Open: An Autobiography

Open: An Autobiography

For Stefanie, Jaden, and Jaz

One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but still one feels certain barriers, certain gates, certain walls. Is all this imagination, fantasy? I do not think so. And then one asks: My God! Is it for long, is it for ever, is it for eternity? Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is very deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force.

—Vincent van Gogh, letter to his brother, July 1880

THE END

I OPEN MY EYES and don’t know where I am or who I am. Not all that unusual—I’ve spent half my life not knowing. Still, this feels different. This confusion is more frightening.

More total.

I look up. I’m lying on the floor beside the bed. I remember now. I moved from the bed to the floor in the middle of the night. I do that most nights. Better for my back. Too many hours on a soft mattress causes agony. I count to three, then start the long, difficult process of standing. With a cough, a groan, I roll onto my side, then curl into the fetal position, then flip over onto my stomach. Now I wait, and wait, for the blood to start pumping.

I’m a young man, relatively speaking. Thirty-six. But I wake as if ninety-six. After three decades of sprinting, stopping on a dime, jumping high and landing hard, my body no longer feels like my body, especially in the morning. Consequently my mind doesn’t feel like my mind. Upon opening my eyes I’m a stranger to myself, and while, again, this isn’t new, in the mornings it’s more pronounced. I run quickly through the basic facts. My name is Andre Agassi. My wife’s name is Stefanie Graf. We have two children, a son and daughter, five and three. We live in Las Vegas, Nevada, but currently reside in a suite at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City, because I’m playing in the 2006 U.S. Open. My last U.S. Open. In fact my last tournament ever. I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.

As this last piece of identity falls into place, I slide to my knees and in a whisper I say: Please let this be over.

Then: I’m not ready for it to be over.

Now, from the next room, I hear Stefanie and the children. They’re eating breakfast, talking, laughing. My overwhelming desire to see and touch them, plus a powerful craving for caffeine, gives me the inspiration I need to hoist myself up, to go vertical. Hate brings me to my knees, love gets me on my feet.

I glance at the bedside clock. Seven thirty. Stefanie let me sleep in. The fatigue of these final days has been severe. Apart from the physical strain, there is the exhausting torrent of emotions set loose by my pending retirement. Now, rising from the center of the fatigue comes the first wave of pain. I grab my back. It grabs me. I feel as if someone snuck in during the night and attached one of those anti-theft steering wheel locks to my spine. How can I play in the U.S. Open with the Club on my spine? Will the last match of my career be a forfeit?

I was born with spondylolisthesis, meaning a bottom vertebra that parted from the other vertebrae, struck out on its own, rebelled. (It’s the main reason for my pigeon-toed walk.) With this one vertebra out of sync, there’s less room for the nerves inside the column of my spine, and with the slightest movement the nerves feel that much more crowded. Throw in two herniated discs and a bone that won’t stop growing in a futile effort to protect the damaged area, and those nerves start to feel downright claustrophobic. When the nerves protest their cramped quarters, when they send out distress signals, a pain runs up and down my leg that makes me suck in my breath and speak in tongues. At such moments the only relief is to lie down and wait. Sometimes, however, the moment arrives in the middle of a match. Then the only remedy is to alter my game—swing differently, run differently, do everything differently.

That’s when my muscles spasm. Everyone avoids change; muscles can’t abide it. Told to change, my muscles join the spinal rebellion, and soon my whole body is at war with itself.

Gil, my trainer, my friend, my surrogate father, explains it this way: Your body is saying it doesn’t want to do this anymore.

My body has been saying that for a long time, I tell Gil. Almost as long as I’ve been saying it.

Since January, however, my body has been shouting it. My body doesn’t want to retire—my body has already retired. My body has moved to Florida and bought a condo and white Sansabelts. So I’ve been negotiating with my body, asking it to come out of retirement for a few hours here, a few hours there. Much of this negotiation revolves around a cortisone shot that temporarily dulls the pain. Before the shot works, however, it causes its own torments.

I got one yesterday, so I could play tonight. It was the third shot this year, the thirteenth of my career, and by far the most alarming. The doctor, not my regular doctor, told me brusquely to assume the position. I stretched out on his table, face down, and his nurse yanked down my shorts. The doctor said he needed to get his seven-inch needle as close to the inflamed nerves as possible. But he couldn’t enter directly, because my herniated discs and bone spur were blocking the path. His attempts to circumvent them, to break the Club, sent me through the roof. First he inserted the needle. Then he positioned a big machine over my back to see how close the needle was to the nerves. He needed to get that needle almost flush against the nerves, he said, without actually touching. If it were to touch the nerves, even if it were to only nick the nerves, the pain would ruin me for the tournament. It could also be life-changing.

In and out and around, he maneuvered the needle, until my eyes filled with water.

Finally he hit the spot. Bull’s-eye, he said.

In went the cortisone. The burning sensation made me bite my lip. Then came the pressure. I felt infused, embalmed. The tiny space in my spine where the nerves are housed began to feel vacuum packed. The pressure built until I thought my back would burst.

Pressure is how you know everything’s working, the doctor said.

Words to live by, Doc.

Soon the pain felt wonderful, almost sweet, because it was the kind that you can tell precedes relief. But maybe all pain is like that.

MY FAMILY IS GROWING LOUDER. I limp out to the living room of our suite. My son, Jaden, and my daughter, Jaz, see me and scream. Daddy, Daddy! They jump up and down and want to leap on me. I stop and brace myself, stand before them like a mime imitating a tree in winter. They stop just before leaping, because they know Daddy is delicate these days, Daddy will shatter if they touch him too hard. I pat their faces and kiss their cheeks and join them at the breakfast table.

Jaden asks if today is the day.

Yes.

You’re playing?

Yes.

And then after today are you retire?

A new word he and his younger sister have learned. Retired. When they say it, they always leave off the last letter. For them it’s retire, forever ongoing, permanently in the present tense. Maybe they know something I don’t.

Not if I win, son. If I win tonight, I keep playing.

But if you lose—we can have a dog?

To the children, retire equals puppy. Stefanie and I have promised them that when I stop training, when we stop traveling the world, we can buy a puppy. Maybe we’ll name him Cortisone.

Yes, buddy, when I lose, we will buy a dog.

He smiles. He hopes Daddy loses, hopes Daddy experiences the disappointment that surpasses all others. He doesn’t understand—and how will I ever be able to explain it to him?—the pain of losing, the pain of playing. It’s taken me nearly thirty years to understand it myself, to solve the calculus of my own psyche.

I ask Jaden what he’s doing today.

Going to see the bones.

I look at Stefanie. She reminds me she’s taking them to the Museum of Natural History.

Dinosaurs. I think of my twisted vertebrae. I think of my skeleton on display at the museum with all the other dinosaurs. Tennis-aurus Rex.

Jaz interrupts my thoughts. She hands me her muffin. She needs me to pick out the blueberries before she eats it. Our morning ritual. Each blueberry must be surgically removed, which requires precision, concentration. Stick the knife in, move it around, get it right up to the blueberry without touching. I focus on her muffin and it’s a relief to think about something other than tennis. But as I hand her the muffin, I can’t pretend that it doesn’t feel like a tennis ball, which makes the muscles in my back twitch with anticipation. The time is drawing near.

AFTER BREAKFAST, after Stefanie and the kids have kissed me goodbye and run off to the museum, I sit quietly at the table, looking around the suite. It’s like every hotel suite I’ve ever had, only more so. Clean, chic, comfortable—it’s the Four Seasons, so it’s lovely, but it’s still just another version of what I call Not Home. The non-place we exist as athletes. I close my eyes, try to think about tonight, but my mind drifts backward. My mind these days has a natural backspin. Given half a chance it wants to return to the beginning, because I’m so close to the end. But I can’t let it. Not yet. I can’t afford to dwell too long on the past. I get up and walk around the table, test my balance. When I feel fairly steady I walk gingerly to the shower.

Under the hot water I groan and scream. I bend slowly, touch my quads, start to come alive. My muscles loosen. My skin sings. My pores fly open. Warm blood goes sluicing through my veins. I feel something begin to stir. Life. Hope. The last drops of youth. Still, I make no sudden movements. I don’t want to do anything to startle my spine. I let my spine sleep in.

Standing at the bathroom mirror, toweling off, I stare at my face. Red eyes, gray stubble—a face totally different from the one with which I started. But also different from the one I saw last year in this same mirror. Whoever I might be, I’m not the boy who started this odyssey, and I’m not even the man who announced three months ago that the odyssey was coming to an end. I’m like a tennis racket on which I’ve replaced the grip four times and the strings seven times—is it accurate to call it the same racket? Somewhere in those eyes, however, I can still vaguely see the boy who didn’t want to play tennis in the first place, the boy who wanted to quit, the boy who did quit many times. I see that golden-haired boy who hated tennis, and I wonder how he would view this bald man, who still hates tennis and yet still plays. Would he be shocked? Amused? Proud? The question makes me weary, lethargic, and it’s only noon.

Please let this be over.

I’m not ready for it to be over.

The finish line at the end of a career is no different from the finish line at the end of a match. The objective is to get within reach of that finish line, because then it gives off a magnetic force. When you’re close, you can feel that force pulling you, and you can use that force to get across. But just before you come within range, or just after, you feel another force, equally strong, pushing you away. It’s inexplicable, mystical, these twin forces, these contradictory energies, but they both exist. I know, because I’ve spent much of my life seeking the one, fighting the other, and sometimes I’ve been stuck, suspended, bounced like a tennis ball between the two.

Tonight: I remind myself that it will require iron discipline to cope with these forces, and whatever else comes my way. Back pain, bad shots, foul weather, self-loathing. It’s a form of worry, this reminder, but also a meditation. One thing I’ve learned in twenty-nine years of playing tennis: Life will throw everything but the kitchen sink in your path, and then it will throw the kitchen sink. It’s your job to avoid the obstacles. If you let them stop you or distract you, you’re not doing your job, and failing to do your job will cause regrets that paralyze you more than a bad back.

I lie on the bed with a glass of water and read. When my eyes get tired I click on the TV.

Tonight, Round Two of the U.S. Open! Will this be Andre Agassi’s farewell? My face flashes on the screen. A different face than the one in the mirror. My game face. I study this new reflection of me in the distorted mirror that is TV and my anxiety rises another click or two. Was that the final commercial? The final time CBS will ever promote one of my matches?

I can’t escape the feeling that I’m about to die.

It’s no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it’s all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It’s our choice.

But if tennis is life, then what follows tennis must be the unknowable void. The thought makes me cold.

Stefanie bursts through the door with the kids. They flop on the bed, and my son asks how I’m feeling.

Fine, fine. How were the bones?

Fun!

Stefanie gives them sandwiches and juice and hustles them out the door again.

They have a playdate, she says.

Don’t we all.

Now I can take a nap. At thirty-six, the only way I can play a late match, which could go past midnight, is if I get a nap beforehand. Also, now that I know roughly who I am, I want to close my eyes and hide from it. When I open my eyes, one hour has passed. I say aloud, It’s time. No more hiding. I step into the shower again, but this shower is different from the morning shower. The afternoon shower is always longer—twenty-two minutes, give or take—and it’s not for waking up or getting clean. The afternoon shower is for encouraging myself, coaching myself.

Tennis is the sport in which you talk to yourself. No athletes talk to themselves like tennis players. Pitchers, golfers, goalkeepers, they mutter to themselves, of course, but tennis players talk to themselves—and answer. In the heat of a match, tennis players look like lunatics in a public square, ranting and swearing and conducting Lincoln-Douglas debates with their alter egos. Why? Because tennis is so damned lonely. Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players—and yet boxers have their corner men and managers. Even a boxer’s opponent provides a kind of companionship, someone he can grapple with and grunt at. In tennis you stand face-to-face with the enemy, trade blows with him, but never touch him or talk to him, or anyone else. The rules forbid a tennis player from even talking to his coach while on the court. People sometimes mention the track-and-field runner as a comparably lonely figure, but I have to laugh. At least the runner can feel and smell his opponents. They’re inches away. In tennis you’re on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement, which inevitably leads to self-talk, and for me the self-talk starts here in the afternoon shower. This is when I begin to say things to myself, crazy things, over and over, until I believe them. For instance, that a quasi-cripple can compete at the U.S.

Open. That a thirty-six-year-old man can beat an opponent just entering his prime. I’ve won 869 matches in my career, fifth on the all-time list, and many were won during the afternoon shower.

With the water roaring in my ears—a sound not unlike twenty thousand fans—I recall particular wins. Not wins the fans would remember, but wins that still wake me at night. Squillari in Paris. Blake in New York. Pete in Australia. Then I recall a few losses. I shake my head at the disappointments. I tell myself that tonight will be an exam for which I’ve been studying twenty-nine years. Whatever happens tonight, I’ve already been through it at least once before. If it’s a physical test, if it’s mental, it’s nothing new.

Please let this be over.

I don’t want it to be over.

I start to cry. I lean against the wall of the shower and let go.

I GIVE MYSELF STRICT ORDERS as I shave: Take it one point at a time. Make him work for everything. No matter what happens, hold your head up. And for God’s sake enjoy it, or at least try to enjoy moments of it, even the pain, even the losing, if that’s what’s in store.

I think about my opponent, Marcos Baghdatis, and wonder what he’s doing at this moment. He’s new to the tour, but not your typical newcomer. He’s ranked number eight in the world. He’s a big strong Greek kid from Cyprus, in the middle of a superb year. He’s reached the final of the Australian Open and the semis of Wimbledon. I know him fairly well. During last year’s U.S. Open we played a practice set. Typically I don’t play practice sets with other players during a Grand Slam, but Baghdatis asked with disarming grace. A TV show from Cyprus was doing a piece about him, and he asked if it would be all right if they filmed us practicing. Sure, I said. Why not? I won the practice set, 6–2, and afterward he was all smiles.

I saw that he’s the type who smiles when he’s happy or nervous, and you can’t tell which. It reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who.

I told Baghdatis that he played a little like me, and he said it was no accident. He grew up with pictures of me on his bedroom wall, patterned his game after mine. In other words, tonight I’ll be playing my mirror image. He’ll play from the back of the court, take the ball early, swing for the fences, just like me. It’s going to be toe-to-toe tennis, each of us trying to impose our will, each of us looking for chances to smoke a backhand up the line. He doesn’t have an overwhelming serve, nor do I, which means long points, long rallies, lots of energy and time expended. I brace myself for flurries, combinations, a tennis of attrition, the most brutal form of the sport.

Of course the one stark difference between me and Baghdatis is physical. We have different bodies. He has my former body. He’s nimble, fast, spry. I’ll have to beat the younger version of myself if I am to keep the older version going. I close my eyes and say: Control what you can control.

I say it again, aloud. Saying it aloud makes me feel brave.

I shut off the water and stand, shivering. How much easier it is to be brave under a stream of piping hot water. I remind myself, however, that hot-water bravery isn’t true bravery. What you feel doesn’t matter in the end; it’s what you do that makes you brave.

STEFANIE AND THE KIDS RETURN. Time to make the Gil Water.

I sweat a lot, more than most players, so I need to begin hydrating many hours before a match. I down quarts of a magic elixir invented for me by Gil, my trainer for the last seventeen years. Gil Water is a blend of carbs, electrolytes, salt, vitamins, and a few other ingredients Gil keeps a closely guarded secret. (He’s been tinkering with his recipe for two decades.) He usually starts force-feeding me Gil Water the night before a match, and keeps forcing me right up to match time. Then I sip it as the match wears on. At different stages I sip different ver-sions, each a different color. Pink for energy, red for recovery, brown for replenishment.

The kids love helping me mix Gil Water. They fight over who gets to scoop out the powders, who gets to hold the funnel, who gets to pour it all into plastic water bottles. No one but me, however, can pack the bottles into my bag, along with my clothes and towels and books and shades and wristbands. (My rackets, as always, go in later.) No one but me touches my tennis bag, and when it’s finally packed, it stands by the door, like an assassin’s kit, a sign that the day has lurched that much closer to the witching hour.

At five, Gil rings from the lobby.

He says, You ready? Time to throw down. It’s on, Andre. It’s on.

Nowadays everyone says It’s on, but Gil has been saying it for years, and no one says it the way he does. When Gil says It’s on, I feel my booster rockets fire, my adrenaline glands pump like geysers. I feel as if I can lift a car over my head.

Stefanie gathers the children at the door and tells them it’s time for Daddy to leave. What do you say, guys?

Jaden shouts, Kick butt, Daddy!

Kick butt, Jaz says, copying her brother.

Stefanie kisses me and says nothing, because there’s nothing to say.

IN THE TOWN CAR Gil sits in the front seat, dressed sharp. Black shirt, black tie, black jacket. He dresses for every match as if it’s a blind date or a mob hit. Now and then he checks his long black hair in the side mirror or rearview. I sit in the backseat with Darren, my coach, an Aussie who always rocks a Hollywood tan and the smile of a guy who just hit the Powerball. For a few minutes no one says anything. Then Gil speaks the lyrics of one of our favorites, an old Roy Clark ballad, and his deep basso fills the car: Just going through the motions and pretending

we have something left to gain—

He looks to me, waits.

I say, We Can’t Build a Fire in the Rain.

He laughs. I laugh. For a second I forget my nervous butterflies.

Butterflies are funny. Some days they make you run to the toilet. Other days they make you horny. Other days they make you laugh, and long for the fight. Deciding which type of butterflies you’ve got going (monarchs or moths) is the first order of business when you’re driving to the arena. Figuring out your butterflies, deciphering what they say about the status of your mind and body, is the first step to making them work for you. One of the thousand lessons I’ve learned from Gil.

I ask Darren for his thoughts on Baghdatis. How aggressive do I want to be tonight? Tennis is about degrees of aggression. You want to be aggressive enough to control a point, not so aggressive that you sacrifice control and expose yourself to unnecessary risk. My questions about Baghdatis are these: How will he try to hurt me? If I hit a backhand cross-court to start a point, some players will be patient, others will make a statement right away, crush the ball up the line or come hard to the net. Since I’ve never played Baghdatis outside of our one practice set, I want to know how he’ll react to conservative play. Will he step up and jack that routine crosscourt, or lie back, bide his time?

Darren says, Mate, I think if you get too conservative on your rally shot, you can expect this guy to move around it and hurt you with his forehand.

I see.

As far as his backhand goes, he can’t hit it easily up the line. He won’t be quick to pull that trigger. So if you find he is hitting backhands up the line, that definitely means you’re not putting enough steam on your rally shot.

Does he move well?

Yes, he’s a good mover. But he’s not comfortable being on the defensive. He’s a better mover offensively than defensively.

Hm.

We pull up to the stadium. Fans are milling about. I sign a few autographs, then duck through a small door. I walk down a long tunnel and into the locker room. Gil goes off to consult with security. He always wants them to know exactly when we’re going out to the court to practice, and when we’re coming back. Darren and I drop our bags and walk straight to the training room. I lie on a table and beg the first trainer who comes near me to knead my back.

Darren ducks out and returns five minutes later, carrying eight freshly strung rackets. He sets them atop my bag. He knows I want to place them in the bag myself.

I obsess about my bag. I keep it meticulously organized, and I make no apologies for this anal retentiveness. The bag is my briefcase, suitcase, toolbox, lunchbox, and palette. I need it just right, always. The bag is what I carry onto the court, and what I carry off, two moments when all my senses are extra acute, so I can feel every ounce of its weight. If someone were to slip a pair of argyle socks into my tennis bag, I’d feel it. The tennis bag is a lot like your heart—you have to know what’s in it at all times.

It’s also a question of functionality. I need my eight rackets stacked chronologically in the tennis bag, the most recently strung racket on the bottom and the least recently strung on the top, because the longer a racket sits, the more tension it loses. I always start a match with the racket strung least recently, because I know that’s the racket with the loosest tension.

My racket stringer is old school, Old World, a Czech artiste named Roman. He’s the best, and he needs to be: a string job can mean the difference in a match, and a match can mean the difference in a career, and a career can mean the difference in countless lives. When I pull a fresh racket from my bag and try to serve out a match, the string tension can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because I’m playing for my family, my charitable foundation, my school, every string is like a wire in an airplane engine. Given all that lies beyond my control, I obsess about the few things I can control, and racket tension is one such thing.

