was on a tennis court in the mornings, afternoons, and weekends. He practiced hard and drove himself. Soon, Chase was playing in regional tournaments and winning. He became recognized as one of the best young players in Wichita, and then was recognized as one of the best players in Kansas. He became one of the top players in the Missouri Valley Conference, which covered several states. On the tennis court, Chase Koch’s last name didn’t matter. And if Chase Koch was winning, his father didn’t express dissatisfaction.
* * *
By the time he was in middle school, Chase Koch’s tennis regimen became difficult to sustain. All of his free time became dominated by tennis. When he spent time with his mother, it was so they could drive to regional tennis tournaments. Chase began to burn out. He started to hate the game. And he rebelled.
“I got exposed to new groups of friends and got to hang out with them, and just enjoyed that part of life instead of tennis,” Chase recalled. “In some of these regional matches, I intentionally started throwing matches, and, like, tanking, because I wanted to get home and party with my friends, basically.”
Chase’s mother, Elizabeth, couldn’t understand what was happening. He was losing now in the early rounds, when he used to win easily. It vexed her, and brought her to tears.
“So she reported this back to my father,” Chase said.
After hearing about Chase Koch’s failure on the court, Charles Koch invited his son to come down to Koch Industries headquarters for a talk. Chase expected that they might have lunch. When he arrived, there was no lunch.
Charles Koch gave his son a choice. Summer was about to begin, and Chase could do one of two things. He could spend his summer working for Koch Industries, or he could reapply himself to tennis and play competitively again.
Chase would be fifteen years old that summer. It was his last summer before high school. He chose to work for the family company. He thought that he would get an office job, learn some things, and have the evenings to spend time with his friends. Plus, he’d earn some money. The decision was easy.
“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,