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