So vital is Roman to my game that I take him on the road. He’s officially a resident of New York, but when I’m playing in Wimbledon, he lives in London, and when I’m playing in the French Open, he’s a Parisian. Occasionally, feeling lost and lonely in some foreign city, I’ll sit with Roman and watch him string a few rackets. It’s not that I don’t trust him. Just the opposite: I’m calmed, grounded, inspired by watching a craftsman. It reminds me of the singular importance in this world of a job done well.

The raw rackets come to Roman in a great big box from the factory, and they’re always a mess. To the naked eye they look identical; to Roman they’re as different as faces in a crowd.

He spins them, back and forth, furrows his brow, then makes his calculations. At last he begins. He starts by removing the factory grip and putting on my grip, the custom grip I’ve had since I was fourteen. My grip is as personal as my thumbprint, a by-product not just of my hand shape and finger length but the size of my calluses and the force of my squeeze. Roman has a mold of my grip, which he applies to the racket. Then he wraps the mold with calf-skin, which he pounds thinner and thinner until it’s the width he wants. A millimeter difference, near the end of a four-hour match, can feel as irritating and distracting as a pebble in my shoe.

With the grip just so, Roman laces in the synthetic strings. He tightens them, loosens them, tightens them, tunes them as carefully as strings on a viola. Then he stencils them and vigorously waves them through the air, to let the stenciling dry. Some stringers stencil the rackets right before match time, which I find wildly inconsiderate and unprofessional. The stencil rubs off on the balls, and there’s nothing worse than playing a guy who gets red and black paint on the balls. I like order and cleanliness, and that means no stencil-specked balls.

Disorder is distraction, and every distraction on the court is a potential turning point.

Darren opens two cans of balls and shoves two balls in his pocket. I take a gulp of Gil Water, then a last leak before warm-ups. James, the security guard, leads us into the tunnel. As usual he’s squeezed into a tight yellow security shirt, and he gives me a wink, as if to say, We security guards are supposed to be impartial, but I’m rooting for you.

James has been at the U.S. Open almost as long as I have. He’s led me down this tunnel before and after glorious wins and excruciating losses. Large, kind, with tough-guy scars that he wears with pride, James is a bit like Gil. It’s almost as though he takes over for Gil during those few hours on the court, when I’m outside Gil’s sphere of influence. There are people you count on seeing at the U.S. Open—office staffers, ball boys, trainers—and their presence is always reassuring. They help you remember where and who you are. James is at the top of that list. He’s one of the first people I look for when I walk into Arthur Ashe Stadium. Seeing him, I know I’m back in New York, and I’m in good hands.

Ever since 1993, when a spectator in Hamburg rushed onto the court and stabbed Monica Seles during a match, the U.S. Open has positioned one security guard behind each player’s chair during all breaks and changeovers. James always makes sure to be the one behind my chair. His inability to remain impartial is endlessly charming. During a grueling match, I’ll often catch James looking concerned, and I’ll whisper, Don’t worry, James, I’ve got this chump today. It always makes him chuckle.

Now, walking me out to the practice courts, he’s not chuckling. He looks sad. He knows that this could be our last night together. Still, he doesn’t deviate from our pre-match ritual. He says the same thing he always says:

Let me help you with that bag.

No, James, no one carries my bag but me.

I’ve told James that when I was seven years old I saw Jimmy Connors make someone carry his bag, as though he were Julius Caesar. I vowed then and there that I would always carry my own.

OK, James says, smiling. I know, I know. I remember. Just wanted to help.

Then I say: James, you got my back today?

I got your back, baby. I got it. Don’t worry about nothing. Just take care of business.

We emerge into a dusky September night, the sky a smear of violet and orange and smog. I walk to the stands, shake hands with a few fans, sign a few more autographs before practicing. There are four practice courts, and James knows I want the one farthest from the crowd, so Darren and I can have a little privacy as we hit and talk strategy.

I groan as I guide the first backhand up the line to Darren’s forehand.

Don’t hit that shot tonight, he says. Baghdatis will hurt you with that.

Really?

Trust me, mate.

And you say he moves well?

Yes, quite well.

We hit for twenty-eight minutes. I don’t know why I notice these details—the length of an afternoon shower, the duration of a practice session, the color of James’s shirt. I don’t want to notice, but I do, all the time, and then I remember forever. My memory isn’t like my tennis bag; I have no say over its contents. Everything goes in, and nothing ever seems to come out.

My back feels OK. Normal stiffness, but the excruciating pain is gone. The cortisone is working. I feel good—though, of course, the definition of good has evolved in recent years.

Still, I feel better than I did when I opened my eyes this morning, when I thought of forfeiting. I might be able to do this. Of course tomorrow there will be severe physical consequences, but I can’t dwell on tomorrow any more than I can dwell on yesterday.

Back inside the locker room I pull off my sweaty clothes and jump in the shower. My third shower of the day is short, utilitarian. No time for coaching or crying. I slip on dry shorts, a T-shirt, put my feet up in the training room. I drink more Gil Water, as much as I can hold, because it’s six thirty, and the match is nearly one hour off.

There is a TV above the training table, and I try to watch the news. I can’t. I walk down to the offices and look in on the secretaries and officials of the U.S. Open. They’re busy. They don’t have time to talk. I step through a small door. Stefanie and the children have arrived.

They’re in a little playground outside the locker room. Jaden and Jaz are taking turns on the plastic slide. Stefanie is grateful, I can tell, to have the children here for distraction. She’s more keyed up than I. She looks almost irritated. Her frown says, This thing should have started already! Come on! I love the way my wife spoils for a fight.

I talk to her and the children for a few minutes, but I can’t hear a word they’re saying. My mind is far away. Stefanie sees. She feels. You don’t win twenty-two Grand Slams without a highly developed intuition. Besides, she was the same way before her matches. She sends me back into the locker room: Go. We’ll be here. Do what you need to do.

She won’t watch the match from ground level. It’s too close for her. She’ll stay in a skybox with the children, alternately pacing, praying, and covering her eyes.

PERE, ONE OF the senior trainers, walks in. I can tell which of his trays is for me: the one with the two giant foam donuts and two dozen precut strips of tape. I lie on one of six training tables, and Pere sits at my feet. A messy business, getting these dogs ready for war, so he puts a trash can under them. I like that Pere is tidy, meticulous, the Roman of calluses. First he takes a long Q-tip and applies an inky goo that makes my skin sticky, my instep purple.

There’s no washing off that ink. My instep hasn’t been ink-free since Reagan was president.

Now Pere sprays on skin toughener. He lets that dry, then taps a foam donut onto each callus. Next come the strips of tape, which are like rice paper. They instantly become part of my skin. He wraps each big toe until it’s the size of a sparkplug. Finally he tapes the bottoms of my feet. He knows my pressure points, where I land, where I need extra layers of padding.

I thank him, put on my shoes, unlaced. Now, as everything begins to slow down, the volume goes up. Moments ago the stadium was quiet, now it’s beyond loud. The air is filled with a buzzing, a humming, the sound of fans rushing to their seats, hurrying to get settled, because they don’t want to miss a minute of what’s coming.

I stand, shake out my legs.

I won’t sit again.

I try a jog down the hall. Not bad. The back is holding. All systems go.

Across the locker room I see Baghdatis. He’s suited up, fussing with his hair in front of a mirror. He’s flicking it, combing it, pulling it back. Wow, he has a lot of hair. Now he’s positioning his headband, a white Cochise wrap. He gets it perfect, then gives one last tug on his ponytail. A decidedly more glamorous pre-match ritual than cushioning your toe calluses. I remember my hair issues early in my career. For a moment I feel jealous. I miss my hair. Then I run a hand over my bare scalp and feel grateful that, with all the things I’m worried about right now, hair isn’t one of them.

Baghdatis begins stretching, bending at the waist. He stands on one leg and pulls one knee to his chest. Nothing is quite so unsettling as watching your opponent do pilates, yoga, and tai chi when you can’t so much as curtsy. He now maneuvers his hips in ways I haven’t dared since I was seven.

And yet he’s doing too much. He’s antsy. I can almost hear his central nervous system, a sound like the buzz of the stadium. I watch the interaction between him and his coaches, and they’re antsy too. Their faces, their body language, their coloring, everything tells me they know they’re in for a street fight, and they’re not sure they want it. I always like my opponent and his team to show nervous energy. A good omen, but also a sign of respect.

Baghdatis sees me and smiles. I remember that he smiles when he’s happy or nervous, and you can never tell which. Again, it reminds me of someone, and I can’t think who.

I raise a hand. Good luck.

He raises a hand. We who are about to die …

I duck into the tunnel for one last word with Gil, who’s staked out a corner where he can be alone but still keep an eye on everything. He puts his arms around me, tells me he loves me, he’s proud of me. I find Stefanie and give her one last kiss. She’s bobbing, weaving, stomping her feet. She’d give anything to slip on a skirt, grab a racket, and join me out there.

My pugnacious bride. She tries a smile but it ends up a wince. I see in her face everything she wants to say but will not let herself say. I hear every word she refuses to utter: Enjoy, savor, take it all in, notice each fleeting detail, because this could be it, and even though you hate tennis, you might just miss it after tonight.

This is what she wants to say, but instead she kisses me and says what she always says before I go out there, the thing I’ve come to count on like air and sleep and Gil Water.

Go kick some butt.

AN OFFICIAL OF THE U.S. OPEN, wearing a suit and carrying a walkie-talkie as long as my forearm, approaches. He seems to be in charge of network coverage and on-court security. He seems to be in charge of everything, including arrivals and departures at LaGuardia.

Five minutes, he says.

I turn to someone and ask, What time is it?

Go time, they say.

No. I mean, what time? Is it seven thirty? Seven twenty? I don’t know, and it suddenly feels important. But there are no clocks.

Darren and I turn to each other. His Adam’s apple goes up and down.

Mate, he says, your homework is done. You’re ready.

I nod.

He holds out his fist for a bump. Just one bump, because that’s what we did before my first-round win earlier this week. We’re both superstitious, so however we start a tournament, that’s how we finish. I stare at Darren’s fist, give it one decisive bump, but don’t dare lift my gaze and make eye contact. I know Darren is tearing up, and I know what that sight will do to me.

Last things: I lace up my shoes. I tape my wrist. I always tape my own wrist, ever since my injury in 1993. I tie my shoes.

Please let this be over.

I’m not ready for it to be over.

Mr. Agassi, it’s time.

I’m ready.

I walk into the tunnel, three steps behind Baghdatis, James again leading the way. We stop, wait for a signal. The buzzing sound all around us becomes louder. The tunnel is meat-locker cold. I know this tunnel as well as I know the front foyer of my house, and yet tonight it feels about fifty degrees colder than usual and a football field longer. I look to the side. There along the walls are the familiar photos of former champions. Navratilova. Lendl. McEnroe.

Stefanie. Me. The portraits are three feet tall and spaced evenly—too evenly. They’re like trees in a new suburban development. I tell myself: Stop noticing such things. Time to narrow your mind, the way the tunnel narrows your vision.

The head of security yells, OK, everyone, it’s showtime!

We walk.

By careful prearrangement, Baghdatis stays three paces ahead as we move toward the light. Suddenly a second light, a blinding ethereal light, is in our faces. A TV camera. A reporter asks Baghdatis how he feels. He says something I can’t hear.

Now the camera is closer to my face and the reporter is asking the same question.

Could be your last match ever, the reporter says. How does that make you feel?

I answer, no idea what I’m saying. But after years of practice I have a sense that I’m saying what he wants me to say, what I’m expected to say. Then I resume walking, on legs that don’t feel like my own.

The temperature rises dramatically as we near the door to the court. The buzzing is now deafening. Baghdatis bursts through first. He knows how much attention my retirement has been getting. He reads the papers. He expects to play the villain tonight. He thinks he’s prepared. I let him go, let him hear the buzzing turn to cheers. I let him think the crowd is cheering for both of us. Then I walk out. Now the cheers triple. Baghdatis turns and realizes the first cheer was for him, but this cheer is mine, all mine, which forces him to revise his expectations and reconsider what’s in store. Without hitting a single ball I’ve caused a major swing in his sense of well-being. A trick of the trade. An old-timer’s trick.

The crowd gets louder as we find our way to our chairs. It’s louder than I thought it would be, louder than I’ve ever heard it in New York. I keep my eyes lowered, let the noise wash over me. They love this moment; they love tennis. I wonder how they would feel if they knew my secret. I stare at the court. Always the most abnormal part of my life, the court is now the only space of normalcy in all this turmoil. The court, where I’ve felt so lonely and exposed, is where I now hope to find refuge from this emotional moment.

I CRUISE THROUGH THE FIRST SET, winning 6–4. The ball obeys my every command.

So does my back. My body feels warm, liquid. Cortisone and adrenaline, working together. I win the second set, 6–4. I see the finish line.

In the third set I start to tire. I lose focus and control. Baghdatis, meanwhile, changes his game plan. He plays with desperation, a more powerful drug than cortisone. He starts to live in the now. He takes risks, and every risk pays off. The ball now disobeys me and conspires with him. It consistently bounces his way, which gives him confidence. I see the confidence shining from his eyes. His initial despair has turned to hope. No, anger. He doesn’t admire me anymore. He hates me, and I hate him, and now we’re sneering and snarling and trying to wrest this thing from each other. The crowd feeds on our anger, shrieking, pounding their feet after every point. They’re not clapping their hands as much as slapping them, and it all sounds primitive and tribal.

He wins the third set, 6–3.

I can do nothing to slow the Baghdatis onslaught. On the contrary, it’s getting worse. He’s twenty-one, after all, just warming up. He’s found his rhythm, his reason for being out here, his right to be here, whereas I’ve burned through my second wind and I’m painfully aware of the clock inside my body. I don’t want a fifth set. I can’t handle a fifth set. My mortality now a factor, I start to take my own risks. I grab a 4–0 lead. I’m up two service breaks, and again the finish line is within sight, within reach. I feel the magnetic force, pulling me.

Then I feel the other force pushing. Baghdatis starts to play his best tennis of the year. He just remembered he’s number eight in the world. He pulls triggers on shots I didn’t know he had in his repertoire. I’ve set a perilously high standard, but now he meets me there, and exceeds me. He breaks me to go 4–1. He holds serve to go 4–2.

Here comes the biggest game of the match. If I win this game, I retake command of this set and reestablish in his mind—and mine—that he was fortunate to get one break back. If I lose, it’s 4–3, and everything resets. Our night will begin again. Though we’ve bludgeoned each other for ten rounds, if I lose this game the fight will start over. We play at a furious pace. He goes for broke, holds nothing back—wins the game.

He’s going to take this set. He’ll die before he loses this set. I know it and he knows it and everyone in this stadium knows it. Twenty minutes ago I was two games from winning and advancing. I’m now on the brink of collapse.

He wins the set, 7–5.

The fifth set begins. I’m serving, shaking, unsure my body can hold out for another ten minutes, facing a kid who seems to be getting younger and stronger with every point. I tell myself, Do not let it end this way. Of all ways, not this way, not giving up a two-set lead.

Baghdatis is talking to himself also, urging himself on. We ride a seesaw, a pendulum of high-energy points. He makes a mistake. I give it back. He digs in. I dig in deeper. I’m serving at deuce, and we play a frantic point that ends when he hits a backhand drop shot that I wing in-to the net. I scream at myself. Advantage Baghdatis. The first time I’ve trailed him all night.

Shake it off. Control what you can control, Andre.

I win the next point. Deuce again. Elation.

I give him the next point. Backhand into the net. Advantage Baghdatis. Depression.

He wins the next point also, wins the game, breaks to go up 1–0.

We walk to our chairs. I hear the crowd murmuring the first Agassi eulogies. I take a sip of Gil Water, feeling sorry for myself, feeling old. I look over at Baghdatis, wondering if he’s feeling cocky. Instead he’s asking a trainer to rub his legs. He’s asking for a medical time-out. His left quad is strained. He did that to me on a strained quad?

The crowd uses the lull in the action to chant. Let’s go, Andre! Let’s go, Andre! They start a wave. They hold up signs with my name.

Thanks for the memories, Andre!

This is Andre’s House.

At last Baghdatis is ready to go. His serve. Having just broken me to take the lead in the match, he should have a full head of steam. But instead the lull seems to have disrupted his rhythm. I break him. We’re back on serve.

For the next six games we each hold. Then, knotted at four–all, with me serving, we play a game that seems to last a week, one of the most taxing and unreal games of my career. We grunt like animals, hit like gladiators, his forehand, my backhand. Everyone in the stadium stops breathing. Even the wind stops. Flags go limp against the poles. At 40–30, Baghdatis hits a swift forehand that sweeps me out of position. I barely get there in time to put my racket on it. I sling the ball over the net—screaming in agony—and he hits another scorcher to my backhand. I scurry in the opposite direction—oh, my back!—and reach the ball just in time.

But I’ve wrenched my spine. The spinal column is locked up and the nerves inside are keen-ing. Goodbye, cortisone. Baghdatis hits a winner to the open court and as I watch it sail by I know that for the rest of this night my best effort is behind me. Whatever I do from this point on will be limited, compromised, borrowed against my future health and mobility.

I look across the net to see if Baghdatis has noticed my pain, but he’s hobbling. Hobbling?

He’s cramping. He falls to the ground, grabbing his legs. He’s in more pain than I. I’ll take a congenital back condition over sudden leg cramps any day. As he writhes on the ground I realize: All I have to do is stay upright, move this goddamned ball around a little while longer, and let his cramps do their work.

I abandon all thought of subtlety and strategy. I say to myself, Fundamentals. When you play someone wounded, it’s about instinct and reaction. This will no longer be tennis, but a raw test of wills. No more jabs, no more feints, no more footwork. Nothing but roundhouses and haymakers.

Back on his feet, Baghdatis too has stopped strategizing, stopped thinking, which makes him more dangerous. I can no longer predict what he’ll do. He’s crazed with pain, and no one can predict crazy, least of all on a tennis court. At deuce, I miss my first serve, then give him a fat, juicy second serve, seventy-something miles an hour, on which he unloads. Winner. Advantage Baghdatis.

Shit. I slump forward. The guy can’t move, but he still crushes my serve?

Now, yet again, I’m one slender, skittish point away from falling behind 4–5, which will set up Baghdatis to serve for the match. I close my eyes. I miss my first serve again. I hit another tentative second serve just to get the point going and somehow he flubs an easy forehand.

Deuce again.

When your mind and body teeter on the verge of all-out collapse, one easy point like that feels like a pardon from the governor. And yet, I nearly squander my pardon. I miss my first serve. I make my second and he returns it wide. Another gift. Advantage Agassi.

I’m one point from a commanding 5–4 lead. Baghdatis grimaces, bears down. He won’t yield. He wins the point. Deuce number three.

I promise myself that if I gain the advantage again, I won’t lose it.

By now Baghdatis isn’t merely cramping, he’s a cripple. Awaiting my serve, he’s fully bent over. I can’t believe he’s managing to stay on the court, let alone give me such a game. The guy has as much heart as he has hair. I feel for him, and at the same time tell myself to show him no mercy. I serve, he returns, and in my eagerness to hit to the open court, I hit far wide.

Out. A choke. Clearly, a choke. Advantage Baghdatis.

He can’t capitalize, however. On the next point he hits a forehand several feet beyond the baseline. Deuce number four.

We have a long rally, ending when I drive a deep shot to his forehand that he misplays.

Advantage Agassi. Again. I promised myself I wouldn’t waste this opportunity if it came around again, and here it is. But Baghdatis won’t let me keep the promise. He quickly wins the next point. Deuce number five.

We play an absurdly long point. Every ball he hits, moaning, catches a piece of the line.

Every ball I hit, screaming, somehow clears the net. Forehand, backhand, trick shot, diving shot—then he hits a ball that nicks the baseline and takes a skittish sideways hop. I catch it on the rise and hit it twenty feet over him and the baseline. Advantage Baghdatis.

Stick to basics, Andre. Run him, run him. He’s gimpy, just make him move. I serve, he hits a vanilla return, I send him side to side until he yowls in pain and hits the ball into the net.

