Michael Kosta plays to a crowd with a cool confidence born of hundreds of college and professional tennis matches. He has never made it to the top of the game, but he has won his share of tournaments, and for a moment even this pressure-packed situation seems like just another third set.

But this is a comedy club, not a tennis court. Kosta opens his mouth and a joke tumbles out, the crowd roars with laughter, and the illusion is broken. The tennis player has somehow become a stand-up comedian, wielding a microphone instead of a racquet. He’s not just a comic, though – there is a book coming out, and some coaching on the side, and the TV show he dreams of hosting. His is a life ripe with aspirations, and it seems he could pick a new one at any time.

“It doesn’t make sense to me sometimes,” Kosta said. “And it certainly doesn’t make sense to my parents.”

At 26, Kosta still looks like an athlete on stage. His short brown hair tops an angular face, and the height that once let him launch booming serves now leaves him towering over his fellow comics. For a time, tennis seemed like all he would ever do. After a dominant junior career that included two Michigan state championships, Kosta chose the University of Illinois over the team he had grown up cheering for, the Michigan Wolverines. With the Illini, he quickly racked up wins, placing seventh all-time in singles victories at the school and winning the regular season Big Ten championship every year. By the time he graduated in 2002 he had spent 20 years preparing to be a professional tennis player.

The tour waited, but it would not be kind.

As soon as their final team competition ended, Kosta and fellow Illinois graduate Nathan Zeder went straight to Mexico for their first professional event. When they arrived, the courts were still blank cement without lines. Their hotel had no air conditioning, so Kosta took freezing showers each night and tried to sleep before he started sweating again. He lost in the first round of the singles tournament and made the quarterfinals of the doubles draw, earning $150 – not nearly enough to offset the $800 he spent to get there. By the end of the trip, Zeder was suffering from diarrhea.

“It wasn’t exactly a ‘Congratulations on turning pro’ tournament,” Kosta said.

It was the start of a hard road in the professional game. In his first year on the tour, Kosta spent 46 weeks away from home, winning some matches but never enough to start making money.

To finance his effort, he sold shares of himself for $5,000, then paid out portions of his prize money to his investors. In a good week, Kosta would spend $1,000 and earn $1,000. In a bad week, he would spend $1,000 and make $200.

After two years of life on the road, scraping together the money for lousy hotels each week, he’d had enough. One of his coaches at Illinois, Bruce Berque, took over as head coach with the Wolverines and offered him a job as an assistant. Kosta could not resist the opportunity to live in his hometown and make a steady salary. Life seemed settled.

The Entertainer

But for Kosta, tennis had never been about just tennis. It was about entertaining, being the center of attention, captivating a crowd with his racquet. No one paid attention to a coach. On a whim, shortly before starting his new job, he took a stand-up comedy gig at an Ann Arbor bar. There was that rush again, the feeling he had looked for since he was a child competing with three older brothers for his parents’ attention.

“I had always had the desire,” Kosta said. “When I was a kid, my parents wouldn’t let me watch SNL because I couldn’t fall asleep afterwards. When I took the gig, I didn’t think it would lead to anything, but I did know I loved it.”

Like many younger children, Kosta had spent his childhood trying to be as good as his brothers. He fought with them physically and to be noticed, developed the sort of outgoing, infectious personality that, he said, tends to spawn stand-up comics. His brothers played tennis recreationally, but by the time Michael was born the family had enough money to hire coaches and send him to tournaments. He relished the chance to be the best in the family, to avenge the wrestling moves his brothers had delivered to him while he was growing up.

That was what tennis was about – winning, being noticed, performing. Once he was in front of a crowd, Kosta treated the court like a stage. Tennis wasn’t a country club sport. It was a chance to entertain.

At times, Kosta’s coaches had to remind him that there were boundaries on what he could do. This was a guy who routinely won Halloween costume contests in Champaign by showing up at bars in a Speedo, chatting up the crowd and working the room while the votes poured in. Talking to people was easy for him, even without clothes on. When the Illini coaches decided to spice up a Los Angeles road trip by challenging the players to put together a street performance, there was the Speedo again. Naturally, he had brought it along. The competition was over almost by default.

“I know it sounds shallow, but I do enjoy being noticed,” Kosta said. “I always played better in front of a crowd.”

