Open: An Autobiography

In conclusion my father says again that I’m staying. I have no choice. Click. Dial tone.

Julio shuts the door. Nick takes the receiver from my hand and says my father told him to take away my credit card.

No way I’m giving up my credit card. My only means of ever getting out of here? Over my dead body.

Nick tries to negotiate with me and I suddenly realize: He needs me. He sent Julio after me, he phoned my father, now he’s trying to get my credit card? He told me to leave, and when I left, he fetched me back. I called his bluff. Despite the trouble I cause, I’m apparently worth something to this guy.

BY DAY, I’M THE MODEL PRISONER. I pick weeds, clean toilets, wear the proper tennis clothes. By night I’m the masked avenger. I steal a master key to the Bollettieri Academy, and after everyone’s asleep I go marauding with a group of other disgruntled inmates. While I confine my vandalism to minor stuff, like throwing shaving cream bombs, my cohorts spray walls with graffiti, and on the door to Nick’s office they paint Nick the Dick. When Nick has the door repainted, they do it again.

My primary cohort on these late-night sprees is Roddy Parks, the boy who beat me that long-ago day when Perry introduced himself. Then Roddy gets caught. His bunkmate drops a dime. I hear that Roddy’s been expelled. So now we know what it takes to get expelled. Nick the Dick. To his credit, Roddy takes the fall. He doesn’t rat out anyone.

Aside from petty vandalism, my main act of insurrection is silence. I vow that, as long as I live, I’ll never speak to Nick. This is my code, my religion, my new identity. This is who I am, the boy who won’t speak. Nick, of course, doesn’t notice. He strolls by the courts and says something to me and I don’t answer. He shrugs. But other kids see me not answer. My status rises.

One reason for Nick’s oblivion is that he’s busy organizing a tournament, which he hopes will attract top juniors from throughout the nation. This gives me a great idea, another way to stick it to Nick. I pull aside one of his staff and mention a kid back in Vegas who’d be perfect for the tournament. He’s unbelievably talented, I say. He gives me problems whenever we play.

What’s his name?

Perry Rogers.

It’s like laying fresh bait in a Nick trap. Nick lives to discover new stars and showcase them in his tournaments. New stars generate buzz. New stars add to the aura of the Bollettieri Academy, and bolster Nick’s image as the great tennis mentor. Sure enough, days later, Perry receives a plane ticket and a personal invite to the tournament. He flies down to Florida and takes a cab to the Bollettieri Academy. I meet him in the compound and we throw our arms around each other, cackling at the fast one we’re pulling on Nick.

Who do I have to play?

Murphy Jensen.

Oh no. He’s great!

Don’t worry about it. That’s not for a few days. For now, let’s party.

One of the many perks for kids playing in the tournament is a field trip to Busch Gardens in Tampa. On the bus to the amusement park I bring Perry up to speed, tell him about my public humiliation, describe how miserable I am at the Bollettieri Academy. And at Bradenton Academy. I tell him I’m close to failing. That’s where I lose him. For once he’s not able to make my problem sound coherent. He loves school. He dreams of attending a fine Eastern college, then law school.

I change the subject. I grill him about Jamie. Did she ask about me? How does she look?

Does she wear my ankle bracelet? I tell Perry I want to send him back to Vegas with a special present for Jamie. Maybe something nice from Busch Gardens.

That would be cool, he agrees.

We’re not at Busch Gardens ten minutes before Perry sees a booth filled with stuffed animals. On a high shelf sits an enormous black-and-white panda, its legs sticking left and right, its tiny red tongue hanging out.

Andre—you need to get Jamie that!

Well, sure, but it’s not for sale. You have to win the grand prize to get that panda, and no one wins this game. It’s rigged. I don’t like things that are rigged.

Nah. You just have to toss two rubber rings around the neck of a Coke bottle. We’re athletes. We’ve got this.

We try for half an hour, scattering rubber rings all over the booth. Not one ring comes close to lassoing a Coke bottle.

OK, Perry says. Here’s what we do. You distract the lady running the booth, I’ll sneak back there and put two of these rings on the bottles.

I don’t know. What if we get caught?

But then I remember: It’s for Jamie. Anything for Jamie.

I call out to the booth lady: Excuse me, ma’am, I have a question.

She turns. Yes?

I ask something inane about the rules of ringtoss. In my peripheral vision I see Perry tiptoe into the booth. Four seconds later he leaps back.

I won! I won!

The booth lady spins around. She sees two Coke bottles with rubber rings around their necks. She looks shocked. Then skeptical.

Now wait just a minute, kid—

I won! Give me my panda!

I didn’t see—

That’s your problem if you didn’t see. That’s not the rule, you have to see. Where does it say you have to see? I want to talk to your supervisor! Get Mr. Busch Gardens himself down here! I’m taking this whole amusement park to court. What kind of a gyp is this? I paid a dollar to play this game, and that’s an implied contract. You owe me a panda. I’m suing. My father is suing. You have exactly three seconds to get me my panda, which I won fair and fucking square!

Perry is doing what he loves, talking. He’s doing what his father does, selling air. And the booth lady is doing what she hates, manning a booth at an amusement park. It’s no contest.

She doesn’t want any trouble and she doesn’t need this headache. With a long stick she snatches down the big panda and forks it over. It’s nearly as tall as Perry. He grabs it like a giant Chipwich and we run off before she changes her mind.

For the rest of the night we’re a threesome: Perry, me, and the panda. We bring the panda to the snack bar, into the boys’ room, on the roller coaster. It’s like we’re babysitting a co-matose fourteen-year-old. A real panda couldn’t be more trouble. When the time comes to board the bus, we’re both weary and glad to dump the panda in its own seat, which it fills. Its girth is as shocking as its height.

I say, I hope Jamie appreciates this.

Perry says, She’s going to love it.

A little girl sits behind us. She’s eight or nine. She can’t take her eyes off the panda. She coos and pets its fur.

What a pretty panda! Where did you get it?

We won it.

What are you going to do with it?

I’m giving it to a friend.

She asks to sit with the panda. She asks if she can cuddle it. I tell her to help herself.

I hope Jamie likes the panda half as much as this girl does.

PERRY AND I are hanging out in the barracks the next morning when Gabriel pokes his head in.

The Man wants to see you.

What about?

Gabriel shrugs.

I walk slowly, taking my time. I stop at the door to Nick’s office and with a thin smile I remember. Nick the Dick. You’ll be missed, Roddy.

Nick is sitting behind his desk, leaning back in his tall black leather chair.

Andre, come in, come in.

I sit in a wooden chair across from him.