Deuce number six.

While waiting for my next serve, Baghdatis is leaning on his racket, using it as an old man uses a walking stick. When I miss a first serve, however, he creeps forward, crablike, and with his walking stick he whacks my serve well beyond the reach of my forehand. Advantage Baghdatis.

His fourth break point of this game. I hit a timid first serve, so paltry, so meek, my seven-year-old self would have been ashamed, and yet Baghdatis hits a defensive return. I hit to his forehand. He nets. Deuce number seven.

I make another first serve. He gets a racket on it but can’t get it over the net. Advantage Agassi.

I’m serving again for the game. I recall my twice-broken promise. Here, one last chance.

My back, however, is spasming. I can barely turn, let alone toss the ball and hit it 120 miles an hour. I miss my first serve, of course. I want to crush a second serve, be aggressive, but I can’t. Physically I cannot. I tell myself, Three-quarter kick, put the ball above his shoulder, make him go side to side until he pukes blood. Just don’t double-fault.

Easier said than done. The box is shrinking. I watch it gradually diminish in size. Can everyone else see what I’m seeing? The box is now the size of a playing card, so small that I’m not sure this ball would fit if I walked it over there and set it down. I toss the ball, hit an al-ligator-armed serve. Out. Of course. Double fault. Deuce number eight.

The crowd screams in disbelief.

I manage to make a first serve. Baghdatis hits a workmanlike return. With three-quarters of his court wide open, I punch the ball deep to his backhand, ten feet from him. He scampers toward it, waves his racket limply, can’t get there. Advantage Agassi.

On the twenty-second point of the game, after a brief rally, Baghdatis finally whips a backhand into the net. Game, Agassi.

During the changeover I watch Baghdatis sit. Big mistake. A young man’s mistake. Never sit when cramping. Never tell your body that it’s time to rest, then tell it, Just kidding! Your body is like the federal government. It says, Do anything you like, but when you get caught, don’t lie to me. So he’s not going to be able to serve. He’s not going to be able to get out of that chair.

And then he gets out and holds serve.

What’s keeping this man up?

Oh. Yes. Youth.

At 5–all, we play a stilted game. He makes a mistake, goes for the knockout. I counterpunch and win. I lead, 6–5.

His serve. He goes up 40–15. He’s one point from pushing this match to a tiebreaker.

I fight him to deuce.

Then I win the next point, and now I have match point.

A quick, vicious exchange. He hits a wild forehand, and as it leaves his strings I know it’s out. I know I’ve won this match, and at the same moment I know that I wouldn’t have had energy for one more swing.

I meet Baghdatis at the net, take his hand, which is trembling, and hurry off the court. I don’t dare stop. Must keep moving. I stagger through the tunnel, my bag slung over my left shoulder, feeling as if it’s slung over my right shoulder, because my whole body is twisted. By the time I reach the locker room I’m unable to walk. I’m unable to stand. I’m sinking to the floor. I’m on the ground. Darren and Gil arrive, slip my bag off my shoulder and lift me onto a table. Baghdatis’s people deposit him on the table next to me.

Darren, what’s wrong with me?

Lie down, mate. Stretch out.

I can’t, I can’t—

Where does it hurt? Is it a cramp?

No, it’s a constriction. I can’t breathe.

What?

I can’t—Darren, I can’t—breathe.

Darren is helping someone put ice on my body, raising my arms, calling for doctors. He’s begging me to reach, reach, stretch.

Just release, mate. Unclench. Your body is clenched. Just let go, mate, let go.

But I can’t. And that’s the whole problem, isn’t it? I can’t let go.

A KALEIDOSCOPE OF FACES appears above me. Gil, squeezing my arm, handing me a recovery drink. I love you, Gil. Stefanie, kissing me on the forehead and smiling—happy or nervous, I can’t tell. Oh, yes, of course, that’s where I’ve seen that smile before. A trainer, telling me the doctors are on the way. He turns on the TV above the table. Something to do while you wait, he says.

I try to watch. I hear moans to my left. I turn my head slowly and see Baghdatis on the next table. His team is working on him. They stretch his quad, his hamstring cramps. They stretch his hamstring, his quad cramps. He tries to lie flat, his groin cramps. He curls into a ball and begs them to leave him be. Everyone clears out of the locker room. It’s just the two of us. I turn back to the TV.

Moments later something makes me turn back to Baghdatis. He’s smiling at me. Happy or nervous? Maybe both. I smile back.

I hear my name coming from the TV. I turn my head. Highlights from the match. The first two sets, so misleadingly easy. The third, Baghdatis starting to believe. The fourth, a knife fight. The fifth, the never-ending ninth game. Some of the best tennis I’ve ever played. Some of the best I’ve ever seen. The commentator calls it a classic.

In my peripheral vision I detect slight movement. I turn to see Baghdatis extending his hand. His face says, We did that. I reach out, take his hand, and we remain this way, holding hands, as the TV flickers with scenes of our savage battle.

At last I let my mind go where it’s wanted to go. I can’t stop it anymore. No longer asking politely, my mind is now forcibly spinning me into the past. And because my mind notes and records the slightest details, I see everything with bright, startling clarity, every setback, victory, rivalry, tantrum, paycheck, girlfriend, betrayal, reporter, wife, child, outfit, fan letter, grudge match, and crying jag. As if a second TV above me were showing highlights from the last twenty-nine years, it all flies past in a high-def whirl.

People often ask what it’s like, this tennis life, and I can never think how to describe it. But that word comes closest. More than anything else, it’s a wrenching, thrilling, horrible, astonishing whirl. It even exerts a faint centrifugal force, which I’ve spent three decades fighting.

Now, lying on my back under Arthur Ashe Stadium, holding hands with a vanquished opponent and waiting for someone to come help us, I do the only thing I can do. I stop fighting it. I just close my eyes and watch.

1

I’M SEVEN YEARS OLD, talking to myself, because I’m scared, and because I’m the only person who listens to me. Under my breath I whisper: Just quit, Andre, just give up. Put down your racket and walk off this court, right now. Go into the house and get something good to eat. Play with Rita, Philly, or Tami. Sit with Mom while she knits or does her jigsaw puzzle.

Doesn’t that sound nice? Wouldn’t that feel like heaven, Andre? To just quit? To never play tennis again?

But I can’t. Not only would my father chase me around the house with my racket, but something in my gut, some deep unseen muscle, won’t let me. I hate tennis, hate it with all my heart, and still I keep playing, keep hitting all morning, and all afternoon, because I have no choice. No matter how much I want to stop, I don’t. I keep begging myself to stop, and I keep playing, and this gap, this contradiction between what I want to do and what I actually do, feels like the core of my life.

At the moment my hatred for tennis is focused on the dragon, a ball machine modified by my fire-belching father. Midnight black, set on big rubber wheels, the word PRINCE painted in white block letters along its base, the dragon looks at first glance like the ball machine at every country club in America, but it’s actually a living, breathing creature straight out of my comic books. The dragon has a brain, a will, a black heart—and a horrifying voice. Sucking another ball into its belly, the dragon makes a series of sickening sounds. As pressure builds inside its throat, it groans. As the ball rises slowly to its mouth, it shrieks. For a moment the dragon sounds almost silly, like the fudge machine swallowing Augustus Gloop in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. But when the dragon takes dead aim at me and fires a ball 110 miles an hour, the sound it makes is a bloodcurdling roar. I flinch every time.

My father has deliberately made the dragon fearsome. He’s given it an extra-long neck of aluminum tubing, and a narrow aluminum head, which recoils like a whip every time the dragon fires. He’s also set the dragon on a base several feet high, and moved it flush against the net, so the dragon towers above me. At seven years old I’m small for my age. (I look smaller because of my constant wince and the bimonthly bowl haircuts my father gives me.) But when standing before the dragon, I look tiny. Feel tiny. Helpless.

My father wants the dragon to tower over me not simply because it commands my attention and respect. He wants the balls that shoot from the dragon’s mouth to land at my feet as if dropped from an airplane. The trajectory makes the balls nearly impossible to return in a conventional way: I need to hit every ball on the rise, or else it will bounce over my head. But even that’s not enough for my father. Hit earlier, he yells. Hit earlier.

My father yells everything twice, sometimes three times, sometimes ten. Harder, he says, harder. But what’s the use? No matter how hard I hit a ball, no matter how early, the ball comes back. Every ball I send across the net joins the thousands that already cover the court.

Not hundreds. Thousands. They roll toward me in perpetual waves. I have no room to turn, to step, to pivot. I can’t move without stepping on a ball—and yet I can’t step on a ball, because my father won’t bear it. Step on one of my father’s tennis balls and he’ll howl as if you stepped on his eyeball.

Every third ball fired by the dragon hits a ball already on the ground, causing a crazy sideways hop. I adjust at the last second, catch the ball early, and hit it smartly across the net. I know this is no ordinary reflex. I know there are few children in the world who could have seen that ball, let alone hit it. But I take no pride in my reflexes, and I get no credit. It’s what I’m supposed to do. Every hit is expected, every miss a crisis.

My father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each day, I’ll hit 17,500 balls each week, and at the end of one year I’ll have hit nearly one million balls. He believes in math. Numbers, he says, don’t lie. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable.

Hit earlier, my father yells. Damn it, Andre, hit earlier. Crowd the ball, crowd the ball.

Now he’s crowding me. He’s yelling directly into my ear. It’s not enough to hit everything the dragon fires at me; my father wants me to hit it harder and faster than the dragon. He wants me to beat the dragon. The thought makes me panicky. I tell myself: You can’t beat the dragon. How can you beat something that never stops? Come to think of it, the dragon is a lot like my father. Except my father is worse. At least the dragon stands before me, where I can see it. My father stays behind me. I rarely see him, only hear him, day and night, yelling in my ear.

More topspin! Hit harder. Hit harder. Not in the net! Damn it, Andre! Never in the net!

Nothing sends my father into a rage like hitting a ball into the net. He dislikes when I hit the ball wide, he yells when I hit a ball long, but when I muff a ball into the net, he foams at the mouth. Errors are one thing, the net is something else. Over and over my father says: The net is your biggest enemy.

My father has raised the enemy six inches higher than regulation, to make it that much harder to avoid. If I can clear my father’s high net, he figures I’ll have no trouble clearing the net one day at Wimbledon. Never mind that I don’t want to play Wimbledon. What I want isn’t relevant. Sometimes I watch Wimbledon on TV with my father, and we both root for Björn Borg, because he’s the best, he never stops, he’s the nearest thing to the dragon—but I don’t want to be Borg. I admire his talent, his energy, his style, his ability to lose himself in his game, but if I ever develop those qualities, I’d rather apply them to something other than Wimbledon. Something of my own choosing.

Hit harder, my father yells. Hit harder. Now backhands. Backhands.

My arm feels like it’s going to fall off. I want to ask, How much longer, Pops? But I don’t ask. I do as I’m told. I hit as hard as I can, then slightly harder. On one swing I surprise myself by how hard I hit, how cleanly. Though I hate tennis, I like the feeling of hitting a ball dead perfect. It’s the only peace. When I do something perfect, I enjoy a split second of sanity and calm.

The dragon responds to perfection, however, by firing the next ball faster.

Short backswing, my father says. Short back—that’s it. Brush the ball, brush the ball.

At the dinner table my father will sometimes demonstrate. Drop your racket under the ball, he says, and brush, brush. He makes a motion like a painter, gently wafting a brush. This might be the only thing I’ve ever seen my father do gently.

Work your volleys, he yells—or tries to. An Armenian, born in Iran, my father speaks five languages, none of them well, and his English is heavily accented. He mixes his Vs and Ws, so it sounds like this: Vork your wolleys. Of all his instructions, this is his favorite. He yells this until I hear it in my dreams. Vork your wolleys, vork your wolleys.

I’ve vorked so many wolleys I can no longer see the court. Not one patch of green cement is visible beneath the yellow balls. I slidestep, shuffling like an old man. Finally, even my father has to admit there are too many balls. It’s counterproductive. If I can’t move we won’t make our daily quota of 2,500. He revs up the blower, the giant machine for drying the court after it rains. Of course it never rains where we live—Las Vegas, Nevada—so my father uses the blower to corral tennis balls. Just as he did with the ball machine, my father has modified a standard blower, made it into another demonic creature. It’s one of my earliest memories: five years old, getting pulled out of kindergarten, going with my father to the welding shop and watching him build this insane lawnmower-like machine that can move hundreds of tennis balls at once.

Now I watch him push the blower, watch the tennis balls scurry from him, and feel sympathy for the balls. If the dragon and the blower are living things, maybe the balls are too.

Maybe they’re doing what I would if I could—running from my father. After blowing all the balls into one corner, my father takes a snow shovel and scoops the balls into a row of metal garbage cans, slop buckets with which he feeds the dragon.

He turns, sees me watching. What the hell are you looking at? Keep hitting! Keep hitting!

My shoulder aches. I can’t hit another ball.

I hit another three.

I can’t go on another minute.

I go another ten.

I get an idea. Accidentally on purpose, I hit a ball high over the fence. I manage to catch it on the wooden rim of the racket, so it sounds like a misfire. I do this when I need a break, and it crosses my mind that I must be pretty good if I can hit a ball wrong at will.

My father hears the ball hit wood and looks up. He sees the ball leave the court. He curses. But he heard the ball hit wood, so he knows it was an accident. Besides, at least I didn’t hit the net. He stomps out of the yard, out to the desert. I now have four and a half minutes to catch my breath and watch the hawks circling lazily overhead.

My father likes to shoot the hawks with his rifle. Our house is blanketed with his victims, dead birds that cover the roof as thickly as tennis balls cover the court. My father says he doesn’t like hawks because they swoop down on mice and other defenseless desert creatures. He can’t stand the thought of something strong preying on something weak. (This also holds true when he goes fishing: whatever he catches, he kisses its scaly head and throws it back.) Of course he has no qualms about preying on me, no trouble watching me gasp for air on his hook. He doesn’t see the contradiction. He doesn’t care about contradictions. He doesn’t realize that I’m the most defenseless creature in this godforsaken desert. If he did realize, I wonder, would he treat me differently?

Now he stomps back onto the court, slams the ball into a garbage can, and sees me staring at the hawks. He glares. What the fuck are you doing? Stop thinking. No fucking thinking!

The net is the biggest enemy, but thinking is the cardinal sin. Thinking, my father believes, is the source of all bad things, because thinking is the opposite of doing. When my father catches me thinking, daydreaming, on the tennis court, he reacts as if he caught me taking money from his wallet. I often think about how I can stop thinking. I wonder if my father yells at me to stop thinking because he knows I’m a thinker by nature. Or, with all his yelling, has he turned me into a thinker? Is my thinking about things other than tennis an act of defiance?

I like to think so.

OUR HOUSE IS AN OVERGROWN SHACK, built in the 1970s, white stucco with peeling dark trim around its edges. The windows have bars. The roof, under all the dead hawks, has wood shingles, many of which are loose or missing. The door has a cowbell that rings every time someone comes or goes, like the opening bell of a boxing match.

My father has painted the high cement wall around the house a bright forest green. Why?

Because green is the color of a tennis court. Also, my father likes the convenience of directing someone to the house like this: Turn left, go down half a block, then look for the bright green wall.

Not that we ever have any visitors.

Surrounding the house on all sides is desert, and more desert, which to me is another word for death. Dotted with sticker bushes, tumble-weed, and coiled rattlers, the desert around our house seems to have no reason for existence, other than providing a place for people to dump things they no longer want. Mattresses, tires, other people. Vegas—the casinos, the hotels, the Strip—stands off in the distance, a glittering illusion. My father commutes to the illusion every day. He’s a captain at one of the casinos, but he refuses to live closer.

We moved out here to the middle of nowhere, the heart of nothingness, because it’s only here that my father could afford a house with a yard big enough for his ideal tennis court.

It’s another early memory: driving around Vegas with my father and the real estate agent.

It would have been funny if it hadn’t been scary. At house after house, even before the agent’s car came to a full stop my father would jump out and march up the front walk. The agent, close on my father’s heels, would be yakking about local schools, crime rates, interest rates, but my father wouldn’t be listening. Staring straight ahead, my father would storm into the house, through the living room, through the kitchen, into the backyard, where he’d whip out his tape measure and count off thirty-six feet by seventy-eight feet, the dimensions of a tennis court. Time after time he’d yell, Doesn’t fit! Come on! Let’s go! My father would then march back through the kitchen, through the living room, down the front walk, the real estate agent struggling to keep pace.

We saw one house my older sister Tami desperately wanted. She begged my father to buy it, because it was shaped like a T, and T stood for Tami. My father almost bought it, probably because T also stood for Tennis. I liked the house. So did my mother. The backyard, however, was inches too short.

Doesn’t fit! Let’s go!

Finally we saw this house, its backyard so big that my father didn’t need to measure. He just stood in the middle of the yard, turning slowly, gazing, grinning, seeing the future.

Sold, he said quietly.

We hadn’t carried in the last cardboard box before my father began to build his dream court. I still don’t know how he did it. He never worked a day in construction. He knew nothing about concrete, asphalt, water drainage. He read no books, consulted no experts. He just got a picture in his head and set about making that picture a reality. As with so many things, he willed the court into being through sheer orneriness and energy. I think he might be doing something similar with me.

He needed help, of course. Pouring concrete is a big job. So each morning he’d drive me to Sambo’s, a diner on the Strip, where we’d recruit a few old-timers from the gang that hung out in the parking lot. My favorite was Rudy. Battle-scarred, barrel-chested, Rudy always looked at me with a half smile, as if he understood that I didn’t know who or where I was.

Rudy and his gang would follow me and my father back to our house, and there my father would tell them what needed doing. After three hours my father and I would run down to McDonald’s and buy huge sacks of Big Macs and French fries. When we returned, my father would let me ring the cowbell and call the men to lunch. I loved rewarding Rudy. I loved watching him eat like a wolf. I loved the concept of hard work leading to sweet rewards—except when hard work meant hitting tennis balls.

The days of Rudy and the Big Macs passed in a blur. Suddenly my father had his backyard tennis court, which meant I had my prison. I’d helped feed the chain gang that built my cell. I’d helped measure and paint the white lines that would confine me. Why did I do it? I had no choice. The reason I do everything.

No one ever asked me if I wanted to play tennis, let alone make it my life. In fact, my mother thought I was born to be a preacher. She tells me, however, that my father decided long before I was born that I would be a professional tennis player. When I was one year old, she adds, I proved my father right. Watching a ping-pong game, I moved only my eyes, never my head. My father called to my mother.

Look, he said. See how he moves only his eyes? A natural.

She tells me that when I was still in the crib, my father hung a mobile of tennis balls above my head and encouraged me to slap at them with a ping-pong paddle he’d taped to my hand.

When I was three he gave me a sawed-off racket and told me to hit whatever I wanted. I spe-cialized in salt shakers. I liked serving them through glass windows. I aced the dog. My father never got mad. He got mad about many things, but never about hitting something hard with a racket.

When I was four he had me hitting with tennis greats who passed through town, beginning with Jimmy Connors. My father told me that Connors was one of the finest to ever play. I was more impressed that Connors had a bowl haircut just like mine. When we finished hitting, Connors told my father that I was sure to become very good.

I already know that, my father said, annoyed. Very good? He’s going to be number one in the world.

He wasn’t seeking Connors’s confirmation. He was seeking someone who could give me a game.

Whenever Connors comes to Vegas, my father strings his rackets. My father is a master stringer. (Who better than my old man to create and maintain tension?) It’s always the same drill. In the morning Connors gives my father a box of rackets, and eight hours later my father and I meet Connors at a restaurant on the Strip. My father sends me in, cradling the restrung rackets. I ask the manager if he can point me to Mr. Connors’s table. The manager sends me to a far corner, where Connors sits with his entourage. Connors is at the center, back to the wall. I hold his rackets toward him, carefully, not saying a word. The conversation at the table comes to a halt, and everyone looks down at me. Connors takes the rackets roughly and sets them on a chair. For a moment I feel important, as though I’ve delivered freshly sharpened swords to one of the Three Musketeers. Then Connors tousles my hair, says something sarcastic about me or my father, and everyone at the table guffaws.