He was always looking for that audience. At Illinois, Kosta co-founded the Net Nuts, the first cheering section for a collegiate tennis team. The other organizers hoped for 50 fans at each match, but Kosta was tireless. He was the face of the campaign, showing up at fraternities and sororities, energizing hordes of college kids who had never held a racquet.

By the time the first match took place, 500 screaming, chanting Net Nuts crammed into Atkins Tennis Center. And each week, they kept coming. For opponents, it could be unnerving. This was not what tennis was supposed to be – tennis meant white shirts and soft applause after someone hit a good shot. But here was Kosta, encouraging the fans to tailgate before the match. He was, he said, in his element.

“He was a comedian even when he was on the tennis team,” Zeder said. “He was the center of attention at all times.”

Kosta studied speech communication in college, primarily because, for him, it was the easiest degree to get. He gives a different sort of speech now – he jokes about sex, his gambling woes, the difference between anorexic and bulimic women (“you don’t have to buy the anorexic girl dinner”), and even his mother’s disappointment in his comedy – but it is the same edgy material he used in college speeches.

“Speech communication is not rocket science,” Kosta said. “I took the classes and every time I gave a speech I just tried to be funny. I would give a speech and half the class would love it and the other half would be offended. About a year into it I thought ‘Oh my god, I’m trying to be a comic up here.'”

His friends talk of another side to Kosta, though, the side that would work tirelessly on his game and take notes on everything his coaches ever told him. After every practice he would approach Berque and repeat everything he had learned that day, making sure he had the last detail down in his journal.

For a man with Kosta’s drive, his work ethic, his meticulous approach to tennis, the Michigan coaching job was perfect. Or so his friends thought.

From the court to the stage

But that was not Michael. All of a sudden, the entertainer who had never held a job in his life was a full-time working man. How was he supposed to handle recruiting, scheduling and watching over eight college students on a cross-country trip? And how could Kosta, the entertainer, the center of attention, stand to the side as his players drew the cheers?

He was good at his job, Berque is quick to note, and loved working with younger players, but the workload was like nothing he had experienced. And then there was the lure of the stage, his comedy act becoming more popular, the club owners calling him to perform. The drive was there, but not for coaching.

When Kosta told his mother that he was quitting his job to become a stand-up comedian, she started sobbing. His friends assumed he was joking. Berque was disappointed, but what could he do? That was Michael.

“Selfishly, I wish he had stayed,” Berque said. “But he’s got to do what makes him happy. If he had his heart in comedy, he wouldn’t have done as great a job as a coach.”

Last June, on the same day he left his job after two years as a coach, Kosta held a launch party for his Web site, http://michaelkosta.com. All of his friends from the tennis world came to wish his tennis life goodbye and usher in comedy.

Like many of Kosta’s decisions, the choice was based on an idea that got into his head and consumed him. It was the same compulsion that had swept him up one night on the pro tour as he pored over that journal full of notes in a Mexican hotel room. If these tips could help him, why not some other player? He would write a book.

Never mind that the 864th-ranked tennis player in the world rarely gets a publishing contract. Kosta began writing, accumulating tips, then sent out samples to publishers. Here was a new way to have fans and receive attention. The same drive that fueled the tennis player took over the author. Thirty-nine rejections came in before he got a phone call showing interest.

The book, “101 Tips for Winning More Tennis Matches,” will be in stores next month.

So now there is Kosta, the comedian, the author, the tennis player, the coach. He is in the minor leagues again, of comedy instead of tennis, but he is making money now. He tours throughout the Midwest and has opened for famous names like Mitch Fatel. He returned to Champaign once – the first time he ever bombed a performance. He was hit by a beer can thrown from the audience and has yet to return.

But outside of Champaign, Kosta’s comedy career is blooming. There was a time when he had to take precise care of his body; now, fans send drinks to him on stage. Two women have even asked him to autograph their breasts – though not attractive ones, he is quick to joke. Those, he hopes, will come with fame. He is at ease, quick, bantering with the audience as if he had been doing it all his life.

“When I started doing comedy, everyone said, ‘you seem so comfortable on stage,'” Kosta said. “I was thinking, ‘I’ve been on stage the last 20 years playing tennis.'”