He clears his throat. I understand, he says, that you were at Busch Gardens yesterday.

Did you have fun?

I say nothing. He waits. Then clears his throat again.

Well, I understand you came home with a very large panda.

I continue to stare straight ahead.

Anyway, he says, my daughter apparently has fallen in love with that panda. Ha ha.

I think of the little girl on the bus. Nick’s daughter—of course. How could I have missed that?

She can’t stop talking about it, Nick says. So here’s the thing. I’d like to buy that panda from you.

Silence.

You hear me, Andre?

Silence.

Can you understand?

Silence.

Gabriel, why isn’t Andre saying anything?

He’s not speaking to you.

Since when?

Gabriel frowns.

Look, Nick says, just tell me how much you want for it, Andre.

I don’t move my eyes.

I know. Why don’t you write down how much you want for it?

He slides a piece of paper toward me. I don’t move.

How about if I give you $200.

Deep silence.

Gabriel tells Nick that he’ll talk to me later about the panda.

Yeah, Nick says. OK. Have a think about it, Andre.

YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE THIS, I tell Perry at the barracks. He wanted the Panda. For his daughter. That little girl on the bus was Nick’s daughter.

You’re kidding. And what did you say?

I said nothing.

What do you mean, nothing?

Vow of silence, remember? Forever.

Andre, you misplayed that. No, no, that’s a miss. You’ve got to revisit this, quickly. Here’s the play. You take the panda, you give it to Nick and tell him you don’t want his money, you just want an opportunity to succeed and get out of this place. You want wild cards, bids to tournaments, different rules to live by. Better food, better everything. Above all—you don’t want to go to school. This is your chance to break free. You’ve got real leverage now.

I can’t give that fucking guy my panda. I just can’t. Besides, what about Jamie?

We’ll worry about Jamie later. This is your future we’re talking about. You have to give that panda to Nick!

We talk until long after lights out, arguing in heated whispers. Finally Perry convinces me.

So, he says, yawning, you’re going to give it to him tomorrow.

No. Bullshit. I’m going to his office right now. I’m going to let myself in with the master key, then put the panda on Nick’s tall leather chair, ass up.

THE NEXT MORNING, before breakfast, Gabriel comes for me again.

Office. On the double.

Nick is in his chair. The panda is now in the corner, leaning, staring into space. Nick looks at the panda, then me. He says, You don’t talk. You wear makeup. You wear jeans in a tournament. You get me to invite your friend Perry to the tourney, even though he can’t play, he can barely chew gum and walk at the same time. And that hair. Don’t get me started on that hair. And now you give me something I ask for, but you break into my office in the middle of the night and put it ass-up in my fucking chair? How the fuck did you get in my office? Jesus, boy, what is your problem?

You want to know what my problem is?

Even Nick is shocked by the sound of my voice.

I shout, You are my fucking problem. You. And if you haven’t figured that out, then you’re stupider than you look. Do you have any idea what it’s like here? What it’s like to be three thousand miles from home, living in this prison, waking up at six thirty, having thirty minutes to eat that shitty breakfast, getting on that broken-down bus, going to that lousy school for four hours, hurrying back and having thirty minutes to eat more crap before going on the tennis court, day after day after day? Do you? The only thing you have to look forward to, the only real fun you have every week, is Saturday night at the Bradenton Mall—and then that gets taken away! You took that from me! This place is hell, and I want to burn it down!

Nick’s eyes are wider than the panda’s. But he’s not angry. Or sad. He’s mildly pleased, because this is the only language he understands. He reminds me of Pacino in Scarface, when a woman tells him, Who, why, when, and how I fuck is none of your business, and Pacino says, Now you’re talking to me, baby.

Nick, I realize, likes it rough.

OK, he says, you made your point. What do you want?

I hear Perry’s voice.

I want to quit school, I say. I want to start doing correspondence school, so I can work on my game full-time. I want your help, instead of the bullshit you’ve been giving me. I want wild cards, bids to tournaments. I want to take real steps toward turning pro.

Of course none of this is really what I want. It’s what Perry tells me I want, and it’s better than what I’ve got. Even as I demand it, I feel ambivalent. But Nick looks at Gabriel, and Gabriel looks at me, and the panda looks at all of us.

I’ll think about it, Nick says.

HOURS AFTER PERRY LEAVES FOR VEGAS, Nick sends word via Gabriel that my first wild card will be the big tournament at La Quinta. Also, he’s going to get me into the next Florida satellite. Furthermore, I’m to consider myself hereby dismissed and excused from Bradenton Academy. He’ll set up a correspondence program of some sort, when he gets around to it.

Gabriel walks off, smirking. You won, kid.

I watch everyone else board the bus for Bradenton Academy, and as it rumbles away, spewing black smoke, I sit on a bench, basking in the sunshine. I tell myself: You’re fourteen years old, and you never have to go to school again. From now on, every morning will feel like Christmas and the first day of summer vacation, combined. A smile spreads across my face, my first in months. No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks. You’re free, Andre. You’ll never have to learn anything again.

7

I PUT IN MY EARRING and run down to the hard courts. The morning is mine, mine, and I spend it hitting balls. Hit harder. I hit for two hours, channeling my newfound freedom into every swing. I can feel the difference. The ball explodes off my racket. Nick appears, shaking his head. I pity your next opponent, he says.

Meanwhile, back in Vegas, my mother begins correspondence school on my behalf. Her first actual correspondence is a letter to me, in which she says that her son might not go to college, but he’s damn sure going to graduate high school. I write back and thank her for doing my homework and taking my tests. But when she earns the degree, I add, she can keep it.

In March 1985, I fly to Los Angeles and stay with Philly, who’s living in someone’s guest cottage, giving tennis lessons, searching for what he wants to do with his life. He helps me train for La Quinta, one of the year’s biggest tournaments. The guest cottage is tiny, smaller than our room back in Vegas, smaller than our rented Omni, but we don’t mind, we’re thrilled to be reunited, hopeful about my new direction. There’s just one problem: We have no money.

We subsist on baked potatoes and lentil soup. Three times a day we bake two potatoes and heat a can of generic lentil soup. We then pour the soup over the potatoes and voilà—breakfast, lunch, or dinner is served. The whole meal costs eighty-nine cents and keeps hunger at bay for about three hours.

THE DAY BEFORE THE TOURNAMENT, we drive Philly’s beat-up jalopy over to La Quinta. The car produces enormous clouds of black smoke. It feels like driving in a portable summer storm.

Maybe we should stick a potato in the tailpipe, I tell Philly.