THE BETTER I GET AT TENNIS, the worse I get at school, which pains me. I like books, but feel overmatched by them. I like my teachers, but don’t understand much of what they say. I don’t seem to learn or process facts the way other kids do. I have a steel-trap memory, but trouble concentrating. I need things explained twice, three times. (Maybe that’s why my father yells everything twice?) Also, I know that my father resents every moment I spend in school; it comes at the cost of court time. Disliking school, therefore, doing poorly in school, feels like loyalty to Pops.

Some days, when he’s driving me and my siblings to school, my father will smile and say: I’ll make you guys a deal. Instead of taking you to school, how about I take you to Cambridge Racquet Club? You can hit balls all morning. How does that sound?

We know what he wants us to say. So we say it. Hooray!

Just don’t tell your mother, my father says.

Cambridge Racquet Club is a long, low-roofed dump, just east of the Strip, with ten hard courts and a seedy smell—dust, sweat, liniment, plus something sour, something just past its expiration date, that I can never quite identify. My father treats Cambridge like an addition to our house. He stands with the owner, Mr. Fong, and they watch us closely, making sure we play, that we don’t waste our time talking or laughing. Eventually my father lets out a short whistle, a sound I’d know anywhere. He puts his fingers in his mouth, gives one hard blast, and that means game, set, match, stop hitting and get in the car, now.

My siblings always stop before I do. Rita, the oldest, Philly, my older brother, and Tami—they all play tennis well. We’re like the von Trapps of tennis. But me, the youngest, the baby, I’m the best. My father tells me so, tells my siblings, tells Mr. Fong. Andre is the chosen one. That’s why my father gives me most of his attention. I’m the last best hope of the Agassi clan. Sometimes I like the extra attention from my father, sometimes I’d rather be invisible, because my father can be scary. My father does things.

For instance, he often reaches a thumb and forefinger inside his nostril and, bracing himself for the eye-watering pain, pulls out a thick bouquet of black nose hairs. This is how he grooms himself. In the same spirit, he shaves his face without soap or cream. He simply runs a disposable razor up and down his dry cheeks and jaw, shredding his skin, then letting the blood trickle down his face until it dries.

When stressed, when distracted, my father often stares off into space and mumbles: I love you, Margaret. I ask my mother one day: Who’s Pops talking to? Who’s Margaret?

My mother says that when my father was my age, he was skating on a pond and the ice cracked. He fell through and drowned—stopped breathing for a long time. He was pulled from the water and revived by a woman named Margaret. He’d never seen her before and never saw her again. But every so often he sees her in his mind, and speaks to her, and thanks her in his most tender voice. He says this vision of Margaret comes upon him like a seizure. He has no knowledge while it’s happening, and only a dim memory afterward.

Violent by nature, my father is forever preparing for battle. He shadowboxes constantly.

He keeps an ax handle in his car. He leaves the house with a handful of salt and pepper in each pocket, in case he’s in a street fight and needs to blind someone. Of course some of his most vicious battles are with himself. He has chronic stiffness in his neck, and he’s perpetually loosening the neck bones by angrily twisting and yanking his head. When this doesn’t work he shakes himself like a dog, whipping his head from side to side until the neck makes a sound like popcorn popping. When even this doesn’t work, he resorts to the heavy punching bag that hangs from a harness outside our house. My father stands on a chair, removes the punching bag, and places his neck in the harness. He then kicks away the chair and drops a foot through the air, his momentum abruptly halted by the harness. The first time I saw him do this, I was walking through the rooms of the house. I looked up and there was my father, kicking the chair, hanging by his neck, his shoes three feet off the ground. I had no doubt he’d killed himself. I ran to him, hysterical.

Seeing the stricken look on my face, he barked: What the fuck is the matter with you?

Most of his battles, however, are against others, and they typically begin without warning, at the most unexpected times. In his sleep, for instance. He boxes in his dreams, and frequently hauls off and punches my dozing mother. In the car too. My father enjoys few things more than driving his green diesel Oldsmobile, singing along to his eight-track of Laura Branigan. But if another driver crosses him, if another driver cuts him off or objects to being cut off by my father, everything goes dark.

I’m driving with my father one day, going to Cambridge, and he gets into a shouting match with another driver. My father stops his car, steps out, orders the man out of his. Because my father is wielding his ax handle, the man refuses. My father whips the ax handle into the man’s headlights and taillights, sending sprays of glass everywhere.

Another time my father reaches across me and points his handgun at another driver. He holds the gun level with my nose. I stare straight ahead. I don’t move. I don’t know what the other driver has done wrong, only that it’s the automotive equivalent of hitting into the net. I feel my father’s finger tensing on the trigger. Then I hear the other driver speed away, followed by a sound I rarely hear—my father laughing. He’s busting a gut. I tell myself that I’ll remember this moment—my father laughing, holding a gun under my nose—if I live to be one hundred.

When he puts the gun back into the glove box and throws the car into drive, my father turns to me. Don’t tell your mother, he says.

I can’t imagine why he says this. What would my mother do if we told her? She never raises a word of protest. Does my father think there’s a first time for everything?

On a rare rainy day in Vegas, my father is driving me to pick up my mother at her office.

I’m standing on my end of the bench seat, horsing around, singing. My father gets in the left lane to make a turn. A trucker honks at my father. My father apparently forgot to signal. My father gives the trucker the finger. His hand flies up so fast, it nearly hits my face. The trucker yells something. My father lets fly a stream of curses. The trucker stops, opens his door. My father stops, jumps out.

I crawl into the backseat and watch through the back window. The rain is falling harder.

My father approaches the trucker. The trucker throws a punch. My father ducks, deflects the punch with the top of his head, then throws a blazingly fast combination, ending with an up-percut. The trucker is lying on the pavement. He’s dead—I’m sure of it. If he’s not dead, he soon will be, because he’s in the middle of the road and someone will run him over. My father gets back in the car and we peel away. I stay in the backseat, watching the trucker through the back window, rain pelting his unconscious face. I turn to see my father, mumbling, throwing combinations against the steering wheel. Just before we pick up my mother he looks down at his hands, clenches and unclenches his fists to make sure the knuckles aren’t broken. Then he looks in the backseat, directly into my eyes, though it feels as if he’s seeing Margaret. Somewhat tenderly he says, Don’t tell your mother.

Such moments, and many more, come to mind whenever I think about telling my father that I don’t want to play tennis. Besides loving my father, and wanting to please him, I don’t want to upset him. I don’t dare. Bad stuff happens when my father is upset. If he says I’m going to play tennis, if he says I’m going to be number one in the world, that it’s my destiny, all I can do is nod and obey. I would advise Jimmy Connors or anyone else to do the same.

THE ROAD TO NUMBER ONE goes over Hoover Dam. When I’m almost eight years old my father says the time has come to move from backyard sessions with the dragon and hit-arounds at Cambridge to actual tournaments, against real live little boys, all over Nevada and Arizona and California. Every weekend the whole family piles into the car and drives, either north on U.S. 95, toward Reno, or south, through Henderson and over Hoover Dam, across the desert to Phoenix or Scottsdale or Tucson. The last place I want to be, other than a tennis court, is in a car with my father. But it’s all settled. I’m condemned to divide my childhood between these two boxes.

I win my first seven tournaments in the ten-and-under bracket. My father has no reaction.

I’m simply doing what I’m supposed to do. Driving back over Hoover Dam, I stare at all the water bottled up behind the massive wall. I look at the inscription on the base of the flagpole: In honor of those men who, inspired by a vision of lonely lands made fruitful… I turn this phrase over in my mind. Lonely lands. Is there a land lonelier than our house in the desert? I think about the rage bottled up in my father, like the Colorado River inside the Hoover Dam.

Only a matter of time before it bursts. Nothing to do but scramble for high ground.

For me, that means winning. Always winning.

We go to San Diego. Morley Field. I play a kid named Jeff Tarango, who isn’t nearly on my level. But he wins the first set, 6–4. I’m stunned. Scared. My father is going to kill me. I bear down, win the second set, 6–0. Early in the third set Tarango twists his ankle. I start drop-shotting him, trying to make him run on the bad ankle. But he’s only faking. His ankle is fine.

He comes bounding in and smashes my drop shots and wins every point.

My father screams from the stands: No more drop shots! No more drops!

But I can’t help myself. I have a strategy, I’m sticking with it.

We go to a tiebreak. It’s best-of-nine. Back and forth we trade points, until it’s 4–all. Here it is. Sudden death. One point for the whole match. I’ve never lost and can’t imagine what my father’s reaction will be if I do. I play as if my life hangs in the balance, which it does. Tarango must have a father like mine, because he’s playing the same way.

I haul off and rope a fizzing backhand crosscourt. I hit it as a rally shot but it comes off my racket bigger and hotter than I intended. It’s a screaming winner, three feet in but well beyond Tarango’s reach. I howl in triumph. Tarango, standing in the center of the court, bows his head and seems to cry. Slowly he walks toward the net.

Now he stops. All of a sudden, he looks back at where the ball hit. He smiles.

Out, he says.

I stop.

The ball was out! Tarango yells.

This is the rule in juniors. Players act as their own linesmen. Players call balls in or out, and there is no appeal. Tarango has decided he’d rather do this than lose, and he knows there’s nothing anyone can do about it. He raises his hands in victory.

Now I start to cry.

Bedlam breaks out in the stands, parents arguing, shouting, nearly coming to blows. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but it’s reality. Tarango is the winner. I refuse to shake his hand. I run away into Balboa Park. When I return half an hour later, all cried out, my father is furious. Not because I disappeared, but because I didn’t do what he said during the match.

Why didn’t you listen to me? Why did you keep hitting drop shots?

For once I’m not afraid of my father. No matter how angry he is with me, I’m angrier. I’m furious with Tarango, with God, with myself. Even though I feel Tarango cheated me, I shouldn’t have put him in a position to cheat me. I shouldn’t have let the match get that close.

Because I did, I’ll now have a loss on my record—forever. Nothing can ever change it. I can’t endure the thought, but it’s inescapable: I’m fallible. Blemished. Imperfect. A million balls hit against the dragon—for what?

After years of hearing my father rant at my flaws, one loss has caused me to take up his rant. I’ve internalized my father—his impatience, his perfectionism, his rage—until his voice doesn’t just feel like my own, it is my own. I no longer need my father to torture me. From this day on, I can do it all by myself.

2

MY FATHER’S MOTHER lives with us. She’s a nasty old lady from Tehran with a wart the size of a walnut on the edge of her nose. Sometimes you can’t hear a word she’s saying because you can’t take your eyes off that wart. But it doesn’t matter, she’s surely saying the same nasty things she said yesterday, and the day before, and probably saying them to my father. This seems to be the reason Grandma was put on earth, to harass my father. He says she nagged him when he was a boy and often beat him. When he was extra bad, she made him wear hand-me-down girl clothes to school. That’s why he learned to fight.

If she’s not pecking at my father, the old lady is squawking about the old country, sighing about the folks she left behind. My mother says Grandma is homesick. The first time I hear this word I ask myself, How can you be sick about not being home? Home is where the dragon lives. Home is the place where, when you go there, you have to play tennis.

If Grandma wants to go back home, I’m all for it. I’m only eight, but I’ll drive her to the airport myself, because she causes more tension in a house that doesn’t need one bit more.

She makes my father miserable, she bosses me and my siblings around, and she engages in a strange competition with my mother. My mother tells me that when I was a baby, she walked into the kitchen and found Grandma breastfeeding me. Things have been awkward between the two women ever since.

Of course, there is one good thing about Grandma living with us. She tells stories about my father, about his childhood, and this sometimes gets my father reminiscing, causes him to open up. If not for Grandma we wouldn’t know much about my father’s past, which was sad and lonely and helps explain his odd behavior and boiling rage. Sort of.

Oh, Grandma says with a sigh, we were poor. You can’t imagine how poor. And hungry, she says, rubbing her belly. We had no food—also, no running water, no electricity. And not a stick of furniture.

Where did you sleep?

We slept on the dirt floor! All of us in one tiny room! In an old apartment house built around a filthy courtyard. In one corner of the courtyard was a hole—that was the toilet for all the tenants.

My father chimes in.

Things got better after the war, he says. Overnight, the streets were filled with British and American soldiers. I liked them.

Why did you like the soldiers?

They gave me candy and shoes.

They also gave him English. The first word my father learned from the GIs was victory.

That’s all they talked about, he says. Wictory.

Whoa, were they big, he adds. And strong. I followed them everywhere, watching them, studying them, and one day I followed them to the place where they spent all their free time—a park in the woods with two clay tennis courts.

There were no fences around the courts, so the ball would go bouncing away every few seconds. My father would run after the ball and bring it back to the soldiers, like a puppy dog, until finally they made him their unofficial ball boy. Then they made him the official court custodian.

My father says: Every day I swept and watered and combed the courts with a heavy roller.

I painted the lines white. What a job that was! I had to use chalk water.

How much did they pay you?

Pay? Nothing! They gave me a tennis racket. It was a piece of junk. An old wooden thing strung with steel wire. But I loved it. I spent hours with that racket, hitting a tennis ball against a brick wall, alone.

Why alone?

No one else in Iran played tennis.

The only sport that could offer my father a steady supply of opponents was boxing. His toughness was tested first in one street fight after another, and then as a teenager he strode into a gym and set to work learning formal boxing techniques. A natural, the trainers called him. Quick with his hands, light on his feet—and he had a grudge against the world. His rage, so hard for us to deal with, was an asset in the squared circle. He won a spot on the Iranian Olympic team, boxing in the bantamweight division, and went to the 1948 Games in London.

Four years later he went to the Games in Helsinki. He didn’t do well at either.

The judges, he grumbles. They were crooked. The whole thing was fixed, rigged. The world was very biased against Iran.

My father, Mike, as a scrappy eighteen-year-old

bantamweight in Tehran

But my son, he adds—maybe they will make tennis an Olympic sport once again, and my son will win a gold medal, and that will make up for it.

A little extra pressure to go with my everyday pressure.

After seeing a bit of the world, after being an Olympian, my father couldn’t return to that same single room with the dirt floor, so he snuck out of Iran. He doctored his passport and booked a flight under an assumed name to New York City, where he spent sixteen days on Ellis Island, then took a bus to Chicago, where he Americanized his name. Emmanuel became Mike Agassi. By day he worked as an elevator operator at one of the city’s grand hotels. By night he boxed.

His coach in Chicago was Tony Zale, the fearless middleweight champ, often called the Man of Steel. Famous for his part in one of the sport’s bloodiest rivalries, a three-bout saga with Rocky Graziano, Zale lauded my father, told him he had tons of raw talent, but pleaded with him to hit harder. Hit harder, Zale would scream at my father as he peppered the speed bag. Hit harder. Every punch you throw, throw it from the floor up.

With Zale in his corner my father won the Chicago Golden Gloves, then earned a prime-time fight at Madison Square Garden. His big break. But on fight night my father’s opponent fell ill. The promoters scrambled, trying to find a substitute. They found one, all right—a much better boxer, and a welterweight. My father agreed to the fight, but moments before the opening bell he got the shakes. He ducked into a bathroom, crawled out the window above the toilet, then took the train back to Chicago.

Sneaking out of Iran, sneaking out of the Garden—my father is an escape artist, I think.

But there’s no escaping him.

My father says that when he boxed, he always wanted to take a guy’s best punch. He tells me one day on the tennis court: When you know that you just took the other guy’s best punch, and you’re still standing, and the other guy knows it, you will rip the heart right out of him. In tennis, he says, same rule. Attack the other man’s strength. If the man is a server, take away his serve. If he’s a power player, overpower him. If he has a big forehand, takes pride in his forehand, go after his forehand until he hates his forehand.

My father has a special name for this contrarian strategy. He calls it putting a blister on the other guy’s brain. With this strategy, this brutal philosophy, he stamps me for life. He turns me into a boxer with a tennis racket. More, since most tennis players pride themselves on their serve, my father turns me into a counterpuncher—a returner.

· · ·

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE my father gets homesick too. He especially misses his oldest brother, Isar. Someday, he vows, your uncle Isar will sneak out of Iran, like I did.

But first Isar needs to sneak out his money. Iran is falling apart, my father explains. Re-volution is brewing. The government is teetering. That’s why they’re watching everyone, making sure people don’t drain their bank accounts and flee. Uncle Isar, therefore, is slowly, secretly converting his cash to jewels, which he then hides in packages he sends us in Vegas. It feels like Christmas every time a brown-wrapped box from Uncle Isar arrives. We sit on the living-room floor and cut the string and tear the paper and shriek when we find, hidden under a tin of cookies or inside a fruitcake, diamonds and emeralds and rubies. Uncle Isar’s packages arrive every few weeks, and then one day comes a much larger package. Uncle Is-ar. Himself. On the doorstep, smiling down.

You must be Andre.

Yes.

I’m your uncle.

He reaches out and touches my cheek.

He’s the mirror image of my father, but his personality is the exact opposite. My father is shrill and stern and filled with rage. Uncle Isar is soft-spoken and patient and funny. He’s also a genius—he was an engineer back in Iran—so he helps me every night with my homework.

Such a relief from my father’s tutoring sessions. My father’s way of teaching is to tell you once, then tell you a second time, then shout at you and call you an idiot for not getting it the first time. Uncle Isar tells you, then smiles and waits. If you don’t understand, no problem. He tells you again, more softly. He has all the time in the world.

I stare at Uncle Isar as he strolls through the rooms and hallways of our house. I follow him the way my father followed the British and American soldiers. As I grow familiar with Uncle Isar, as I get to know him better, I like to hang from his shoulders and swing from his arms. He likes it too. He likes to roughhouse, to be tackled and tickled by his nephews and nieces. Every night I hide behind the front door and jump out when Uncle Isar comes home, because it makes him laugh. His booming laughter is the opposite of the sounds that come from the dragon.

One day Uncle Isar goes to the store for a few things. I count the minutes. At last, the front gate clanks open, then clanks shut, meaning I have exactly twelve seconds until Uncle Isar walks through the front door. It always takes people twelve seconds to go from the gate to the door. I crouch, count to twelve, and as the door opens I leap out.

Boo!

It’s not Uncle Isar. It’s my father. Startled, he yells, steps back, then shoots out his fist.

Even though he only puts a fraction of his weight into it, my father’s left hook hits my jaw flush and sends me flying. One second I’m excited, joyful, the next I’m sprawled on the ground.

My father stands over me, scowling. What the fuck is the matter with you? Go to your room.

I run to my room and throw myself on my bed. I lie there, shaking, I don’t know how long.

An hour? Three? Eventually the door opens and I hear my father.

Grab your racket. Get on the court.

Time to face the dragon.

I hit for half an hour, my head throbbing, my eyes tearing.

Hit harder, my father says. Goddamn it, hit harder. Not in the fucking net!

I turn and face my father. The next ball from the dragon I hit as hard as I can, but high over the fence. I aim for the hawks and I don’t bother pretending it’s an accident. My father stares. He takes one menacing step toward me. He’s going to hit me over the fence. But then he stops, calls me a bad name, and warns me to stay out of his sight.

I run into the house and find my mother lying on her bed, reading a romance novel, her dogs at her feet. She loves animals, and our house is like Dr. Dolittle’s waiting room. Dogs, birds, cats, lizards, and one mangy rat named Lady Butt. I grab one of the dogs and hurl it across the room, ignoring its insulted yelp, and bury my head in my mother’s arm.

Why is Pops so mean?

What happened?

I tell her.

She strokes my hair and says my father doesn’t know any better. Pa has his own ways, she says. Strange ways. We have to remember that Pa wants what’s best for us, right?

Part of me feels grateful for my mother’s endless calm. Part of me, however, a part I don’t like to acknowledge, feels betrayed by it. Calm sometimes means weak. She never steps in.

She never fights back. She never throws herself between us kids and my father. She should tell him to back off, ease up, that tennis isn’t life.

But it’s not in her nature. My father disturbs the peace, my mother keeps it. Every morning she goes to the office—she works for the State of Nevada—in her sensible pantsuit, and every night she comes home at six, bone tired, not uttering one word of complaint. With her last speck of energy she cooks dinner. Then she lies down with her pets and a book, or her favorite: a jigsaw puzzle.

