these weeds.’ And it was just a lot of busywork just to get my head right.”
Chase worked at least ten hours a day, seven days a week. He got one day off, the Fourth of July. On that day, his parents called him from Vail, Colorado, where they were vacationing. They told him that it was snowing there. Wasn’t that remarkable?
Chase kept working and slowly got to know Fink. Then he started to like him. Then, strangely, he started to like the work. Toward the end of the summer, Chase felt something he’d never really felt before. He felt like he had endured an ordeal, and had really earned something.
When Chase was in sixth grade, his father had helped him write a paper. Chase’s assignment was to pick a philosopher and write about the philosopher’s ideas. Charles Koch told his son to pick Aristotle, and they read Aristotle’s work together. Charles Koch wrote notes on Aristotle in his neat, engineer’s script, listing page numbers from Aristotle’s significant work for Chase to pursue. When Chase turned in the paper, he summarized what he believed was one of Aristotle’s most important ideas.
“Aristotle taught that the goal in life is to be happy and to be happy you need to use your natural ability,” Chase Koch had written.
Now, at the end of the summer, before his freshman year of high school, Chase was starting to understand what Aristotle had meant. And what his father had meant. Chase Koch was feeling happy. He was feeling a sense of accomplishment.
* * *
Chase enrolled for his freshman year of high school at the Wichita Collegiate School, a private academy located on a spacious, grassy campus less than two blocks from the Koch family compound. To get to school each morning, Chase could leave the front gate of the Koch estate and take a left turn on Thirteenth Street, heading due east, passing the front gates of the Wichita Country Club, and then taking a right turn into the parking lot of his high school. This is the small geographic circuit in which he spent the majority of his adolescence.
The Wichita Collegiate classrooms were located in a group of modest, beige-brick buildings, set back from the street behind a screen of leafy trees. On the east side of campus there was the football field and the track, and then, farther back, a cluster of tennis courts. This is where Chase Koch spent an inordinate amount of his free time as a teenager. The tennis courts were the domain of a tall, imposing man named Dave Hawley, one of the winningest tennis coaches in Kansas history.I On a typical spring afternoon, Hawley walked from court to court in the tennis complex, calling out to his players in a booming voice. Hawley was uncompromising in his discipline and demands. If he felt that students weren’t practicing hard enough, he sent them home. If he felt they were falling short of their own ability, he let them know in unvarnished critiques. Still, Hawley could be friendly and gregarious. He gave lessons to little kids when things were quiet. While coaching a small girl, Hawley reminded her that tennis wasn’t like bowling; you couldn’t take your time to set up a shot. The game was an intimate competition against an opponent who didn’t want to give you time to think, and who wanted to be unpredictable. As he lobbed balls toward the little girl, Hawley called out to her, “You never know what’s coming! You never know what’s coming!”
Chase Koch thrived in this world. Over the course of his high school career, Chase faced more than a hundred competitors, and beat all of them except for one. The one student who beat Chase was Matthew Wright, a classmate and fellow player on Hawley’s team.
Chase Koch was one of the best players that Hawley ever worked with during his decades-long career. “If I had a Mount Rushmore of players that I’ve coached, he’d be on it,” he said of Chase. “He’d be one of the four—at the very outside, one of the six—best players I’ve ever coached on the boys’ side.”
Chase Koch’s style of play reflected his personality. His game relied on two primary strengths: his ability to quiet his mind and react in real time to his opponents, and his willingness to work harder than nearly everyone else in the state. Hawley noticed Chase Koch’s quiet demeanor almost immediately. The tennis team spent a lot of time together, and Hawley had hours to observe Chase interact with his classmates. What Hawley saw was a kid who defied expectations. Everyone in Wichita knew who Chase was the moment he walked into a room. The aura of power and wealth around the Koch name was inescapable. Yet somehow Chase Koch made this aura invisible. He didn’t act superior. He didn’t act like he was better than anyone else. He did drop stories about private jets and the fact that he could attend the US Open in New York every year with his family. Chase seemed happiest on the court, where he competed in silent exertion. “If you had no idea who he was, you never would have known who he was,” Hawley said.
Chase approached tennis as if it were a seven-day-a-week job. Hawley never saw Chase take it easy during practice. Chase developed a game that Coach Hawley called an “all-court game.” Chase’s primary skill was the ability to be anywhere on the court before his opponent could get a ball there. Chase’s strategy relied in part on wearing his opponents down, volley after volley, until they made too many mistakes and crumbled. It was a strategy that relied on hard work, long practice, and physical conditioning. There wasn’t some secret genius in Chase Koch’s serve. He just outworked the competition.
Still, Chase Koch could never beat Matt Wright. If Chase was impressive, Wright was slightly more so. Their close proximity in talent drove a friendly competition between the teammates. During those intense hours of practice, it was often Chase Koch and Matt Wright who fought the hardest against each other.
Chase won more freedom as he excelled in school and tennis. He got a Ford Explorer and, during his sophomore year, he got his driver’s license.