Our first stop is the grocery store. I stand before the bin of potatoes and my stomach rolls.

I can’t face another spud. I walk off, wander up and down the aisles, and find myself in the frozen-food section. My eye lands on one particularly enticing treat. Oreo ice cream sandwiches. I reach for them like a sleepwalker. I take a box of ice cream sandwiches from the case and meet my brother in the express lane. Slipping behind him I gently set the ice cream sandwiches on the conveyor belt.

He looks down, then looks at me.

We can’t afford that.

I’ll have this instead of my potato.

He picks up the box, looks at the price, lets out a low whistle. Andre, this costs as much as ten potatoes. We can’t.

I know. Fuck.

Walking back to the frozen-food case, I think: I hate Philly. I love Philly. I hate potatoes.

Woozy with hunger, I go out and beat Broderick Dyke in the first round at La Quinta, 6–4, 6–4. In the second round I beat Rill Baxter, 6–2, 6–1. In the third round I beat Russell Simpson, 6–3, 6–3. Then I win my first round in the main draw against John Austin, 6–4, 6–1.

Down a break in the first set, I come storming back. I’m fifteen years old, beating grown men, beating them senseless, churning my way through the ranks. Everywhere I walk people are pointing at me, whispering. There he is. That’s the kid I was telling you about—the prodigy.

It’s the prettiest word I’ve ever heard applied to me.

Prize money for reaching the second round at La Quinta, is $2,600. But I’m an amateur, so I get nothing. Still, Philly learns that the tournament will reimburse players for expenses.

We sit in his jalopy and make up an itemized list of imaginary expenses, including our imaginary first-class flight from Vegas, our imaginary five-star-hotel room, our imaginarily lavish restaurant meals. We think we’re shrewd, because our expenses equal exactly $2,600.

Philly and I have the balls to ask for so much because we’re from Vegas. We’ve spent our childhoods in casinos. We think we’re born bluffers. We think we’re high rollers. After all, we did learn to double down before we were potty-trained. Recently, while walking through Caesars, Philly and I passed a slot machine just as it began to play that old Depression-era song We’re in the Money. We knew the song from Pops, so we felt it was a sign. It didn’t occur to us that the slot machine played that song all day long. We sat down at the nearest blackjack table—and won. Now, with the same swagger born of naïveté, I walk our list of expenses into the office of the tournament director, Charlie Pasarell, while Philly waits in the car.

Charlie is a former player. In fact, back in 1969 he played Pancho Gonzalez in the longest men’s singles match ever at Wimbledon. Pancho is now my brother-in-law—he recently married Rita. Another sign that Philly and I are in the money. But the biggest sign of all: one of Charlie’s oldest friends is Alan King, who hosted the very same Vegas tournament where I saw Caesar and Cleopatra and the wheelbarrow full of silver dollars, where I worked as a ball boy with Wendi, where I first stepped onto a professional tennis court in an official capacity.

Signs, signs, everywhere signs. I place the list on Charlie’s desk and stand back.

Huh, Charlie says, looking over the list. Very interesting.

Sorry?

Expenses don’t usually work out so neat.

I feel a hot flash.

Your expenses, Andre, are exactly the same amount as the prize money you’d be able to collect if you were a pro.

Charlie looks at me over the top of his glasses. I feel my heart shrivel to the size of a lentil.

I consider making a run for it. I imagine Philly and me living in that guest cottage for the rest of our lives. But Charlie suppresses a smile, reaches into a strongbox, and removes a wad of bills.

Here’s two grand, kid. Don’t grind me for the other six hun.

Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.

I run outside and dive into Philly’s car. He peels out as if we’ve just held up the First Bank of La Quinta. I count out $1,000 and throw it at my brother.

Your cut of the loot.

What? No! Andre, you worked hard for this, bro.

Are you kidding? We worked. Philly, I couldn’t have done this without you! Impossible!

We’re in this together, man.

In the back of our minds we’re both thinking of the morning I woke up with $300 on my chest. We’re also thinking of all those nights, sitting in the ad court–deuce court of our bedroom, sharing everything. He leans over, while driving, and gives me a hug. Then we talk about where we’re going to eat dinner. We’re drooling as we bandy names of restaurants about. In the end we agree that this is a special occasion, a once-in-a-lifetime occasion, which calls for something truly fancy.

Sizzler.

I can already taste that rib eye, Philly says.

I’m not going to bother with a plate. I’m just going to shove my head into the salad bar.

They have an all-you-can-eat shrimp special.

They’re going to be sorry they ever came up with that idea!

You said it, bro!

We gnaw through the La Quinta Sizzler, not leaving a single seed or crouton in our wake, then sit around and stare at the money we have left over. We line up the bills, stack them, stroke them. We talk about our new buddy, Benjamin Franklin. We’re so drunk on calories, we break out the steam iron and run it lightly over each bill, gently smoothing out the wrinkles in Ben’s face.

8

I CONTINUE TO LIVE AND TRAIN at the Bollettieri Academy, with Nick as my coach and sometime travel companion, though he feels more like a sounding board. And, honestly, a friend. Our makeshift truce has turned into a surprisingly harmonious working relationship.

Nick respects the way I stood up to him, and I respect him for being true to his word. We’re working hard to achieve a common goal, to conquer the tennis world. I don’t expect much from Nick in the way of Xs and Os; I look to him for cooperation, not information. Meanwhile, he looks to me for headline-generating wins which help his academy. I don’t pay him a salary, because I can’t, but it’s understood that when I turn pro I’ll give him bonuses based on what I earn. He considers this more than generous.

Early spring, 1986. I tramp all over Florida, playing a series of satellite tournaments.

Kissimmee. Miami. Sarasota. Tampa. After a year of working hard, focusing exclusively on tennis, I play well, making it to the fifth tournament of the series, the Masters. I reach the final and, though I lose, I’m entitled to a finalist check of $1,100.

I want to take it. I yearn to take it. Philly and I sure could use the money. Still, if I take that check I’m a professional tennis player, forever, no turning back.

I phone my father back in Vegas and ask him what I should do.

My father says, What the hell do you mean? Take the money.

If I take the money, there’s no turning back. I’m pro.

So?

If I cash this check, Pops, that’s it.

He acts as if we have a bad connection.

You’ve dropped out of school! You have an eighth-grade education. What are your choices? What the hell else are you going to do? Be a doctor?

None of this comes as news, but I hate the way he puts it.

I tell the tournament director I’ll take the money. As the words leave my mouth I feel a shelf of possibilities fall away. I don’t know what those possibilities might be, but that’s the point—I never will know. The man hands me a check, and as I walk out of his office I feel as if I’m starting down a long, long road, one that seems to lead into a dark, ominous forest.