Only every great once in a while does she lose her temper, and when she does, it’s epic.

One time my father made a remark about the house being unclean. My mother walked to the cupboard, took out two boxes of cereal, and waved them around her head like flags, spraying Corn Flakes and Cheerios everywhere. She yelled: You want the house clean? Clean it yourself!

Moments later, she was calmly working on a jigsaw puzzle.

She particularly loves Norman Rockwell puzzles. There is always some half-assembled scene of idyllic family life spread across the kitchen table. I can’t imagine the pleasure my mother takes in jigsaw puzzles. All that fractured disorder, all that chaos—how can that be relaxing? It makes me think my mother and I are complete opposites. And yet, anything soft in me, any love or compassion I have for people, must come from her.

Lying against her, letting her continue to stroke my hair, I think there is so much about her that I can’t understand, and it all seems to flow from her choice of a husband. I ask how she ever ended up with a guy like my father in the first place. She gives a short, weary laugh.

It was a long time ago, she says. Back in Chicago. A friend of a friend told your father: You should meet Betty Dudley, she’s just your type. And vice versa. So your father phoned me one night at the Girls Club where I was renting a furnished room. We talked a long, long time, and your father seemed sweet.

Sweet?

I know, I know. But he did. So I agreed to meet him. He showed up the next day in a spiffy new Volkswagen. He drove me around town, no place in particular, just round and round, telling me his story. Then we stopped to get something to eat and I told him my story.

My mother told my father about growing up in Danville, Illinois, 170 miles from Chicago, the same small town where Gene Hackman and Donald O’Connor and Dick Van Dyke grew up. She told him about being a twin. She told him about her father, a crotchety English teacher, a stickler for proper English. My father, with his broken English, must have cringed. More likely, he didn’t hear. I imagine my father not capable of listening to my mother on their first date. He would have been too mesmerized by her flaming auburn hair and bright blue eyes.

I’ve seen pictures. My mother was a rare beauty. I wonder if he liked her hair best because it was the color of a clay tennis court. Or was it her height? She’s several inches taller than he. I can imagine him perceiving that as a challenge.

My mother says it took eight blissful weeks for my father to convince her that they should combine their stories. They ran away from her crotchety father and her twin sister and eloped.

Then they kept running. My father drove my mother clear out to Los Angeles, and when they had trouble finding jobs there, he drove her across the desert, to a new gambling boomtown.

My mother landed her job with the state government, and my father caught on at the Tropic-ana Hotel, giving tennis lessons. It didn’t pay much, so he got a second job waiting tables at the Landmark Hotel. Then he got a job as a captain at the MGM Grand casino, which kept him so busy he dropped the other two jobs.

My parents, Mike and Betty Agassi, 1959, newlyweds in Chicago

Over their first ten years of marriage, my parents had three kids. Then, in 1969, my mother went to the hospital with ominous stomach pains. Need to do a hysterectomy, the doctor said.

But a second round of tests showed she was pregnant. With me. I was born April 29, 1970, at Sunrise Hospital, two miles from the Strip. My father named me Andre Kirk Agassi, after his bosses at the casino. I ask my mother why my father named me after his bosses. Were they friends? Did he admire them? Did he owe them money? She doesn’t know. And it’s not the kind of question you can ask my father directly. You can’t ask my father anything directly. So I file it away with all the other things I don’t know about my parents—permanently missing pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that is me.

MY FATHER WORKS HARD, puts in long hours on the night shift at the casino, but tennis is his life, his reason for getting out of bed. No matter where you sit in the house, you see scattered evidence of his obsession. Aside from the backyard court, and the dragon, there is my father’s laboratory, also known as the kitchen. My father’s stringing machine and tools take up half the kitchen table. (My mother’s latest Norman Rockwell takes up the other half—two obsessions vying for one busy room.) On the kitchen counter stand several stacks of rackets, many sawed in half so my father can study their guts. He wants to know everything about tennis, everything, which means dissecting its various parts. He’s forever conducting experiments on this or that piece of equipment. Lately, for instance, he’s been using old tennis balls to extend the lives of our shoes. When the rubber starts to wear down, my father cuts a tennis ball in half and puts one half on each toe.

I tell Philly: It’s not bad enough that we live in a tennis laboratory—now we have to wear tennis balls on our feet?

I wonder why my father loves tennis. Yet another question I can’t ask him directly. Still, he drops clues. He talks sometimes about the beauty of the game, its perfect balance of power and strategy. Despite his imperfect life—or maybe because of it—my father craves perfection.

Geometry and mathematics are as close to perfection as human beings can get, he says, and tennis is all about angles and numbers. My father lies in bed and sees a court on the ceiling.

He says he can actually see it there, and on that ceiling court he plays countless imaginary matches. It’s a wonder he has any energy when he goes to work.

As a casino captain it’s my father’s job to seat people at the shows. Right this way, Mr.

Johnson. Nice to see you again, Miss Jones. The MGM pays him a small salary, the rest he earns in tips. We live on tips, which makes life unpredictable. Some nights my father comes home with his pockets bulging with cash. Other nights his pockets are perfectly flat. Whatever he pulls from his pockets, no matter how little, gets carefully counted and stacked, then stashed in the family safe. It’s nerve-wracking, never knowing how much Pops is going to be able to tuck in the safe.

My father loves money, makes no apologies for loving it, and he says there’s good money to be made in tennis. Clearly this is one big part of his love for tennis. It’s the shortest route he can see to the American dream. He takes me to the Alan King Tennis Classic and we watch a beautiful woman dressed as Cleopatra being carried onto center court by four half-naked musclemen in togas, followed by a man dressed as Caesar, pushing a wheelbarrow full of silver dollars. First prize for the winner of the tournament. My father stares at that silvery haze sparkling in the Vegas sun and looks drunk. He wants that. He wants me to have that.

Soon after that fateful day, when I’m almost nine years old, he finagles me a job as a ball boy for the Alan King tournament. But I don’t give a damn about silver dollars—I want a mini Cleopatra. Her name is Wendi. She’s one of the ball girls, about my age, a vision in her blue uniform. I love her instantly, with all my heart and part of my spleen. I lie awake at night, picturing her on the ceiling.

During matches, as Wendi and I dart past each other along the net, I shoot her a smile, try to get her to give me a smile in return. Between matches I buy her Cokes and sit with her, trying to impress her with my knowledge of tennis.

The Alan King tournament attracts big-time players, and my father cajoles most of them into hitting a few balls with me. Some are more willing than others. Borg acts as if there is nowhere else he’d rather be. Connors clearly wants to say no, but can’t, because my father is his stringer. Ilie Nastase tries to say no, but my father pretends to be deaf. A champion of Wimbledon and the French Open, ranked number one in the world, Nastase has other places he’d rather be, but he quickly discovers that refusing my father is next to impossible. The man is relentless.

As Nastase and I hit, Wendi watches from the net post. I’m nervous, Nastase is visibly bored—until he spots Wendi.

Hey, he says. Is this your girlfriend, Snoopy? Is this pretty thing over here your sweet-heart?

I stop. I glare at Nastase. I want to punch this big, stupid Romanian in the nose, even though he’s got two feet and 100 pounds on me. Bad enough that he calls me Snoopy, but then he dares to mention Wendi in such a disrespectful way. A crowd has gathered, two hundred people at least. Nastase begins playing to the crowd, calling me Snoopy again and again, teasing me about Wendi. And I thought my father was relentless.

Eight years old, hitting a few balls with my idol, Björn Borg At the very least, I wish I had the courage to say: Mr. Nastase, you’re embarrassing me, please stop. But all I can do is keep hitting harder. Hit harder. Then Nastase makes yet another wisecrack about Wendi, and that’s it, I can’t take any more. I drop my racket and walk off the court. Up yours, Nastase.

My father stares, openmouthed. He’s not angry, he’s not embarrassed—he’s incapable of embarrassment, and he recognizes his own genes when he sees them in action. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him prouder.

BESIDES THE OCCASIONAL EXHIBITION with a top-ranked player, my public matches are mostly hustle jobs. I have a slick routine to lure in the suckers. First, I pick a highly visible court, where I play by myself, knocking the ball all over the place. Second, when some cocky teenager or drunken guest strolls by I invite them to play. Third, I let them beat me, soundly.

Finally, in my most pitiful voice I ask if they’d like to play for a dollar. Maybe five? Before they know what’s happening, I’m serving for match point and twenty bucks, enough to keep Wendi in Cokes for a month.

Philly taught me how to do it. He gives tennis lessons and often hustles his students, plays them for the price of the lesson, then double or nothing. But Andre, he says, with your size and youth, you should be raking in the dough. He helps me develop and rehearse the routine.

Now and then it occurs to me that I only think I’m hustling, that people are happy to shell out for the show. Later they can brag to their friends that they saw a nine-year-old tennis freak who never misses.

I don’t tell my father about my side business. Not that he’d think it was wrong. He loves a good hustle. I just don’t feel like talking to my father about tennis any more than is absolutely necessary. Then my father stumbles into his own hustle. It happens at Cambridge. As we walk in one day, my father points to a man talking with Mr. Fong.

That’s Jim Brown, my father whispers to me. Greatest football player of all time.

He’s an enormous block of muscle wearing tennis whites and tube socks. I’ve seen him before at Cambridge. When he’s not playing tennis for money, he’s playing backgammon, or shooting craps—also for money. Like my father, Mr. Brown talks a lot about money. At this moment he’s complaining to Mr. Fong about a money match that fell through. He was supposed to play a guy, and the guy didn’t show. Mr. Brown is taking it out on Mr. Fong.

I came to play, Mr. Brown is saying, and I want to play.

My father steps forward.

You looking for a game?

Yeah.

My son Andre will play you.

Mr. Brown looks at me, then back at my father.

I ain’t playing no eight-year-old boy!

Nine.

Nine? Oooh, well, I didn’t realize.

Mr. Brown laughs. A few men within earshot laugh too.

I can tell that Mr. Brown doesn’t take my father seriously. Big mistake. Just ask that trucker lying in the road. I close my eyes and see him, the rain pelting his face.

Look, Mr. Brown says, I don’t play for fun, OK? I play for money.

My son will play you for money.

I feel a bead of sweat start down my armpit.

Yeah? How much?

My father laughs and says, I’ll bet you my fucking house.

I don’t need your house, Mr. Brown says. I got a house. Let’s say ten grand.

Done, my father says.

I walk toward the court.

Slow down, Mr. Brown says. I need to see some money up front.

I’ll go home and get it, my father says. I’ll be right back.

My father hurries out the door. I sit in a chair and picture him opening the safe and pulling out stacks of money. All those tips I’ve seen him count through the years, all those nights of hard work. Now he’s going to let it ride on me. I feel a heaviness in the center of my chest. I’m proud, of course, to think my father has such faith in me. But mainly I’m scared. What happens to me, to my father, to my mother and my siblings, not to mention Grandma and Uncle Isar, if I lose?

I’ve played under this kind of pressure before, when my father, without warning, has chosen an opponent and ordered me to beat him. But it’s always been another kid, and there’s never been money involved. It usually happens in the middle of the afternoon. My father will wake me from a nap and yell, Grab your racket! There’s someone here you need to beat! It never occurs to him that I’m taking a nap because I’m exhausted from a morning playing the dragon, that nine-year-olds don’t often take naps. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes I’ll go outside and see some strange kid, some prodigy from Florida or California who happens to be in town. They’re always older and bigger—like that punk who’d just moved to Vegas, and heard about me, and rang our doorbell. He had a white Rossignol and a head like a pumpkin.

He was at least three years older than I, and he smirked as I walked out of the house, because I was so small. Even after I beat him, even after I wiped that smirk off his face, it took hours for me to calm down, to shed the feeling that I’d just run along a tightrope stretched across Hoover Dam.

This thing with Mr. Brown, however, is different, and not just because my family’s life sav-ings are riding on the outcome. Mr. Brown disrespected my father, and my father can’t knock him out. He needs me to do it. So this match will be about more than money. It will be about respect and manhood and honor—against the greatest football player of all time. I’d rather play in the final of Wimbledon. Against Nastase. With Wendi as the ballgirl.

Slowly I become aware that Mr. Brown is watching me. Staring. He walks over and introduces himself, shakes my hand. His hand is one big callus. He asks how long I’ve been playing, how many matches I’ve won, how many I’ve lost.

I never lose, I say quietly.

His eyes narrow.

Mr. Fong pulls Mr. Brown aside and says: Don’t do this, Jim.

Guy’s asking for it, Mr. Brown whispers. Fool and his money.

You don’t understand, Mr. Fong says. You are going to lose, Jim.

What the hell are you—? He’s a kid.

That’s not just any kid.

You must be crazy.

Look, Jim, I like having you come here. You’re a friend, and it’s good for business to have you at my club. But when you lose ten grand to this kid, you’ll be sore, and you might stop coming around.

Mr. Brown turns to look me up and down, as if he must have missed something the first time. He walks back toward me and starts firing questions.

How much do you play?

Every day.

No—how long do you play at one time? An hour? Couple of hours?

I see what he’s doing. He wants to know how fast I get tired. He’s trying to size me up, game-planning for me.

My father’s back. He’s got a fistful of hundreds. He waves it in the air. Suddenly Mr. Brown has had a change of heart.

Here’s what we’ll do, Mr. Brown tells my father. We’ll play two sets, then decide how much to bet on the third.

Whatever you say.

We play on Court 7, just inside the door. A crowd has gathered, and they cheer themselves hoarse as I win the first set, 6–3. Mr. Brown shakes his head. He talks to himself. He bangs his racket on the ground. He’s not happy, which makes two of us. Not only am I thinking, in direct violation of my father’s cardinal rule, but my mind is spinning. I feel as if I might have to stop playing at any moment, because I need to throw up.

Still, I win the second set, 6–3.

Now Mr. Brown is furious. He drops to one knee, laces his sneakers.

My father approaches him.

So? Ten grand?

Naw, Mr. Brown says. Why don’t we just bet $500.

Whatever you say.

My body relaxes. My mind grows quiet. I want to dance along the baseline, knowing I won’t have to play for $10,000. I can swing freely now, without thinking about consequences.

Without thinking at all.

Mr. Brown, meanwhile, is thinking more, playing a less relaxed game. He’s suddenly junk-ing, drop-shotting, lofting lobs, angling the ball at the corners, trying backspin and sidespin and all sorts of trickery. He’s also trying to run me, back and forth, wear me out. But I’m so relieved not to be playing for the entire contents of my father’s safe that I can’t be worn out, and I can’t miss. I beat Mr. Brown 6–2.

Sweat running down his face, he pulls a wad from his pocket and counts out five crisp hundreds. He hands them to my father, then turns to me.

Great game, son.

He shakes my hand. His calluses feel rougher—thanks to me.

He asks what my goals are, my dreams. I start to answer, but my father jumps in.

He’s going to be number one in the world.

I wouldn’t bet against him, Mr. Brown says.

NOT LONG AFTER BEATING MR. BROWN, I play a practice match against my father at Caesars. I’m up 5–2, serving for the match. I’ve never beaten my father, and he looks as if he’s about to lose much more than $10,000.

Suddenly he walks off the court. Get your stuff, he says. Let’s go.

He won’t finish. He’d rather sneak away than lose to his son. Deep down, I know it’s the last time we’ll ever play.

Packing my bag, zipping the cover on my racket, I feel a thrill greater than anything I felt after beating Mr. Brown. This is the sweetest win of my life, and it will be hard to top. I’ll take this win over a wheelbarrow full of silver dollars—and Uncle Isar’s jewels thrown on top—because this is the win that made my father finally sneak away from me.

3

I’M TEN, playing in the nationals. Second round. I lose badly to some kid who’s older, who’s supposed to be the best in the country. Not that this makes it easier. How can losing hurt so much? How can anything hurt so much? I walk off the court wishing I were dead. I stagger out to the parking lot. As my father gathers our stuff and says goodbye to the other parents, I sit in the car, crying.

A man’s face appears in the car window. Black guy. Smiling.

Hey there, he says. My name’s Rudy.

Same name as the man who helped my father build his backyard tennis court. Strange.

What’s your name?

Andre.

He shakes my hand.

Nice to meet you, Andre.

He says he works with the great champion Pancho Segura, who coaches kids my age. He comes to these big tournaments to scout kids for Pancho. He puts his arms through the window, leans heavily on the car door, sighs. He tells me that days like this are tough, he knows, very tough indeed, but in the end these days will make me stronger. His voice is warm, thick, like hot cocoa.

That kid who beat you, why, that kid’s two years older than you! You’ve got two years to reach that kid’s level. Two years is an eternity—especially when you’re working hard. Do you work hard?

Yes, sir.

You’ve got so much ahead of you, son.

But I don’t want to play anymore. I hate tennis.

Ha, ha! Sure you do. Right now. But deep down, you don’t really hate tennis.

Yes, I do.

You just think you hate it.

No, I hate it.

You’re saying that because you’re hurting right now, hurting like heck, but that just means you care. Means you want to win. You can use that. Remember this day. Try to use this day as motivation. If you don’t want to feel this hurt again, good, do everything you can to avoid it.

Are you ready to do everything?

I nod.

Fine, fine. So go ahead and cry. Hurt a while longer. But then tell yourself, that’s it, time to get back to work.

OK.

I wipe my tears on my sleeve and thank Rudy and when he walks away I’m ready to practice. Bring on the dragon. I’m ready to hit balls for hours. If Rudy were standing behind me, whispering encouragement in my ear, I think I could beat that dragon. Suddenly my father climbs behind the wheel of the car and we drive slowly away, like the head car in a funeral procession. The tension in the car is so thick that I curl up on the backseat and close my eyes. I think about jumping out, running away, finding Rudy and asking him to coach me. Or adopt me.

I HATE ALL THE junior tournaments, but I hate nationals most of all, because the stakes are higher, and they’re held in other states, which means airfare, motels, rental cars, restaurant meals. My father is shelling out money, investing in me, and when I lose, there goes another piece of his investment. When I lose I set back the whole Agassi clan.

I’m eleven, playing nationals in Texas on clay. I’m among the best in the nation on clay, so there’s no way I’m going to lose, and then I lose. In the semis. I don’t even reach the final.

Now I have to play a consolation match. When you lose in the semis they make you play a match to determine third and fourth place. Worse, in this particular consolation match I’m facing my archnemesis, David Kass. He’s ranked just below me, but somehow becomes a different player when he sees me across that net. No matter what I do, Kass beats me, and today is no different. I lose in three sets. Again I’m shattered. I’ve disappointed my father. I’ve cost my family. I don’t cry, however. I want to make Rudy proud, so I manage to choke back the tears.

At the awards ceremony a man hands out the first-place trophy, then second, then third.

Then he announces that this year a sportsmanship trophy will be awarded to the youngster who exhibits the most grace on the court. Incredibly, he says my name—maybe because I’ve been biting my lip for an hour. He’s holding the trophy toward me, waving me to come and get it. It’s the last thing in the world I want, a sportsmanship trophy, but I take it from the man and thank him and something shifts inside me. It is an awfully cool trophy. And I have been a good sport. I walk out to the car, clutching the trophy to my chest, my father a step behind me. He says nothing, I say nothing. I concentrate on the click-clack of our footsteps on the cement.

Finally I break the silence. I say, I don’t want this stupid thing. I say it because I think it’s what my father wants to hear. My father comes alongside me. He rips the trophy from my hands.

He lifts it over his head and throws it on the cement. The trophy shatters. My father picks up the biggest piece and throws it on the cement, smashing it into smaller pieces. Now he collects the pieces and throws them into a nearby dumpster. I don’t say a word. I know not to say a word.

IF ONLY I COULD play soccer instead of tennis. I don’t like sports, but if I must play a sport to please my father, I’d much rather play soccer. I get to play three times a week at school, and I love running the soccer field with the wind in my hair, calling for the ball, knowing the world won’t end if I don’t score. The fate of my father, of my family, of planet earth, doesn’t rest on my shoulders. If my team doesn’t win, it will be the whole team’s fault, and no one will yell in my ear. Team sports, I decide, are the way to go.