It’s April 29, 1986. My sixteenth birthday.

In disbelief, all day long, I tell myself: You’re a professional tennis player now. That’s what you are. That’s who you are. No matter how many times I say it, it just doesn’t sound right.

The one unequivocally good thing about my decision to turn pro is that my father sends Philly on the road with me full-time, to help with the minutiae, the endless details and arrangements of being a pro, from renting cars to reserving hotel rooms to stringing rackets.

You need him, my father says. But all three of us know that Philly and I need each other.

The day after I turn pro, Philly gets a call from Nike. They want to meet with me about an endorsement deal. Philly and I meet the Nike man in Newport Beach, at a restaurant called the Rusty Pelican. His name is Ian Hamilton.

I call him Mr. Hamilton, but he says I should call him Ian. He smiles in a way that makes me trust him instantly. Philly, however, remains wary.

Boys, Ian says, I think Andre has a very bright future.

Thank you.

I’d like Nike to be a part of that future, to be a partner in that future.

Thank you.

I’d like to offer you a two-year contract.

Thank you.

During which time Nike will provide all your gear, and pay you $20,000.

For both years?

For each year.

Ah.

Philly jumps in. What would Andre have to do in exchange for this money?

Ian looks confused. Well, he says. Andre would have to do what Andre has been doing, son. Keep being Andre. And wear Nike stuff.

Philly and I look at each other, two Vegas kids who still think they know how to bluff. But our poker faces are long gone. We left them back at Sizzler. We can’t believe this is happening, and we can’t pretend to feel otherwise. At least Philly still has the presence of mind to ask Ian if we may be excused. We need a few moments in private to discuss his offer.

We speed-walk to the back of the Rusty Pelican and dial my father from the pay phone.

Pops, I whisper, Philly and I are here with the guy from Nike and he’s offering me $20,000.

What do you think?

Ask for more money.

Really?

More money! More money!

He hangs up. Philly and I rehearse what we’re going to say. I play me, he plays Ian. Men passing us on their way in and out of the men’s room think we’re doing a skit. At last we walk casually back to the table. Philly spells out our counteroffer. More money. He looks grave. He looks, I can’t help but notice, like my father.

OK, Ian says. I think we can manage that. I have the budget for $25,000 for the second year. Deal?

We shake his hand. Then we all walk out of the Rusty Pelican. Philly and I wait for Ian to drive off before jumping up and down, singing We’re in the Money.

Can you believe this is happening?

No, Philly says. Honestly? No, I can’t.

Can I drive back to L.A.?

No. Your hands are shaking. You’ll plow us straight into a median, and we can’t have that.

You’re worth twenty grand, bro!

And twenty-five next year.

All the way back to Philly’s place, item one on our agenda is what model of cool but cheap car we’re going to buy. The main thing is to buy a car with a tailpipe that doesn’t blow black clouds. Pulling up to Sizzler in a car that doesn’t smoke—now that would be the height of lux-ury.

MY FIRST TOURNAMENT as a pro is in Schenectady, New York. I reach the final of the $100,000 tournament, then lose to Ramesh Krishnan, 6–2, 6–3. I don’t feel bad, however.

Krishnan is great, better than his ranking of forty-something, and I’m an unknown teenager, playing in the final of a fairly important tournament. It’s that ultimate rarity—a painless loss. I feel nothing but pride. In fact, I feel a trace of hope, because I know I could have played better, and I know Krishnan knows.

Next I travel to Stratton Mountain, Vermont, where I beat Tim Mayotte, who’s ranked number twelve. In the quarterfinal I play John McEnroe, which feels like playing John Lennon. The man is a legend. I’ve grown up watching him, admiring him, though I’ve often rooted against him, because his archrival, Borg, was my idol. I’d love to beat Mac, but this is his first tournament after a brief hiatus. He’s well rested, raring to go, and he was recently ranked number one in the world. Moments before we take the court I wonder why a player as polished and accomplished as Mac needs a hiatus. Then he shows me. He demonstrates the virtue of rest.

He beats me soundly, 6–3, 6–3. During the loss, however, I manage to hit one atomic winner, a forehand return of Mac’s serve that explodes past him. At the post-match news conference, Mac announces to reporters: I’ve played Becker, Connors, and Lendl, and no one ever hit a return that hard at me. I never even saw the ball.

This one quote, this ringing endorsement of my game from a player of Mac’s status, puts me on the national map. Newspapers write about me. Fans write to me. Philly suddenly finds himself deluged with requests for interviews. He giggles every time he fields another.

Nice to be popular, he says.

My ranking, meanwhile, keeps pace with my popularity.

I GO TO MY FIRST U.S. OPEN in the late summer of 1986, feeling eager for the step up in competition. Then I see the New York skyline from the airplane window and my eagerness evaporates. It’s a beautiful sight, but intimidating for someone who grew up in the desert. So many people. So many dreams.

So many opinions.

Up close, at street level, New York is less intimidating than irritating. The nasty smells, the ear-splitting sounds—and the tipping. Raised in a house that depended on tips, I believe in tips, but in New York the tip takes on a brand new dimension. It costs me a hundred dollars just to get from the airport to my hotel room. By the time I’ve greased the palm of the cabbie, the doorman, the bellhop, and the concierge, I’m tapped out.

Also, I’m late for everything. I continually underestimate the time it takes to travel in New York from Point A to Point B. One day, right before the start of the tournament, I’m due to practice at two o’clock. I leave my hotel in what I think is plenty of time to reach the arena in Flushing Meadows. I board a charter bus outside the hotel, and by the time we navigate the midtown gridlock and cross the Triborough I’m horribly late. A woman tells me they’ve given away my court.

I stand before her, pleading for another practice time.

Who are you?

I show her my credentials, flash a weak smile.

Behind her is a chalkboard, covered with a sea of players’ names, which she consults skeptically. I think of Mrs. G. She runs her fingers up and down the left column.

OK, she says. Four o’clock, Court 8.

I peer at the name of the player I’ll be practicing with.

I’m sorry. I can’t practice with that guy. I’m possibly going to play that guy in the second round.

She consults the chalkboard again, sighing, annoyed, and now I wonder if Mrs. G has a long-lost sister. At least I’m no longer rocking a mohawk, which would make me even more offensive to this woman. On the other hand, my current hairstyle is only slightly less outrageous. A fluffy, spiky, two-toned mullet, with black roots and frosted tips.

OK, she says. Court 17, five o’clock. But you’ll have to share with three other guys.

I tell Nick: It feels as if I’m in over my head in this town.

Nah, he says. You’ll be fine.

The whole place looks a lot better from a distance.

What doesn’t?

In the first round I face Jeremy Bates, from Great Britain. We’re on a back court, far from the crowds and the main action. I’m excited. I’m proud. Then I’m terrified. I feel as if it’s the final Sunday of the tournament. My butterflies are flying in tight formation.

Because it’s a Grand Slam, the energy of the match is different from anything I’ve experienced. More frenetic. The play is moving at warp speed, a rhythm with which I’m unfamiliar.

Plus, the day is windy, so points seem to be flying past like the gum wrappers and dust. I don’t understand what’s happening. This doesn’t even feel like tennis. Bates isn’t a better player than I, but he’s playing better, because he came in knowing what to expect. He beats me in four sets, then looks up at my box, where Philly is sitting with Nick, and shoves his fist into the crook of his arm, the international sign for Up yours. Apparently Bates and Nick have a history.

I feel disappointed, slightly embarrassed. But I know that I wasn’t prepared for my first U.S. Open or New York. I see a gap between where I am and where I need to be, and I feel reasonably confident that I can close that gap.

You’re going to get better, Philly says, putting an arm around me. It’s just a matter of time.

Thanks. I know.

And I do know. I really do. But then I begin to lose. Not just lose, but lose badly. Weakly.

Miserably. In Memphis I get knocked out in the first round. In Key Biscayne, first round again.

Philly, I say, what’s going on? I have no clue out there. I feel like a hacker, a weekend player. I’m lost.

The low point is at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. It’s not a tennis facility but a converted basketball arena, and barely that. Cavernous, poorly lit, it’s got two tennis courts, side by side, and two matches taking place simultaneously. At the same moment I’m returning serve, somebody is returning serve in the next court, and if his serve goes wide at the same moment mine kicks, we both need to worry about colliding head-on. My concentration is fragile enough without factoring in collisions with other players. I don’t know yet how to tune out distractions.

After one set I can’t think and can’t hear anything but my own heartbeat.

Also, my opponent is bad, which puts me at a disadvantage. I’m at my worst against less-er opponents. I play down to their level. I don’t know how to maintain my game while adjusting for an opponent’s, which feels like inhaling and exhaling at the same time. Against great players I rise to the challenge. Against bad players I press, which is the tennis term for not letting things flow. Pressing is one of the deadliest things you can do in tennis.

Philly and I stagger back to Vegas. We’re discouraged, but a more immediate problem is that we’re broke. I’ve made no money in months, and with all the traveling and hotels, all the rental cars and restaurant meals, I’ve burned through nearly all my Nike money. From the airport I drive straight to Perry’s house. We hole up in his bedroom with a couple of sodas. As soon as his door is closed I feel safer, saner. I notice that the walls are plastered with a few dozen more covers of Sports Illustrated. I study the faces of all the great athletes, and I tell Perry that I always believed I’d be a great athlete, whether I wanted to be one or not. I took it for granted. It was my life, and though I hadn’t chosen it, my sole consolation was its certainty. At least fate has a structure. Now I don’t know what the future holds. I’m good at one thing, but it looks as though I’m not as good at that one thing as I thought. Maybe I’m finished before I’ve started. In which case, what the hell are Philly and I going to do?

I tell Perry that I want to be a normal sixteen-year-old, but my life keeps getting more abnormal. It’s abnormal to be humiliated at the U.S. Open. It’s abnormal to run around the Spectrum worrying about a head-on collision with some giant Russian. It’s abnormal to be shunned in locker rooms.

Why are you shunned?

Because I’m sixteen and in the top hundred. Also, Nick isn’t well liked, and I’m associated with Nick. I have no friends, no allies. I have no girlfriend.

Jamie and I are done. My latest crush, Jillian, another schoolmate of Perry’s, doesn’t return my calls. She wants a boyfriend who isn’t on the road all the time. I can’t blame her.

Perry says, I had no idea you were dealing with all this.

But here’s the topper, I tell him. I’m broke.

What happened to the twenty grand from Nike?

Travel. Expenses. It’s not just me on the road, it’s Philly, Nick—it adds up. When you’re not winning it adds up faster. You can burn through twenty grand fast.

Can you ask your father for a loan?

No. Absolutely not. Help from him comes with a cost. I’m trying to break free of him.

Andre, everything will be fine.

Yeah, sure.

Really, it’s about to get so much better. Before you know it, you’re going to be winning again. Blink your eyes and your face will be on one of these Sports Illustrated covers.

Pff.

It will! I know it. And Jillian? Please. She’s small time. You’ll always have girl problems.

That’s the nature of the beast. But soon the girl giving you problems will be—Brooke Shields.

Brooke Shields? Where do you get Brooke Shields?

He laughs.

I don’t know, I just read about her in Time. She’s graduating from Princeton. She’s the most beautiful woman in the world, she’s brilliant, she’s famous, and someday you’re going to date her. Don’t get me wrong, your life might never be normal—but soon the abnormal will be cool.

Buoyed by Perry, I go to Asia. I have just enough cash to get Philly and me there and back. I play the Japan Open, win a few matches before falling to Andrés Gómez in the quarters. I then go to Seoul, where I reach the final. I lose, but my share of the prize money is $7,000, enough to fund another three months of searching for my game.

As Philly and I land in Vegas, I feel relieved. I feel buoyant. Our father is meeting us at the airport, and I tell Philly as we walk through McCarran International Airport that I’ve made a momentous decision. I’m going to hug Pops.

Hug him? What for?

I feel good. I’m happy, damn it. Why not? I’m going to do it. You only live once.

Our father is at the gate, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. I rush toward him, wrap my arms around him, and squeeze. He doesn’t move. He stiffens. It feels like hugging the pilot.

I release him and tell myself I’ll never try that again.

PHILLY AND I GO TO ROME in May 1987. I’m in the main draw, so our rooms will be comped. We can upgrade from the dump Philly booked, which doesn’t have TVs or shower curtains, to the swank Cavalieri, which sits atop a main hill overlooking the city.

In our free days before the tournament we get out and see the sights. We go to the Sistine Chapel and gaze at the frescoes of Christ handing St. Peter the keys to the kingdom of Heaven. We stare at Michelangelo’s ceiling and learn from the tour guide that he was a tormented perfectionist, eaten up with rage whenever he discovered that his work—or even materials on which he planned to work—had the tiniest flaws.

We spend a day in Milan, stopping in churches and museums. We stand for half an hour before Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. We learn about da Vinci’s notebooks, with their minute observations of the human form, and their futuristic plans for helicopters and toilets.