My father doesn’t mind my playing soccer, because he thinks it helps my footwork on the court. But I recently hurt myself in a soccer scrimmage, pulled a muscle in my leg, and the injury forces me to skip tennis practice one afternoon. My father isn’t happy. He looks at my leg, then me, as if I injured myself on purpose. But an injury is an injury. Even he can’t argue with my body. He stomps out of the house.

Moments later my mother looks at my schedule and realizes I have a soccer game this afternoon. What do we do? she says.

The team is counting on me, I tell her.

She sighs. How do you feel?

I think I can play.

OK. Put on your soccer uniform.

Do you think Pops will be upset?

You know Pa. He doesn’t need a reason to be upset.

She drives me to the soccer game and leaves me there. After a few jogs up and down the field, my leg feels good. Surprisingly good. I dart in between defenders, fluid, graceful, calling for the ball, laughing with my teammates. We’re working toward a common objective. We’re in this together. This feels right. This feels like me.

Suddenly I look up and see my father. He’s at the edge of the parking lot, stalking toward the field. Now he’s talking to the coach. Now he’s yelling at the coach. The coach is waving to me. Agassi! Out of the game!

I sprint off the field.

Get in the car, my father says. And get out of that uniform.

I run to the car and find my tennis clothes on the backseat. I put them on and walk back to my father. I hand him my soccer uniform. He walks onto the field and throws the uniform at the coach’s chest.

As we drive home my father says without looking at me: You’re never playing soccer again.

I beg him for a second chance. I tell my father that I don’t like being by myself on that huge tennis court. Tennis is lonely, I tell him. There’s nowhere to hide when things go wrong.

No dugout, no sideline, no neutral corner. It’s just you out there, naked.

He shouts at the top of his lungs: You’re a tennis player! You’re going to be number one in the world! You’re going to make lots of money. That’s the plan, and that’s the end of it.

He’s adamant, and desperate, because that was the plan for Rita, Philly, and Tami, but things never worked out. Rita rebelled. Tami stopped getting better. Philly didn’t have the killer instinct. My father says this about Philly all the time. He says it to me, to Mom, even to Philly—right to his face. Philly just shrugs, which seems to prove that Philly doesn’t have the killer instinct.

But my father says far worse things to Philly.

You’re a born loser, he says.

You’re right, Philly says in a sorrowful tone. I am a born loser. I was born to be a loser.

You are! You feel sorry for your opponent! You don’t care about being the best!

Philly doesn’t bother to deny it. He plays well, he has talent, but he just isn’t a perfectionist, and perfection isn’t the goal in our house, it’s the law. If you’re not perfect, you’re a loser.

A born loser.

My father decided that Philly was a born loser when Philly was about my age, playing nationals. Philly didn’t just lose; he didn’t argue when his opponents cheated him, which made my father turn bright red and scream curses in Assyrian from the bleachers.

Like my mother, Philly takes it and takes it, and then every once in a great while he blows.

The last time it happened, my father was stringing a tennis racket, my mother was ironing, and Philly was on the couch, watching TV. My father kept after Philly, mercilessly nagging him about his performance at a recent tournament. All at once, in a tone I’d never heard him use, Philly screeched, You know why I don’t win? Because of you! Because you call me a born loser!

Philly started panting with anger. My mother started crying.

From now on, Philly continued, I’ll just be a robot, how’s that? Would you like that? I’ll be a robot and feel nothing and just go out there and do everything you say!

My father stopped stringing the racket and looked happy. Almost peaceful. Jesus Christ, he said, you’re finally getting it.

Unlike Philly, I argue with opponents all the time. I sometimes wish I had Philly’s knack for shrugging off injustice. If an opponent cheats me, if he pulls a Tarango, my face gets hot. Often I get my revenge on the next point. When my cheating opponent hits a shot in the center of the court, I call it out and stare at him with a look that says: Now we’re even.

I don’t do this to please my father, but it surely does. He says, You have a different mentality than Philly. You got all the talent, all the fire—and the luck. You were born with a horseshoe up your ass.

He says this once a day. Sometimes he says it with conviction, sometimes admiration—sometimes envy. I blanch when he says it. I worry that I got Philly’s good luck, that I stole it from him somehow, because if I was born with a horseshoe up my ass, Philly was born with a black cloud over his head. When Philly was twelve he broke his wrist while riding his bike, broke it in three places, and that was the beginning of a long stretch of unbroken gloom. My father was so furious with Philly that he made Philly keep playing tournaments, broken wrist and all, which worsened Philly’s wrist, made the problem chronic, and ruined his game forever. Favoring his broken wrist, Philly was forced to use a one-handed backhand, which Philly believes is a terrible habit, one he couldn’t break after the wrist healed. I watch Philly lose and think: Bad habits plus bad luck—deadly combination. I also watch him when he comes home after a hard loss. He feels so rotten about himself, you can see it all over his face, and my father drives that rottenness down deeper. Philly sits in a corner, beating himself up over the loss, but at least it’s a fair fight, one on one. Then along comes my father. He jumps in and helps Philly gang up on Philly. There is name-calling, slapping. By rights this should make Philly a basket case. At the very least it should make him resent me, bully me.

Instead, after every verbal or physical assault at the hands of himself and my father, Philly’s slightly more careful with me, more protective. Gentler. He wants me spared his fate. For this reason, though he may be a born loser, I see Philly as the ultimate winner. I feel lucky to have him as my older brother. Feeling lucky to have an unlucky older brother? Is that possible?

Does that make sense? Another defining contradiction.

PHILLY AND I spend all our free time together. He picks me up at school on his scooter and we go riding home across the desert, talking and laughing above the engine’s insect whine. We share a bedroom at the back of the house, our sanctuary from tennis and Pops.

Philly is as fussy about his stuff as I am about mine, so he paints a white line down the center of the room, dividing it into his side and mine, ad court and deuce court. I sleep in the deuce court, my bed closest to the door. At night, before we turn out the lights, we have a ritual I’ve come to depend on. We sit on the edges of our beds and whisper across the line. Philly, seven years older, does most of the talking. He pours out his heart, his self-doubts and disappointments. He talks about never winning. He talks about being called a born loser. He talks about needing to borrow money from Pops so that he can continue to play tennis, to keep trying to turn pro. Pops, we both agree, is not a man you want holding your marker.

Of all the things that trouble Philly, however, the great trauma of his life is his hairline. Andre, he says, I’m going bald. He says this in the same way he would tell me the doctor has given him four weeks to live.

But he won’t lose his hair without a battle. Baldness is one opponent Philly will fight with all he’s got. He thinks the reason he’s going bald is that he’s not getting enough blood to his scalp, so every night, at some point during our bedtime talks, Philly stands upside down. He puts his head on the mattress and lifts his feet, balancing himself against the wall. I pray it will work. I plead with God that my brother, the born loser, won’t lose this one thing, his hair. I lie to Philly and tell him that I can see his miracle cure working. I love my brother so much, I’d say anything if I thought it would make him feel better. For my brother’s sake, I’d stand on my own head all night.

After Philly tells me his troubles, I sometimes tell him mine. I’m touched by how quickly he refocuses. He listens to the latest mean thing Pops said, gauges my level of concern, then gives me the proportionate nod. For basic fears, a half nod. For big fears, a full nod with a patented Philly frown. Even when upside down, Philly says as much with one nod as most people say in a five-page letter.

One night Philly asks me to promise him something.

Sure, Philly. Anything.

Don’t ever let Pops give you any pills.

Pills?

Andre, you have to hear what I am telling you. This is really important.

OK, Philly, I hear you. I’m listening.

Next time you go away to nationals, if Pops gives you pills, don’t take them.

He already gives me Excedrin, Philly. He makes me take Excedrin before a match, because it’s loaded with caffeine.

Yeah, I know. But these pills I’m talking about are different. These pills are tiny, white, round. Don’t take them. Whatever you do.

What if Pops makes me? I can’t say no to Pops.

Yeah. Right. OK, let me think.

Philly closes his eyes. I watch the blood rushing to his forehead, turning it purple.

OK, he says. I got it. If you have to take the pills, if he makes you take them, play a bad match. Tank. Then, as you come off the court, tell him you were shaking so bad that you couldn’t concentrate.

OK. But Philly—what are these pills?

Speed.

What’s that?

A drug. Gives you lots of energy. I just know he’s going to try to slip you some speed.

How do you know, Philly?

He gave it to me.

Sure enough, at the nationals in Chicago my father gives me a pill. Hold out your hand, he says. This will help you. Take it.

He puts a pill on my palm. Tiny. White. Round.

I swallow the pill and feel OK. Not much different. Slightly more alert. But I pretend to feel very different. My opponent, an older kid, poses no challenge, and still I carry him, drag out points, hand him several games. I make the match look tougher than it is. Walking off the court I tell my father I don’t feel right, I want to pass out, and he looks guilty.

OK, he says, rubbing his hand across his face, that’s not good. We won’t try that again.

I phone Philly after the tournament and tell him about the pill.

He says, I fucking knew it!

I did just what you told me to do, Philly, and it worked.

My brother sounds the way I imagine a father is supposed to sound. Proud of me and scared for me at the same time. When I return from nationals I grab him and hug him and we spend my first night home locked in our room, whispering across the white line, cherishing our rare victory over Pops.

A short time later I play an older opponent and beat him. It’s a practice match, no big deal, and I’m much better than the opponent, but once again I carry him, drag out points, make the match look tougher than it is, just as I did in Chicago. Walking off Court 7 at Cambridge—the same court on which I beat Mr. Brown—I feel devastated, because my opponent looks devastated. I should have tanked all the way. I hate losing, but I hate winning this time because the defeated opponent is Philly. Does this devastated feeling prove I don’t have the killer instinct? Confused, sad, I wish I could find that old guy, Rudy, or the other Rudy before him, and ask them what it all means.

4

I’M PLAYING A TOURNAMENT at the Las Vegas Country Club, vying for a chance to go to the state championship. My opponent is a kid named Roddy Parks. The first thing I notice about him is that he too has a unique father. Mr. Parks wears a ring with an ant frozen inside a large gumdrop of yellow amber. Before the match starts, I ask him about it.

You see, Andre, when the world ends in a nuclear holocaust, ants will be the only things that survive. So I’m planning for my spirit to go into an ant.

Roddy is thirteen, two years older than I, and big for his age, with a military crew cut. But he looks beatable. Right away I see holes in his game, weaknesses. Then, somehow, he fills in the holes, papers over the weaknesses. He wins the first set.

I talk to myself, tell myself to suck it up, dig in. I take the second set.

Bearing down now, I play smarter, quicker. I feel the finish line. Roddy is mine, he’s toast.

What kind of name is Roddy anyway? But a few points slip away, and now Roddy is raising his arms above his head, he’s won the third set, 7–5, and the match. I look into the stands for my father, and he’s staring down, concerned. Not angry—concerned. I’m concerned too, but damned angry also, sick with self-loathing. I wish I were the frozen ant in Mr. Parks’s ring.

I’m saying hateful things to myself as I pack my tennis bag. Out of nowhere a boy appears and interrupts my rant.

Hey, he says, don’t sweat it. You didn’t play your best today.

I look up. The boy is slightly older than I, a head taller, wearing an expression that I don’t like. There’s something different about his face. His nose and mouth are out of alignment.

And, the capper, he’s wearing a fruity shirt with a little man playing polo? I want no part of him.

Who the fuck are you? I say.

Perry Rogers.

I turn back to my tennis bag.

He won’t take a hint. He drones on about how I didn’t have my best game, how much better I am than Roddy, how I’ll beat Roddy the next time, blah, blah. He’s trying to be nice, I guess, but he’s coming off like a know-it-all, like some kind of Björn Borg Jr., so I stand and pointedly do an about-face. The last thing I need is a consolation speech, which is more point-less than a consolation trophy, especially from a kid with a man playing polo on his chest.

Slinging my tennis bag over my shoulder I tell him: What the fuck do you know about tennis?

Later I feel bad. I shouldn’t have been so harsh. Then I find out the kid is a tennis player, that he was competing in the same tournament. I also hear he’s got a crush on my sister Tami, which is undoubtedly why he talked to me in the first place. Trying to get close to Tami.

But if I feel guilty, Perry is pissed. Word spreads along the Vegas teenager grapevine: Watch your back. Perry is gunning for you. He’s telling everyone that you disrespected him, and the next time he sees you, he’s going to kick your ass.

WEEKS LATER TAMI SAYS the whole gang is going to see a horror flick, all the older kids, and she asks if I want to go along.

That Perry kid going?

Maybe.

Yeah, I’ll go.

I love horror movies. And I have a plan.

Our mother drives us to the theater early so we can buy popcorn and licorice and find the perfect seats, dead center, middle row. I always sit dead center, middle row. Best seats in the house. I put Tami to my left and save the seat to my right. Sure enough, here comes Preppy Perry. I jump to my feet and wave. Hey Perry! Over here!

He turns, squints. I can see he’s caught off guard by my friendliness. He’s trying to analyze the situation, weigh his response. Then he smiles, visibly releases whatever anger he’s been holding. He saunters down the aisle and slides down our row, throwing himself into the seat next to me.

Hey Tami, he says across me.

Hey Perry.

Hey Andre.

Hey Perry.

Just as the lights go down and the first coming attraction starts we give each other a look.

Peace?

Peace.

The movie is Visiting Hours. It’s about a psycho who stalks a lady journalist, sneaks into her house, kills her maid, then for some reason puts on lipstick and pops out when the lady journalist comes home. She fights free, and somehow gets to a hospital, where she thinks she’s safe, but of course the psycho is hiding in the hospital, trying to find the lady journalist’s room, killing everyone who gets in his way. Cheesy, but satisfyingly creepy.

When scared, I react like a cat thrown into a room full of dogs. I freeze, don’t move a muscle. But Perry apparently is the high-strung type. As the suspense builds, he twitches and fidgets and spills soda on himself. Every time the killer jumps out of a closet, Perry jumps out of his seat. Several times I turn to Tami and roll my eyes. I don’t tease Perry about his reaction, however. I don’t even mention it when the lights come on. I don’t want to break our fragile peace accord.

We roll out of the theater and decide the popcorn and Cokes and Twizzlers weren’t enough. We head across the street to Winchell’s and buy a box of French crullers. Perry gets his covered with chocolate. I get mine with rainbow sprinkles. We eat the donuts at the counter, talking. Perry sure can talk. He’s like a lawyer before the Supreme Court. Then, in the middle of a fifteen-minute sentence, he stops and asks the guy behind the counter, Is this place open twenty-four hours?

Yup, the counter guy says.

Seven days a week?

Uh-huh.

Three hundred sixty-five days a year?

Yeah.

Then why are there locks on the front door?

We all turn and look. What a brilliant question! I start laughing so hard that I have to spit out my cruller. Rainbow sprinkles are falling from my mouth like confetti. This might be the funniest, smartest thing anyone’s ever said. Certainly the funniest, smartest thing said by anyone in this particular Winchell’s. Even the donut guy has to smile and admit: Kid, that’s a head-scratcher.

Isn’t life just like that? Perry says. Full of Winchell’s locks and other stuff you can’t explain?

You said it.

I always thought I was the only one who noticed. But here’s a kid who not only notices, he points that stuff out. When my mother comes to pick up me and Tami, I’m sad to say goodbye to my new friend Perry. I even find myself less annoyed by his polo shirt.

I ASK MY FATHER if I can sleep over at Perry’s house.

No fucking way, he says.

He doesn’t know Perry’s family from a hole in the ground. And he doesn’t trust anyone he doesn’t know. My father is suspicious of everyone in the world, especially the parents of our friends. I don’t bother asking why, and I don’t waste my breath arguing. I just invite Perry to our house for a sleepover.

Perry is extremely polite with my parents. He’s agreeable with my siblings, especially Tami, though she’s gently discouraged his crush. I ask if he wants a quick tour. Sure thing, he says, so I show him the room I share with Philly. He laughs at the white stripe down the middle. I show him the court out back. He takes a turn hitting with the dragon. I tell him how much I hate the dragon, how I used to think it was a living, breathing monster. He looks sympathetic. He’s seen enough horror flicks to know that monsters come in all shapes and sizes.

Since Perry is a fellow connoisseur of horror, I’ve got a surprise for him. I’ve scored a beta copy of The Exorcist. After seeing him jump out of his skin at Visiting Hours, I can’t wait to see how he reacts to a genuine horror classic. After everyone’s asleep we slide the movie into the machine. I suffer a minor aneurysm with every rotation of Linda Blair’s head, but Perry doesn’t flinch once. Visiting Hours gives him the shakes, but The Exorcist leaves him cold? I think: This dude marches to his own drummer.

Afterward, we sit up drinking sodas and talking. Perry agrees that my father’s scarier than anything Hollywood can offer, but he says his father is twice as scary. His father, he says, is an ogre, a tyrant, and a narcissist—the first time I’ve heard this word.

Perry says, Narcissist means he thinks only about himself. It also means his son is his personal property. He has a vision of how his son’s life is going to be, and he couldn’t care less about his son’s vision of that future.

Sounds familiar.

Perry and I agree that life would be a million times better if our fathers were like other kids’

fathers. But I hear an added note of pain in Perry’s voice, because he says his father doesn’t love him. I’ve never questioned my father’s love. I just wish it were softer, with more listening and less rage. In fact, I sometimes wish my father loved me less. Maybe then he’d back off, let me make my own choices. I tell Perry that having no choice, having no say about what I do or who I am, makes me crazy. That’s why I put more thought, obsessive thought, into the few choices I do have—what I wear, what I eat, who I call my friends.

He nods. He gets it.

At last, in Perry, I have a friend with whom I can share these deep thoughts, a friend I can tell about the Winchell’s locks in my life. I talk to Perry about playing tennis, despite hating tennis. Hating school, despite enjoying books. Feeling lucky to have Philly, despite his streak of bad luck. Perry listens, patient as Philly, but more involved. Perry doesn’t just talk, then listen, then nod. He converses. He analyzes, strategizes, spit-balls, helps me come up with a plan to make things better. When I tell Perry my problems, they sound jumbled and asinine at first, but Perry has a way of rearranging them, making them sound logical, which feels like the first step to making them solvable. I feel as if I’ve been on a desert island, with no one to talk to but the palm trees, and now a thoughtful, sensitive, like-minded castaway—albeit with a stupid polo player on his shirt—has come stumbling ashore.

Perry confides in me about his nose and mouth. He says he was born with a cleft palate.

He says it’s made him deeply self-conscious and painfully shy with girls. He’s had surgeries to fix it, and faces one more surgery at least. I tell him it’s not that noticeable. He gets tears in his eyes. He mumbles something about his father blaming him.

Most conversations with Perry eventually lead to fathers, and from fathers it’s a quick segue to the future. We talk about the men we’re going to be once we’re rid of our fathers. We promise each other that we’ll be different, not just from our fathers but from all the men we know, even the ones we see in movies. We make a pact that we’ll never do drugs or drink al-cohol. And when we’re rich, we vow, we’ll do what we can to help the world. We shake on it.

A secret handshake.

Perry has a long way to go to get rich. He never has a dime. Everything we do is my treat.

I don’t have much—a modest allowance, plus what I hustle from guests at the casinos and hotels. But I don’t care; what’s mine is Perry’s, because I’ve decided that Perry is my new best friend. My father gives me five dollars every day for food, and I freely spend half on Perry.

We meet every afternoon at Cambridge. After goofing off, hitting a few balls around, we go for a snack. We slip out the back door, hop the wall, and race across the vacant lot to 7-Eleven, where we play video games and eat Chipwiches, paid for by me, until it’s time to go home.

A Chipwich is a new ice cream sandwich Perry recently discovered. Vanilla ice cream pressed between two doughy chocolate chip cookies—it’s the greatest food in the world, according to Perry, who’s a raging addict. He loves Chipwiches more than talking. He can talk for an hour about the beauty of the Chipwich—and yet a Chipwich is one of the few things that can get him to stop talking. I buy him Chipwiches by the dozens, and I feel sorry for him that he doesn’t have enough money to feed his habit.

We’re at 7-Eleven one day when Perry stops chewing his Chipwich and looks up at the wall clock.