Both of us are floored that one man could have been so inspired. To be inspired, I tell Philly—that’s the secret.

The Italian Open is on red clay, a surface that feels unnatural to me. I’ve only played on green clay, which is sort of fast. Red clay, I tell Nick, is hot glue and wet tar laid across a bed of quicksand. You can’t put a guy away on this red-clay shit, I complain at our first practice.

He smirks. You’re going to be fine, he says. You just have to get used to it. Don’t be impatient, don’t try to finish every point.

I don’t have the slightest idea what he means. I lose in the second round.

We fly to Paris for the French Open. More red clay. I manage to win my first-rounder, but get spanked in the second. Again, Philly and I try to see something of the city, to improve ourselves. We go to the Louvre. The sheer number of paintings and sculptures daunts us. We don’t know where to turn, how to stand. We can’t comprehend all that we’re seeing. We pass from room to room, dumbstruck. Then we come to a piece that we understand all too well. It’s a painting from the Italian Renaissance and it depicts a young man, naked, standing on a cliff.

With one hand he clutches a bare, breaking tree limb. With the other he holds a woman and two infants. Wrapped around his neck is an old man, perhaps his father, who also grasps a sack of what looks like money. Below them lies an abyss strewn with the bodies of those who couldn’t hold on. Everything depends on this one naked man’s strength—his grip.

The longer you look, I tell Philly, the tighter that old guy’s arm around the hero’s neck feels.

Philly nods. He looks up at the man on the cliff and says softly: Hang in there, bro.

IN JUNE 1987 we go to Wimbledon. I’m scheduled to play a Frenchman, Henri Leconte, on Court 2, known as the Graveyard Court because so many players have suffered fatal losses there. It’s my first time at the most hallowed venue in tennis, and from the moment we arrive I dislike it. I’m a sheltered teenager from Las Vegas with no education. I reject all that’s alien, and London feels as alien as a place can be. The food, the buses, the venerable tradi-tions. Even the grass of Wimbledon smells different from the grass back home, what little there is of it.

More off-putting, Wimbledon officials appear to take a haughty, high-handed pleasure in telling players what to do and what not to do. I resent rules, but especially arbitrary rules. Why must I wear white? I don’t want to wear white. Why should it matter to these people what I wear?

Above all, I take offense at being barred and blocked and made to feel unwanted. I need to show a badge to get into the locker room—and not the main locker room at that. I’m playing in this tournament, but I’m treated as an intruder, not even allowed to practice on the courts where I’ll be competing. I’m restricted to indoor courts up the street. Consequently the first time I ever hit a ball on grass is the first time I play Wimbledon. And what a shock. The ball doesn’t bounce right, doesn’t bounce at all, because this grass isn’t grass, but ice slathered with Vaseline. And I’m so afraid of slipping that I tiptoe. When I look around, to see if the British fans have noticed my discomfort, I get a scare: they’re right on top of me. The building is like a dollhouse. Add my name to the list of those who’ve expired on Graveyard Court. Leconte euthanizes me. I tell Nick that I’m never coming back. I’ll hug my father again before I embrace Wimbledon.

· · ·

STILL IN A FOUL MOOD, I travel several weeks later to Washington, D.C. In the first round, playing Patrick Kuhnen, I come up empty. Bone dry. After the long slog across Europe I have nothing left. The travel, the losses, the stress, it’s all sapped me. Plus, the day is op-pressively hot and I’m not physically fit. I’m wholly unprepared, so I become unpresent. When we’re tied at one set apiece, I leave the court, mentally. My mind departs my body and goes floating out of the arena. I’m long gone when the third set starts. I lose 6–0.

I walk to the net and shake Kuhnen’s hand. He says something, but I can’t see or hear him. He’s a blob of energy at the end of a tube. I grab my tennis bag and stumble out of the arena. I walk across the street, into Rock Creek Park, into some woods, and when I feel sure no one is around, I berate the trees.

I can’t take this shit anymore! I’m fucking done! I quit!

I keep walking, walking, until I come to a clearing, where I find myself surrounded by a group of homeless men. Some are sitting on the ground, some are stretched out on logs, sleeping. Two are playing cards. They all look like trolls in a fairy tale. I walk up to one who seems fairly alert. I unzip my bag and remove several Prince rackets.

Here, man, you want these? Do you? Because I don’t have any use for them anymore.

The man isn’t sure what’s happening, but he’s pretty confident that he’s finally met someone crazier than himself. His buddies shuffle over and I tell them, Gather round, fellas, gather round. It might be a hundred degrees in the shade, but it’s Christmas Eve.

I dump out my tennis bag, pull out the rest of the rackets, each one worth hundreds of dollars, and pass them around.

Here, help yourselves! I sure as hell won’t be needing them!

Then, reveling in how much lighter my tennis bag feels, I walk to the hotel where Philly and I are staying. I sit on one bed and Philly sits on the other, just like old times, in more ways than one. I tell him I’ve had it. I can’t do this anymore.

He doesn’t argue. He understands. Who better to understand? We knuckle down to details, making a plan. How to tell Nick, how to tell my father, how I can earn a living.

What do you want to do instead of playing tennis?

I don’t know.

We go out for dinner, talk it over, analyze where I stand financially—a few hundred dollars above zero. We joke that we’re getting close to potato-and-lentil-soup territory.

Back at the hotel the phone in our room is flashing. I have one message. The organizers of a tennis exhibition in North Carolina phoned to say a player canceled on them. They want to know if I can play. If I do, they’ll guarantee me $2,000.

Philly agrees it would be nice to walk away from tennis with a little coin in my pocket.

OK, I say. One last tournament. I better get some more rackets.

IN THE FIRST ROUND I draw a kid named Michael Chang. I grew up playing him. I played him all through juniors, and I’ve never lost to him. I’ve never even had problems with him. Also, he’s only fifteen, two years younger than I. He comes up to my navel. So this is just what the doctor ordered for my bruised psyche. A preordained beat-down. I walk onto the court, smiling.

Chang, however, has undergone some kind of metamorphosis since our last meeting.

He’s made a quantum leap in his game, and now he plays like a flea on speed. It takes everything I’ve got to beat him. Still, I do beat him. My first win in months. I decide to postpone my retirement. Just a few more weeks. I tell Philly I want to go to Stratton Mountain, where I did well last year. Stratton will be a fitting place for my last hurrah.

We fly up to Vermont with two fellow players, Peter Doohan and Kelly Evernden. Kelly says he grabbed the Stratton draw right before we left.