Shit, Andre, we better get back to Cambridge, my mother’s coming early to get me.

Your mother?

Yeah. She said to be ready and waiting out front.

We haul ass across the vacant lot.

Uh-oh, Perry shouts, there she is!

I look up the street and see two cars cruising toward Cambridge—a Volkswagen bug and a convertible Rolls-Royce. I see the bug keep going past Cambridge, and I tell Perry to relax, we have time. She missed the turn.

No, Perry says, come on, come on.

He turns on the jets, sprinting after the Rolls.

Hey! What the—? Perry, are you kidding? Your mom drives a Rolls? Are you—rich?

I guess so.

Why didn’t you tell me?

You never asked.

For me, that’s the definition of being rich: it doesn’t cross your mind to mention it to your best friend. And money is such a given you don’t care how you come by it.

Perry, however, is more than rich. Perry is super-rich. Perry is Richie Rich. His father, a senior partner at a major law firm, owns a local TV station. He sells air, Perry says. Imagine.

Selling air. When you can sell air, man, you’ve got it made. (Presumably his father gives him air for an allowance.)

My father finally lets me visit Perry’s house, and I discover that he doesn’t live in a house, in fact, but a mega-mansion. His mother drives us there in the Rolls, and my eyes get big as we pass slowly up a massive front drive, around green rolling hills, then under enormous shade trees. We stop outside a place that looks like Bruce Wayne’s stately manor. One entire wing is set aside for Perry, including a teenager’s dream room, featuring a ping-pong table, pool table, poker table, big-screen TV, mini fridge, and drum set. Down a long hallway lies Perry’s bedroom, the walls of which are covered with dozens and dozens of Sports Illustrated covers.

My head rotating on a swivel, I look at all the portraits of great athletes and I can only say one word: Whoa.

Did this all myself, Perry says.

The next time I’m at the dentist I tear off the covers of all the Sports Illustrateds in the waiting room and stash them under my jacket. When I hand them to Perry, he shakes his head.

No, I have this one. And this one. I have them all, Andre. I have a subscription.

Oh. OK. Sorry.

It’s not just that I’ve never met a rich kid. I’ve also never met a kid with a subscription.

IF WE’RE NOT HANGING OUT AT CAMBRIDGE, or at his mansion, Perry and I are talking on the phone. We’re inseparable. He’s crushed, therefore, when I tell him that I’m going away for a month, to play a series of tournaments in Australia. McDonald’s is putting together a team of America’s elite juniors, sending us to play Australia’s best.

A whole month?

I know. But I have no choice. My father.

I’m not being entirely truthful. I’m one of only two twelve-year-olds selected, so I’m honored, excited, if slightly on edge about traveling so far from home—the plane ride is fourteen hours. For Perry’s sake I downplay the trip. I tell him not to worry, I’ll be back in no time, and we’ll have a Chipwich feast.

I fly alone to Los Angeles, and upon landing I want to go straight back to Vegas. I’m scared. I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go or how to find my way through the airport. I feel as if I stick out in my warm-up suit with the McDonald’s Golden Arches on the back and my name on the chest. Now, off in the distance I see a group of kids wearing the same warm-up suit. My team. I approach the one adult in the group and introduce myself.

He flashes a big smile. He’s the coach. My first real coach.

Agassi, he says. The hotshot from Vegas? Hey, glad to have you aboard!

During the flight to Australia, Coach stands in the aisle, telling us how the trip is going to work. We’re going to play five tournaments in five different cities. The most important tournament, however, will be the third, in Sydney. That’s where we’ll pit our best against the best Australians.

There should be five thousand fans in the arena, he says, plus it’s going to be televised throughout Australia.

Talk about pressure.

But here’s the good news, Coach says. Every time you win a tournament, I’ll let you have one cold beer.

I win my first tournament, in Adelaide, no problem, and on the bus Coach hands me an ice-cold Foster’s Lager. I think of Perry and our pact. I think of how strange it is that I’m twelve and being served booze. But the beer can looks so frosty cold, and my teammates are watching. Also, I’m thousands of miles from home—fuck it. I take a sip. Delicious. I drain it in four gulps, then wrestle with my guilty conscience the rest of the afternoon. I stare out the window as the outback crawls by and I wonder how Perry will take the news, if he’ll stop being my friend.

I win three of the next four tournaments. Three more beers. Each more delicious than the last. But with every sip, I taste the bitter dregs of guilt.

PERRY AND I FALL right back into our old routine. Horror movies. Long talks. Cambridge.

7-Eleven. Chipwiches. Every now and then, however, I look at him and feel the weight of my betrayal.

We’re walking from Cambridge to 7-Eleven and I can’t hold it in any longer. The guilt is eating away at me. We’re each wearing headphones plugged into Perry’s Walkman, listening to Prince. Purple Rain. I tap Perry on the shoulder and tell him to take off his headphones.

What’s up?

I don’t know how to say this.

He stares.

What is it?

Perry. I broke our pact.

No.

I had a beer in Australia.

Just one?

Four.

Four!

I look down.

He thinks. He stares off at the mountains. Well, he says, we make choices in life, Andre, and you’ve made yours. I guess that leaves me on my own.

But a few minutes later, he’s curious. He asks how the beers tasted, and again I can’t lie. I tell him they were great. I apologize again, but there’s no point in pretending to be remorseful.

Perry’s right—I had a choice, for once, and I made it. Sure, I wish I hadn’t broken our pact, but I can’t feel bad about finally exercising free will.

Perry frowns like a father. Not like my father, or his father, but like a TV father. He looks as if he should be wearing a cardigan sweater and smoking a pipe. I realize that the pact Perry and I made, at its root, was a promise to become each other’s fathers. To raise each other. I apologize once more, and I realize how much I missed Perry while I was gone. I make another pact, with myself, that I won’t leave home again.

MY FATHER ACCOSTS ME IN THE KITCHEN. He says we need to talk. I wonder if he heard about the beer.

He tells me to sit at the table. He sits across from me. An unfinished Norman Rockwell separates us. He describes a story he caught recently on 60 Minutes. It was all about a tennis boarding school on the west coast of Florida, near Tampa Bay. The first school of its kind, my father says. A boot camp for young tennis players, it’s run by a former paratrooper named Nick Bollettieri.

So?

So—you’re going there.

What!

You’re not getting any better here in Las Vegas. You’ve beaten all the local boys. You’ve beaten all the boys in the West. Andre, you’ve beaten all the players at the local college! I have nothing left to teach you.

My father doesn’t say the words, but it’s obvious: he’s determined to do things differently with me. He doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes he made with my siblings. He ruined their games by holding on too long, too tight, and in the process he ruined his relationship with them. Things got so bad with Rita that she’s recently run off with Pancho Gonzalez, the tennis legend, who’s at least thirty years her senior. My father doesn’t want to limit me, or break me, or ruin me. So he’s banishing me. He’s sending me away, partly to protect me from himself.

Andre, he says, you’ve got to eat, sleep, and drink tennis. It’s the only way you’re going to be number one.

I already eat, sleep, and drink tennis.

But he wants me to do my eating, sleeping, and drinking elsewhere.

How much does this tennis academy cost?

About $12,000 a year.

We can’t afford that.

You’re only going for three months. That’s $3,000.

We can’t afford that either.

It’s an investment. In you. We’ll find a way.

I don’t want to go.

I can see from my father’s face it’s settled. End of story.

I try to look on the bright side. It’s only three months. I can take anything for three months.

Also, how bad could it be? Maybe it will be like Australia. Maybe it will be fun. Maybe there will be unforeseen benefits. Maybe it will feel like playing for a team.

What about school? I ask. I’m in the middle of seventh grade.

There’s a school in the next town, my father says. You’ll go in the morning, for half a day, then play tennis all afternoon and into the night.

Sounds grueling. A short time later my mother tells me that the 60 Minutes report was actually an exposé on this Bollettieri character, who was in essence running a tennis sweatshop that employed child labor.

THEY GIVE A GOODBYE PARTY for me at Cambridge. Mr. Fong looks glum, Perry looks suicidal, my father looks uncertain. We stand around eating cake. We play tennis with the balloons, then pop them with pins. Everyone pats me on the back and says what a blast I’m going to have.

I know, I say. Can’t wait to mix it up with those Florida kids.

The lie sounds like a deliberate miss, like a ball off the wooden rim of my racket.

As the day of my departure draws closer, I don’t sleep well. I wake up thrashing, sweating, twisted up in the sheets. I can’t eat. All at once the concept of homesickness makes perfect sense. I don’t want to leave my home, my siblings, my mother, my best friend. Despite the tension of my home, the occasional terror, I’d give anything to stay. For all the pain my father has caused me, the one constant has been his presence. He’s always been there, at my back, and now he won’t be. I feel abandoned. I thought the one thing I wanted was to be free of him, and now that he’s sending me away, I’m heartbroken.

I spend my last days at home hoping that my mother will come to my rescue. I look at her imploringly, but she looks back with a face that says: I’ve seen him break three kids. You’re lucky to be getting out while you’re whole.

My father drives me to the airport. My mother wants to go but can’t miss a day of work.

Perry takes her place. He doesn’t stop talking the whole way. I can’t decide if he’s trying to cheer me up or himself. It’s only three months, he says. We’ll write letters, postcards. You’ll see, it’s going to be fine. You’re going to learn so much. Maybe I’ll even come visit.

I think about Visiting Hours, the cheesy horror movie we saw the night our friendship was born. Perry is acting now the way he acted then, the way he always reacts to fear—twitching, jumping out of his seat. And I’m reacting in my typical way. A cat thrown into a room full of dogs.

5

THE AIRPORT SHUTTLE pulls into the compound just after sunset. The Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, built on an old tomato farm, is nothing fancy, just a few outbuildings that look like cell blocks. They’re named like cell blocks too: B Building, C Building. I look around, half expecting to find a guard tower and razor wire. More ominously, stretching off into the distance I see row after row of tennis courts.

As the sun sinks beyond the inky black marshes, the temperature plummets. I huddle into my T-shirt. I thought Florida was supposed to be hot. A staff member greets me as I step out of the van and marches me straight to my barracks, which are empty and eerily quiet.

Where is everyone?

Study hall, he says. In a few minutes it’ll be free hour. That’s the hour between study hall and bedtime. Why don’t you go down to the rec center and introduce yourself to the others?

In the rec center I find two hundred wild boys, plus a few tough-looking girls, separated in-to tight cliques. One of the largest cliques is pressed around a Nerf ping-pong table, screaming insults at two boys playing. I press my back against a wall and scan the room. I recognize a few faces, including one or two from the Australia trip. That kid over there—I played him in California. That evil-looking homey right there—I played a tough three-setter against him in Arizona. Everyone looks talented, supremely confident. The kids are all colors, all sizes, all ages, and from all around the world. The youngest is seven, the oldest nineteen. After ruling Las Vegas my whole life, I’m now a tiny fish in a vast pond. Or marsh. And the biggest of the big fish are the best players in the country—teenage Supermen who form the tightest clique in a far corner.

I try to watch the ping-pong game. Even there I’m outclassed. Back home, nobody could beat me at Nerf ping-pong. Here? Half these guys would cream me.

I can’t imagine how I’ll ever fit in at this joint, how I’ll make friends. I want to go home, right now, or at least phone home, but I’d have to call collect and I know my father wouldn’t accept the charges. Just knowing I can’t hear my mother’s voice, or Philly’s, no matter how much I need to, makes me feel panicky. When free hour ends I hurry back to the barracks and lie on my bunk, waiting to disappear into the black marsh of sleep.

Three months, I tell myself. Just three months.

PEOPLE LIKE TO CALL the Bollettieri Academy a boot camp, but it’s really a glorified prison camp. And not all that glorified. We eat gruel—beige meats and gelatinous stews and gray slop poured over rice—and sleep in rickety bunks that line the plywood walls of our military-style barracks. We rise at dawn and go to bed soon after dinner. We rarely leave, and we have scant contact with the outside world. Like most prisoners we do nothing but sleep and work, and our main rock pile is drills. Serve drills, net drills, backhand drills, forehand drills, with occasional match play to establish the pecking order, strong to weak. Sometimes it feels as though we’re gladiators, preparing underneath the Colosseum. Certainly the thirty-five instructors who bark at us during drills think of themselves as slave drivers.

When we’re not drilling, we’re studying the psychology of tennis. We take classes on mental toughness, positive thinking, and visualization. We’re taught to close our eyes and picture ourselves winning Wimbledon, hoisting that gold trophy above our heads. Then we go to aer-obics, or weight training, or out to the crushed-shell track, where we run until we drop.

The constant pressure, the cutthroat competition, the total lack of adult supervision—it slowly turns us into animals. A kind of jungle law prevails. It’s Karate Kid with rackets, Lord of the Flies with forehands. One night two boys get into an argument in the barracks. A white boy and an Asian boy. The white boy uses a racial slur, then walks out. For a full hour the Asian boy stands in the middle of the barracks, stretching, shaking out his legs and arms, rolling his neck. He runs through a progression of judo moves, then carefully, methodically tapes his ankles. When the white boy returns, the Asian boy spins, whipsaws his leg through the air, and unleashes a kick that shatters the white boy’s jaw.

The shocking part is that neither boy gets expelled, which greatly adds to the overall sense of anarchy.

Another two boys have a low-grade, long-running feud. It’s mostly taunts, teases, minor stuff—until one boy ups the ante. For days he urinates and defecates into a bucket. Then, late one night, he bursts into the other boy’s barracks and dumps the bucket on his head.

The jungle feeling, the constant threat of violence and ambush, is reinforced, just before lights out, by the sound of drums in the distance.

I ask one of the boys: What the hell is that?

Oh. That’s just Courier. He likes to pound a drum set his parents sent him.

Who?

Jim Courier. From Florida.

Within days I get my first glimpse of the warden, founder, and owner of the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. He’s fiftysomething, but looks 250, because tanning is one of his obsessions, along with tennis and getting married. (He’s got five or six ex-wives, no one is quite sure.) He’s soaked up so much sun, baked himself so deeply beneath so many ultraviolet sunlamps, he’s permanently altered his pigmentation. The one portion of his face that isn’t the color of beef jerky is his mustache, a black, meticulously trimmed quasi-goatee, only without the chin hair, so it looks like a permanent frown. I see Nick striding across the compound, an angry red man in wraparound shades, berating someone who jogs alongside, trying to keep pace, and I pray that I never have to deal with Nick directly. I watch as he slides into a red Ferrari and zooms away, leaving a dorsal fin of dust in his wake.

A boy tells me it’s our job to keep Nick’s four sports cars washed and polished.

Our job? That’s bullshit.

Tell it to the judge.

I ask some of the older boys, some of the veterans, about Nick. Who is he? What makes him tick? They say he’s a hustler, a guy who makes a very nice living off tennis, but he doesn’t love the game or even know it all that well. He’s not like my father, captivated by the angles and numbers and beauty of tennis. Then again, he’s just like my father. He’s captivated by cash. He’s a guy who flunked the exam for Navy pilots, dropped out of law school, then landed one day on the idea of teaching tennis. Stepped in shit. Through a bit of hard work, and a ton of luck, he’s turned himself into this image of a tennis titan, mentor to prodigies. You can learn a few things from him, the other kids say, but he’s no miracle worker.

He doesn’t sound like a guy who can make me stop hating the game.

· · ·

I’M PLAYING A PRACTICE MATCH, putting a fairly good whooping on a kid from the East Coast, when I become aware that Gabriel, one of Nick’s henchmen, is behind me, staring.

After a few more points Gabriel stops the match. He asks, Has Nick seen you play yet?

No, sir.

He frowns, walks off.

Later, over the loudspeaker that carries across all the courts of the Bollettieri Academy, I hear:

Andre Agassi to the indoor supreme court! Andre Agassi, report to the indoor supreme court—immediately!

I’ve never been to the indoor supreme court, and I can’t imagine there’s a good reason for my being summoned now. I run there and find Gabriel and Nick, standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting.

Gabriel says to Nick: You’ve got to see this kid hit.

Nick strolls off into the shadows. Gabriel gets on the other side of the net. He puts me through drills for half an hour. I sneak occasional glances over my shoulder: I can vaguely make out the silhouette of Nick, concentrating, stroking his mustache.

Hit some backhands, Nick says. His voice is like sandpaper on Velcro.

I do as I’m told. I hit backhands.

Now hit some serves.

I serve.

Come to the net.

I come to the net.

That’s enough.

He steps forward. Where are you from?

Las Vegas.

What’s your national ranking?

Number three.

How do I reach your father?

He’s at work. He works nights at the MGM.

How about your mother?

At this hour? She’s probably at home.

Come with me.

We walk slowly to his office, where he asks for my home number. He’s sitting in a tall black leather chair, turned almost away from me. My face feels redder than his face looks. He dials and speaks to my mother. She gives him my father’s number. He dials again.

He’s yelling. Mr. Agassi! Nick Bollettieri here! Right, right. Yes, well, listen to me. I’m going to tell you something very important. Your boy has more talent than anybody I’ve ever seen come through this academy. That’s right. Ever. And I’m going to take him to the top.

What the hell is he talking about? I’m only here for three months. I’m leaving here in sixty-four days. Is Nick saying he wants me to stay here? Live here—forever? Surely my father won’t go for that.

Nick says: That’s right. No, that’s no issue. I’m going to make it so you won’t pay a penny.

Andre can stay, free of charge. I’m tearing up your check.

My heart sinks. I know my father can’t resist anything free. My fate is sealed.

Nick hangs up and spins toward me in his chair. He doesn’t explain. He doesn’t console.

He doesn’t ask if this is what I want. He doesn’t say a thing besides: Go back out to the courts.

The warden has tacked several years to my sentence, and there’s nothing to be done but pick up my hammer and return to the rock pile.

EVERY DAY AT THE BOLLETTIERI ACADEMY starts with the stench. The surrounding hills are home to several orange-processing plants, which give off a toxic smell of burned orange peels. It’s the first thing that hits me when I open my eyes, a reminder that this is real, I’m not back in Vegas, I’m not in my deuce-court bed, dreaming. I’ve never cared much for orange juice, but after the Bollettieri Academy I’ll never be able to look at a gallon of Minute Maid again.

As the sun clears the marshes, burning off the morning mist, I hurry to beat the other boys into the shower, because only the first boys get hot water. Actually, it’s not a shower, just a tiny nozzle that shoots a narrow jet of painful needles, which hardly gets you wet, let alone clean. Then we all rush to breakfast, served in a cafeteria so chaotic, it’s like a mental hospital where the nurses forgot to hand out the meds. But you’d better get there early or it might be worse. The butter will be filled with everyone else’s crumbs, the bread will be gone, the plastic eggs will be ice.

Straight from breakfast we board a bus for school, Bradenton Academy, twenty-six minutes away. I divide my time between two academies, both prisons, but Bradenton Academy makes me more claustrophobic, because it makes less sense. At the Bollettieri Academy, at least I’m learning something about tennis. At Bradenton Academy, the only thing I learn is that I’m stupid.

Bradenton Academy has warped floors, dirty carpets, and a color scheme that’s fourteen shades of gray. There isn’t one window in the building, so the light is fluorescent and the air is stale, filled with a medley of foul odors, chiefly vomit, toilet, and fear. It’s almost worse than the scorched-orange smell back at the Bollettieri Academy.

Other kids, non-tennis kids from town, don’t seem to mind. Some actually thrive at Bradenton Academy, maybe because their life schedules are manageable. They don’t balance school with careers as semipro athletes. They don’t contend with waves of homesickness that rise and fall like nausea. They spend seven hours a day in class, then go home to eat dinner and watch TV with their families. Those of us who commute from the Bollettieri Academy, however, spend four and a half hours in class, then board the bus for the long slog back to our full-time jobs, hitting balls until after dusk, at which time we collapse in heaps on our wooden bunks, to grab a half hour of rest before returning to the original state of nature that is the rec center. Then we nod over our textbooks for a few futile hours before free hour and lights out. We’re always behind on schoolwork and falling ever further behind. The system is rigged, guaranteed to produce bad students as quickly and efficiently as it produces good tennis players.