Anyone want to hear who he’ll be playing?

I do.

No, Andre. You don’t.

Uh-oh. Who did I draw?

Luke Jensen.

Fuck.

Luke’s the best junior in the world, by far the most promising kid on the tour. I sink in my seat and watch the clouds. Should have quit while I was ahead. Should have retired after Chang.

LUKE SERVES BOTH lefty and righty, which is why they call him Dual Hand Luke, and he can bring it 130 miles an hour from either side. But today, against me, his first serve is off, and I cane his second. I’m more surprised than he is when I scrape by him in three sets and advance.

Next up is Pat Cash—who just won Wimbledon, twelve days after I met my demise on Graveyard Court. Cash is a machine, a finely tuned athlete who moves well and covers the net like a hydra. I don’t even think about beating him, only about holding my own. But in the early going I find that he doesn’t have a lot of top on his ball, so I’m getting nice, clean, eye-level looks, hitting one winner after another. Since I have no chance to win, since I want only to be credible, I’m free, loose, and this makes Cash tight. He appears shocked by what’s unfolding. He’s missing first serves, which lets me cheat in a half step, put everything I’ve got behind my return. Every time I hit a ball past him, Cash glares across the net with an expression that says, This wasn’t in the plan. You’re not supposed to be doing this.

Foolishly, somewhat arrogantly, he spends more and more time at the net looking surprised, rather than going back to the baseline and thinking up a new strategy. After one of my better returns, he hits a so-so volley, and I pass him again. He stands with his hands on his hips, staring at me, radiating a sense of injustice.

Keep staring, I think. Keep it up.

Toward the end he’s giving me painfully easy targets, making his ball so beautifully hit-table, so marvelously strikable, that it all seems unfair. I have a legit chance of hitting a winner on every point. I just wanted to leave a mark, but I’m leaving a gash. I score a shocking upset, 7–6, 7–6.

Stratton Mountain, I conclude, is my magic mountain. My anti-Wimbledon. Last year I played above my level here, now I’m playing twice as well. The setting is breathtaking, laid back—and quintessentially American. Unlike those snooty Brits, these Strattonites know me, or at least the idealized me I want them to know. They don’t know about my struggles of the last twelve months, about my giving rackets to homeless men, about my pending retirement.

And if they knew they wouldn’t hold it against me. They cheered me during my match with Jensen, but after I outclass Cash, they adopt me. This guy is our guy. This guy does well here. Inspired by their raucous encouragement, I reach the semis against Ivan Lendl, who’s ranked number one. My biggest match ever. My father flies in from Vegas.

An hour before the match, Lendl is walking around the locker room wearing only his tennis shoes. Seeing him so relaxed, so remarkably nude, right before facing me, I know what’s coming. The beat-down to end all beat-downs. I lose in three sets. Still, I walk away feeling encouraged, because I won the second set. For half an hour, I gave the best in the world all he wanted. I can build on that. I feel good.

That is, until I see what Lendl has to say about me in the newspapers. Asked about my game, he sniffs: A haircut and a forehand.

9

I FINISH 1987 WITH A BANG. I win my first tournament as a pro, in Itaparica, Brazil, all the more impressive because I do it before a crowd of initially hostile Brazilians. After I beat their top player, Luiz Mattar, the fans don’t seem to hold a grudge. In fact they make me an honorary Brazilian. They rush the court, hoist me on their shoulders, throw me in the air.

Many have come to the arena straight from the beach. They’re slathered with cocoa butter, and consequently so am I. Women in bikinis and thongs cover me with kisses. Music plays, people dance, someone hands me a bottle of champagne and tells me to spray it into the crowd. The carnival atmosphere is the perfect complement to my inner Mardi Gras. I finally broke through. I won five matches in a row. (To win a slam, I realize with some alarm, I’ll need to win seven.)

A man hands me the winner’s check. I have to look twice at the number. In the amount of: $90,000.

With the check still folded in my jeans pocket, I stand two days later in my father’s living room and employ a bit of remedial psychology. Pops, I say, how much do you think I’m going to make next year?

Ho ho, he says, beaming. Millions.

Good—then you won’t mind if I buy a car.

He frowns. Checkmate.

I know just the kind I want. A white Corvette with all the extras. My father insists that he and my mother go with me to the dealership, to make sure the salesman doesn’t screw me. I can’t say no. My father is my landlord and keeper. I no longer live full-time at the Bolletieri Academy, so once again I live under my father’s roof, and thus under his control. I’m traveling the world, making good money, winning a measure of fame, and yet my old man essentially keeps me on an allowance. It’s inappropriate, but hell, my whole life is inappropriate. I’m only seventeen, not ready to live on my own, barely ready to stand alone on a tennis court, and yet I was just in Rio, holding a girl in a thong with one hand and a $90,000 check with the other.

I’m an adolescent who’s seen too much, a man-child without a checking account.

At the car dealership my father goes back and forth with the salesman, and the negotiation quickly turns contentious. Why am I not surprised? Every time my father makes a new offer the salesman walks off to consult his manager. My father clenches and unclenches his fists.

The salesman and my father eventually agree on a price. I’m seconds from owning my dream car. My father puts on his glasses, gives the paperwork a last look. He runs his finger down the itemized list of charges. Wait, what’s this? A charge for $49.99?

Small fee for the paperwork, the salesman says.

Ain’t my fucking paper. That’s your fucking paper. Pay for your own fucking paper.

The salesman doesn’t care for my father’s tone. Hard words are exchanged. My father gets that look in his eye, the same look he had before dropping the trucker. Just the sight of all these cars is giving him the old road rage.

Pops, the car costs $37,000, and you’re flipping out about a $50 fee?

They’re screwing you, Andre! They’re screwing me. The world is trying to screw me!

He storms out of the salesman’s office and into the main showroom, where the managers sit along a high counter. He screams at them: You think you’re safe back there? You think you’re safe behind that counter? Why don’t you come out from behind there?

His dukes are up. He’s ready to fight five men at once.

My mother puts an arm around me and says the best thing we can do now is go outside and wait.

We stand on the sidewalk and watch my father’s tirade through the plate-glass window of the dealership. He’s pounding the desk. He’s waving his hands. It’s like watching a terrible silent movie. I’m mortified, but also slightly envious. I wish I possessed some of my father’s rage. I wish I could tap into it during tough matches. I wonder what I could do in tennis if I could access that rage and aim it across the net. Instead, whatever rage I have, I turn on myself.

Mom, I ask, how do you take it? All these years?