I don’t like anything that’s rigged, so I don’t give much effort. I don’t study. I don’t do homework. I don’t pay attention. And I don’t give a damn. In every class I sit quietly at my desk, staring at my feet, wishing I were somewhere else, while the teacher drones on about Shakespeare or Bunker Hill or the Pythagorean theorem.

The teachers don’t care that I’ve tuned them out, because I’m one of Nick’s Boys, and they don’t want to cross Nick. Bradenton Academy exists because the Bollettieri Academy keeps sending it a bus full of paying customers every semester. The teachers know that their jobs depend on Nick, so they can’t flunk us, and we cherish our special status. We feel a lordly sense of entitlement, never realizing that the thing to which we’re most entitled is the thing we’re not getting—an education.

Inside the metal front doors of Bradenton Academy stands the office, the nerve center of the school and the source of much pain. Report cards and threatening letters emanate from the office. Bad boys are sent there. The office is also the lair of Mrs. G and Doc G, married coprincipals of Bradenton Academy, and, I suspect, frustrated sideshow performers. Mrs. G is a gangly woman with no midsection. She looks as if her shoulders have been set directly on her hips. She tries to disguise this odd shape by wearing skirts, but this only accentuates the problem. On her face she wears two gobs of blush and one smear of lipstick, a symmetrical triad of three circles that she color-coordinates the way other people do their shoes and belt.

Her cheeks and mouth always match, and always almost distract you from the hump in her back. Nothing Mrs. G wears, however, can distract you from her gargantuan hands. She has mitts the size of rackets, and the first time she shakes my hand I think I might faint.

Old Doc G is half her size but has just as many body issues. It’s not hard to see what they first found in common. Frail, gamy, Doc G has a right arm that’s been shriveled since birth. He ought to hide this arm, keep it behind his back or shoved in a pocket. Instead he waves it around, brandishes it like a weapon. He likes to take students aside for one-on-one chats, and whenever he does so, he swings his bad arm up onto the student’s shoulder, setting it there until he’s said his piece. If this doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, nothing will. Doc G’s arm feels like a pork tenderloin lying on your shoulder, and hours later you can still feel it there and you can’t help but shiver.

Mrs. G and Doc G have instituted dozens of rules at Bradenton Academy, and one of the most strictly enforced is their ban on jewelry. Thus, I go out of my way to pierce my ears. It’s an easy show of rebellion, which, as I see it, is my last resort. Rebellion is the one thing I get to choose every day, and this rebellion comes with the added bonus that it represents a neat little fuck-you to my father, who’s always hated earrings on men. Many times I’ve heard my father say that earrings equal homosexuality. I can’t wait for him to see mine. (I buy both studs and dangly hoops.) He’ll finally regret sending me thousands of miles from home and leaving me here to be corrupted.

I make a feeble and insincere effort to hide my new accessory, wrapping a Band-Aid around it. Mrs. G notices, of course, just as I hoped she would. She pulls me out of class and confronts me.

Mr. Agassi, what is the meaning of that bandage?

I hurt my ear.

Hurt your—? Don’t be ridiculous. Remove that Band-Aid.

I pull off the Band-Aid. She sees the stud and gasps.

We do not allow earrings at Bradenton Academy, Mr. Agassi. The next time I see you, I will expect the Band-Aid gone and the earring out.

By the end of the first semester I’m close to failing all my classes. Except English. I show a strange aptitude for literature, especially poetry. Memorizing famous poems, writing original poems, it comes easily to me. We’re assigned to write a short verse about our daily lives and I set mine proudly on the teacher’s desk. She likes it. She reads it aloud in class. Some of the other kids later ask me to ghostwrite their homework. I dash off their assignments on the bus, no problem. The English teacher detains me after class and says I have real talent. I smile.

It’s different from being told by Nick that I have talent. This feels like something I’d like to pur-sue. For a moment I imagine what it would be like to do something besides playing tennis—something I choose. Then I go to my next class, math, and the dream dies in a cloud of algebra formulae. I’m not cut out to be a scholar. The math teacher’s voice sounds as if it’s coming from miles away. The next class, French, is worse. I’m très stupide. I transfer to Spanish, where I’m muy estúpido. Spanish, I think, might actually shorten my life. The boredom, the confusion, might cause me to expire in my chair. They will find me one day in my seat, muerto.

Gradually school goes from being hard to being physically harmful. The anxiety of boarding the bus, the twenty-six-minute ride, the inevitable confrontation with Mrs. G or Doc G, actually make me ill. What I dread most is the moment, the daily moment, when I’m exposed as a loser. An academic loser. So great is this dread that over time Bradenton Academy modifies my view of the Bollettieri Academy. I look forward to all those drills, and even the high-pressure tournaments, because at least I’m not at school.

Thanks to one particularly big tournament, I miss a major history test at Bradenton Academy, a test I was sure to fail. I celebrate this dodging of a bullet by eviscerating my opponents. But when I return to school my teacher says I have to take a makeup.

The injustice. I skulk down to the office for the makeup test. Along the way I duck into a dark corner and prepare a cheat sheet, which I stash in my pocket.

There is only one other student in the office, a red-haired girl with a fat, sweaty face. She doesn’t blink, doesn’t register my presence in any way. She seems to be in a coma. I fill out the test, fast, copying from my cheat sheet. Suddenly I feel a pair of eyes on me. I look up, and the red-haired girl is out of her coma, staring. She closes her book and strolls out. Quickly I shove the cheat sheet into the crotch of my underwear. I tear another sheet of paper from my notebook and, imitating a girlish handwriting, I write: I think you’re cute! Give me a call! I shove the paper in my front pocket just as Mrs. G storms in.

Pencil down, she says.

Soon after arriving at the Bollettieri Academy, I start to rebel.

What’s up, Mrs. G?

Are you cheating?

On what? This? If I were going to cheat on something it wouldn’t be this. I’ve got this history stuff down cold. Valley Forge. Paul Revere. Piece of cake.

Empty your pockets.

I lay out a few coins, a pack of gum, the note from my imaginary admirer. Mrs. G picks up the note and reads under her breath.

I say, I’m thinking about what I should write back. Any ideas?

She scowls, walks out. I pass the test and chalk it up as a moral victory.

MY ENGLISH TEACHER is my only advocate. She’s also the daughter of Mrs. G and Doc G, so she pleads with her parents that I’m smarter than my grades and my behavior indicate.

She even arranges an IQ test and the results confirm her opinion.

Andre, she says, you need to apply yourself. Prove to Mrs. G that you’re not who she thinks you are.

I tell her that I am applying myself, that I’m doing as well as I can under the circumstances. But I’m tired all the time from playing tennis, and distracted by the pressure of tournaments and so-called challenges. Especially the challenges: once a month we play someone above us in the pecking order. I’d like any teacher to explain how you’re supposed to concentrate on conjugating verbs or solving for x when you’re steeling yourself for a five-set brawl with some punk from Orlando that afternoon.

I don’t tell her everything, because I can’t. I’d feel like a sissy talking about my fear of school, the countless times I sit in class drenched in sweat. I can’t tell her about my trouble concentrating, my horror of being called on, how this horror sometimes morphs into an air bubble in my lower intestine, which grows and grows until I need to run to the bathroom.

Between classes I’m often locked in a toilet stall.

Then there’s the social anxiety, the doomed effort to fit in. At Braden-ton Academy, fitting in takes money. Most of the kids are fashion plates, whereas I have three pairs of jeans, five T-shirts, two pairs of tennis shoes—and one cotton crewneck with gray and black squares. In class, rather than thinking about The Scarlet Letter, I’m thinking about how many days per week I can get away with wearing my sweater, worrying about what I’ll do when the weather gets warm.

The worse I do in school, the more I rebel. I drink, I smoke pot, I act like an ass. I’m dimly aware of the inverse ratio between my grades and my rebellion, but I don’t dwell on it. I prefer Nick’s theory. He says I don’t do well in school because I have a hard-on for the world. It might be the only thing he’s ever said about me that’s halfway accurate. (He typically describes me as a cocky showboater who seeks the limelight. Even my father knows me better than that.) My general demeanor does feel like a hard-on—violent, involuntary, unstoppable—and so I accept it as I accept the many changes in my body.

Finally, when my grades hit bottom, my rebellion reaches the breaking point. I walk into a hair salon in the Bradenton Mall and tell the stylist to give me a mohawk. Razor the sides, shave them to the scalp, and leave just one thick strip of spiked hair down the middle.

Are you sure, kid?

I want it high, and I want it spiky. Then dye it pink.

He works his shearer back and forth for eight minutes. Then he says, All done, and spins me around in the chair. I look in the mirror. The earring was good, this is better. I can’t wait to see the look on Mrs. G’s face.

Outside the mall, while I wait for the bus back to the Bollettieri Academy, no one recognizes me. Kids I play with, kids I bunk with, they look right past me. To the casual observer I’ve done something that seems like a desperate effort to stand out. But in fact I’ve rendered myself, my inner self, my true self, invisible. At least, that was the idea.

I FLY HOME FOR CHRISTMAS, and as the plane approaches the Strip, as the casinos below the canting right wing twinkle like a row of Christmas trees, the flight attendant says we’re stuck in a holding pattern.

Groans.

Since we know you’re all itching to hit the casinos, she says, we thought it might be fun to do a little gambling till we’re clear to land.

Cheers.

Let’s everybody take out a dollar and put it in this airsick bag. Then write your seat number on your ticket stub and throw it in this other airsick bag. We’ll pull out one ticket stub, and that person will win the jackpot!

She collects everyone’s dollar while another flight attendant collects the ticket stubs. Now she stands at the head of the plane and reaches in the bag.

And the grand prize goes to, drumroll please, 9F!

I’m 9F. I won! I won! I stand and wave. The passengers turn and see me. More groans.

Great, the kid with the pink mohawk won.

The flight attendant reluctantly hands me the airsick bag full of ninety-six ones. I spend the rest of the flight counting and recounting them, thanking my lucky stars for this horseshoe up my ass.

My father, as expected, is horrified by my hair and earring. But he refuses to blame himself or the Bollettieri Academy. He won’t admit that sending me away was a mistake, and he won’t stand for any talk of my coming home. He simply asks if I’m a faggot.

No, I say, then go to my room.

Philly follows. He compliments my new look. Even a mohawk beats bald. I tell him about my windfall on the airplane.

Whoa! What are you going to do with all that cash?

I’m thinking about spending it on an ankle bracelet for Jamie. She’s a girl who goes to school with Perry. She let me kiss her the last time I was home. But I don’t know—I desperately need new clothes for school. I can’t make it much farther with one gray-black sweater. I want to fit in.

Philly nods. Tough call, bro.

He doesn’t ask why, if I want to fit in, I got a mohawk and an earring. He treats my di-lemma as serious, my contradictions as coherent, and helps me work through the options. We decide that I should spend the money on the girlfriend, forget about the new clothes.

The moment I have the anklet in my hands, however, I’m filled with regret. I picture myself back in Florida, rotating my few articles of clothing. I tell Philly, and he gives a half nod.

In the morning I open one eye and find Philly hovering over me, grinning. He’s staring at my chest. I look down and find a stack of bills.

What’s this?

Went out and played cards last night, bro. Hit a lucky streak. Won $600.

So—what’s this?

Three hundred bucks. Go buy yourself some sweaters.

DURING SPRING BREAK my father wants me to play semipro tournaments, called satellites, which are open qualification, meaning anyone can show up and play at least one match.

They’re held in out-of-the-way towns, way out of the way, burgs like Monroe, Louisiana, and St. Joe, Missouri. I can’t travel by myself; I’m just fourteen. So my father sends Philly along to chaperone me. Also, to play. Philly and my father still cling to the belief that he can do something with his tennis.

Philly rents a beige Omni, which quickly becomes a mobile version of our bedroom back home. One side his, one side mine. We log thousands of miles, stopping only for fast-food joints, tournament sites, and sleep. Our lodging is free, because in every town we stay with strangers, local families who volunteer to host players. Most of the hosts are pleasant enough, but they’re overly enthusiastic about the game. It’s awkward enough to stay with strangers, but it’s a chore to make tennis talk over pancakes and coffee. For me, that is. Philly will talk to anyone, and I often have to nudge and pull him when it’s time to go.

Philly and I both feel like outlaws, living on the road, doing whatever we please. We throw fast-food wrappers over our shoulders into the backseat. We listen to loud music, curse all we want, say whatever is on our minds, without fear of being corrected or ridiculed. Still, we never mention our very different goals for this trip. Philly wants only to earn one ATP point, just one, so he can know what it feels like to be ranked. I want only to avoid playing Philly, in which case I’ll have to beat my beloved brother again.

At the first satellite I rout my opponent and Philly gets routed by his. Afterward, in the rental car, in the parking garage beside the stadium, Philly stares at the steering wheel, looking stunned. For some reason this loss hurt more than the others. He balls his fist and punches the steering wheel. Hard. Then punches it again. He begins talking to himself, so low that I can’t hear. Now he’s talking louder. Now he’s shouting, calling himself a born loser, hitting the steering wheel again and again. He’s hammering the wheel so hard that I’m sure he’s going to break a bone in his hand. I think of our father, shadowboxing the steering wheel after knocking out the trucker.

Philly says, It would be better if I broke my fucking fist! At least then it would all be over!

Dad was right. I am a born loser.

All at once he stops. He looks at me and becomes resigned. Calm. Like our mother. He smiles; the storm has passed, the poison is gone.

I feel better, he says with a laugh and a snuffle.

Driving out of the parking garage, he gives me pointers on my next opponent.

DAYS AFTER I RETURN to the Bollettieri Academy, I’m at the Bradenton Mall. I take a chance and place a collect call home. Pfew: Philly answers. He sounds the way he did in the parking garage.

So, he says. We got a letter from the ATP.

Yeah?

You want to know your ranking?

I don’t know—do I?

You’re number 610.

Really?

Six-ten in the world, bro.

Which means there are only 609 people better than me in the entire world. On planet earth, in the solar system, I’m number 610. I slap the wall of the phone booth and shout for joy.

The line is silent. Then, in a kind of whisper, Philly asks, How does it feel?

I can’t believe how thoughtless I’ve been, shouting in Philly’s ear when he must feel bitterly disappointed. I wish I could throw half of my ATP points on his chest. In a tone of supreme boredom, stifling a pretend yawn, I tell him: You know what? It’s no big deal. It’s overrated.

6

WHAT MORE CAN I DO? Nick, Gabriel, Mrs. G, Doc G—no one seems to notice my antics anymore. I’ve mutilated my hair, grown my nails, including one pinky nail that’s two inches long and painted fire-engine red. I’ve pierced my body, broken rules, busted curfew, picked fistfights, thrown tantrums, cut classes, even slipped into the girls’ barracks after hours. I’ve consumed gallons of whiskey, often while sitting brazenly atop my bunk, and as an extra dash of audacity I’ve built a pyramid from my dead soldiers. A three-foot tower of empty Jack Daniel’s bottles. I chew tobacco, hardcore weed like Skoal and Kodiak, soaked in whiskey. After losses I stick a plum-sized wad of chew inside my cheek. The bigger the loss, the bigger the wad. What rebellion is left? What new sin can I commit to show the world I’m unhappy and want to go home?

Each week, the only time I’m not plotting rebellion is free hour, when I can goof off in the rec center, or Saturday night, when I can go to the Bradenton Mall and flirt with girls. That adds up to ten hours per week that I’m happy, or at least not wracking my brain to think up some new form of civil disobedience.

When I’m still fourteen the Bollettieri Academy hires a bus and ships us upstate to a major tournament in Pensacola. The Bollettieri Academy travels several times each year to tournaments like this one, throughout Florida, because Nick thinks they’re good tests. Measuring sticks, he calls them. Florida is tennis heaven, Nick says, and if we’re better than Florida’s best, then we must be tops in the world.

I have no trouble reaching the final in my bracket, but the other kids don’t fare as well.

They all get knocked out early. Thus they’re all forced to gather and watch my match. They have no choice, nowhere else to go. When I’m done, we’ll get back on the bus, en masse, and drive the twelve hours home to the Bollettieri Academy.

Take your time, the kids joke.

No one is eager to spend twelve more hours on that slow stinky bus.

For laughs, I decide to play the match in jeans. Not tennis shorts, not warm-up pants, but torn, faded, dirty dungarees. I know it won’t affect the outcome. The kid I’m playing is a chump. I can beat him with one hand tied behind my back, wearing a gorilla costume. For good measure I pencil on some eyeliner and put in my gaudiest earrings.

I win the match in straight sets. The other kids cheer wildly. They award me bonus points for style. On the ride back to the Bollettieri Academy I get extra attention, slaps on the back and attaboys. I feel at last as though I’m fitting in, becoming one of the cool kids, one of the alphas. Plus I got the W.

The next day, right after lunch, Nick calls a surprise meeting.

Everyone gather around, he bellows.

He directs us to a back court with bleachers. When all two hundred full-time kids are settled in and quiet he starts pacing before us, talking about what the Bollettieri Academy means, how we should feel privileged to be here. He built this place from nothing, he says, and he’s proud to have it bear his name. The Bollettieri Academy stands for excellence. The Bollettieri Academy stands for class. The Bollettieri Academy is known and respected the world over.

He pauses.

Andre, would you stand up for a minute?

I stand.

All that I’ve just said about this place, Andre, you have vi-o-lated. You have defiled this place, shamed it with your little stunt yesterday. Wearing jeans and makeup and earrings during your final? Boy, I’m going to tell you something very important: If you’re going to act like that, if you’re going to dress like a girl, then here’s what I’m going to do. In your next tournament I’m going to have you wear a skirt. I’ve contacted Ellesse, and I’ve asked them to send a bunch of skirts for you, and you will wear one, yes sirree, because if that’s who you are, then that is how we’re going to treat you.

All two hundred kids are looking at me. Four hundred eyes, fixed tight on me. Many of the kids are laughing.

Nick keeps going. Your free time, he says, is hereby revoked. Your free time is now my time. You’re on detail, Mr. Agassi. Between nine and ten you’ll clean every bathroom on the property. When the toilets are scrubbed, you’ll police the grounds. If you don’t like it, well, it’s simple. Leave. If you’re going to act like you did yesterday, we don’t want you here. If you’re incapable of showing that you care about this place as much as we do, buh-bye.

This last word, buh-bye, rings out, echoes across the empty courts.

That’s it, he says. Everyone get back to work.

All the kids scurry away. I stand stock still, trying to decide what to do. I could curse out Nick. I could threaten to fight him. I could start bawling. I think of Philly, then Perry. What would they have me do? I think of my father, sent to school in girl clothes when his mother wanted to humiliate him. The day he became a fighter.

There is no more time to decide. Gabriel says my punishment begins right now. For the rest of the afternoon, he says—on your knees. Weed.

AT DUSK, relieved of my weed sack, I walk to my room. No more indecision. I know exactly what I’m going to do. I throw my clothes in a suitcase and start for the highway. The thought crosses my mind that this is Florida, any maniac halfwit could pick me up and I’d never be heard from again. But I’d be better off with a maniac halfwit than with Nick.

In my wallet I have one credit card, which my father gave me for emergencies, and I’m thinking this is a bona fide Code Red. I’m headed for the airport. By this time tomorrow I’ll be sitting in Perry’s bedroom, telling him the story.

I keep my eyes peeled for searchlights. I listen for the yelps of distant bloodhounds. I stick out my thumb.

A car pulls up. I open the door, wind up to toss my suitcase in the backseat. It’s Julio, the disciplinarian on Nick’s staff. He says my father is on the phone back at the Bollettieri Academy and wants to speak to me—now.

I’d prefer the bloodhounds.

I TELL MY FATHER that I want to come home. I tell him what Nick has done.

You dress like a fag, my father says. Sounds like you deserved it.

I move to Plan B.

Pops, I say, Nick’s ruining my game. It’s all about hitting from the baseline—we never work on my net game. We never work on serve and volley.

My father says he’ll talk to Nick about my game. He also says Nick has given his assur-ance that I’ll only be punished for a few weeks, to prove that Nick is in charge of the place.

They can’t have one kid flouting the rules. They need to maintain some show of discipline.