Oh, she says, I don’t know. He hasn’t gone to jail yet. And nobody’s killed him yet. I think we’re pretty lucky, all things considered. Hopefully we’ll get through this incident without either of those two things happening, and move on.

Along with my father’s rage, I wish I had a fraction of my mother’s calm.

Philly and I go back to the dealership the next day. The salesman hands me the keys to my new Corvette, but treats me with pity. He says I’m nothing like my father, and though he means it as a compliment, I feel vaguely offended. Driving home, the thrill of my new Corvette is dampened. I tell Philly that things are going to be different from now on. Weaving in and out of traffic, gunning the engine, I tell him: The time has come. I need to take control of my money. I need to take control of my fucking life.

I’M RUNNING OUT of steam in long matches. And for me every match is long, because my serve is average. I can’t serve my way out of trouble, I get no easy points off my serve, so every opponent takes me the full twelve rounds. My knowledge of the game is improving, but my body is breaking down. I’m skinny, brittle, and my legs give out quickly, followed in short order by my nerve. I tell Nick that I’m not fit enough to compete with the best in the world. He agrees. Legs are everything, he says.

I find a trainer in Vegas, a retired military colonel named Lenny. Tough as burlap, Lenny curses like a sailor and walks like a pirate, the result of being shot in a long-ago war he doesn’t like to talk about. After one hour with Lenny I wish someone would shoot me. Few things give Lenny more pleasure than abusing me and hurling obscenities at me in the process.

In December 1987 the desert turns unseasonably cold. The blackjack dealers wear Santa hats. The palm trees are strung with lights. The hookers on the Strip wear Christmas orna-ments for earrings. I tell Perry I can’t wait for this new year. I feel strong. I feel as if I’m starting to get tennis.

I win the first tournament of 1988, in Memphis, and the ball sounds alive as it leaves my racket. I’m growing into my forehand. I’m hitting the ball through opponents. Each one turns to me with a look that says, Where the hell did that come from?

I notice something on the faces of fans too. The way they watch me and ask for my autograph, the way they scream as I enter an arena, makes me uncomfortable, but also satisfies something deep inside me, some hidden craving I didn’t know was there. I’m shy—but I like attention. I cringe when fans start dressing like me—but I also dig it.

Dressing like me in 1988 means wearing denim shorts. They’re my signature. They’re synonymous with me, mentioned in every article and profile. Oddly, I didn’t choose to wear them; they chose me. It was 1987, in Portland, Oregon. I was playing the Nike International Challenge and Nike reps invited me up to a hotel suite to show me the latest demos and clothing samples. McEnroe was there, and of course he was given first choice. He held up a pair of denim shorts and said, What the fuck are these?

My eyes got big. I licked my lips and thought, Whoa. Those are cool. If you don’t want those, Mac, I’ve got dibs.

The moment Mac set them aside, I scooped them up. Now I wear them at all my matches, as do countless fans. Sportswriters murder me for it. They say I’m trying to stand out. In fact—as with my mohawk—I’m trying to hide. They say I’m trying to change the game. In fact I’m trying to prevent the game from changing me. They call me a rebel, but I have no interest in being a rebel, I’m only conducting an everyday, run-of-the-mill teenage rebellion. Subtle distinctions, but important. At heart, I’m doing nothing more than being myself, and since I don’t know who that is, my attempts to figure it out are scattershot and awkward—and, of course, contradictory. I’m doing nothing more than I did at the Bollettieri Academy. Bucking authority, experimenting with identity, sending a message to my father, thrashing against the lack of choice in my life. But I’m doing it on a grander stage.

Whatever I’m doing, for whatever reasons, it strikes a chord. I’m routinely called the savior of American tennis, whatever that means. I think it has to do with the atmosphere at my matches. Besides wearing my outfits, fans come sporting my hairdo. I see my mullet on men and women. (It looks better on the women.) I’m flattered by the imitators, embarrassed, thoroughly confused. I can’t imagine all these people trying to be like Andre Agassi, since I don’t want to be Andre Agassi.

Now and then I start to explain this in an interview, but it never comes out right. I try to be funny, and it falls flat or offends someone. I try to be profound, and I hear myself making no sense. So I stop, fall back on pat answers and platitudes, tell journalists what they seem to want to hear. It’s the best I can do. If I can’t understand my motivations and demons, how can I hope to explain them to journalists on deadline?

To make matters worse, journalists write down exactly what I say, while I’m saying it, word for word, as if this represented the literal truth. I want to tell them, Hold it, don’t write that down, I’m only thinking out loud here. You’re asking about the subject I understand least—me. Let me edit myself, contradict myself. But there isn’t time. They need black-and-white answers, good and evil, simple plot lines in seven hundred words, and then they’re on to the next thing.

Eighteen years old, wearing a frosted mullet and denim shorts, my first signature look

If I had time, if I were more self-aware, I would tell journalists that I’m trying to figure out who I am, but in the meantime I have a pretty good idea of who I’m not. I’m not my clothes. I’m certainly not my game. I’m not anything the public thinks I am. I’m not a showman simply because I come from Vegas and wear loud clothes. I’m not an enfant terrible, a phrase that appears in every article about me. (I think you can’t be something you can’t pronounce.) And, for heaven’s sake, I’m not a punk rocker. I listen to soft, cheesy pop, like Barry Manilow and Richard Marx.

Of course the key to my identity, the thing I know about myself but can’t bring myself to tell journalists, is that I’m losing my hair. I wear it long and fluffy to conceal its rapid departure.

Only Philly and Perry know, because they’re fellow sufferers. In fact Philly recently flew to New York to meet with an owner of Hair Club for Men, to buy himself a few toupees. He’s finally given up on the headstands. He phones to tell me about the astonishing variety of toupees the Hair Club offers. It’s a hair smorgasbord, he says. It’s like the salad bar at Sizzler, only all hair.

I ask him to pick one up for me. Every morning I find a little more of my identity on my pillow, in my sink, in my drain.

I ask myself: You’re going to wear a hairpiece? During tournaments?

I answer: What choice do I have?

AT INDIAN WELLS, in February 1988, I blaze my way to the semis, where I meet Boris Becker, from West Germany, the most famous tennis player in the world. He cuts an imposing figure, with a shock of hair the color of a new penny and legs as wide as my waist. I catch him at the peak of his powers, but win the first set. Then I lose the next two, including a hard, tough third. We walk off the court glowering at each other like rutting bulls. I promise myself I won’t lose to him the next time we meet.

In March, at Key Biscayne, I face an old schoolmate from the Bollettieri Academy, Aaron Krickstein. We’re often compared to each other, because of our connection with Nick and our precocious skills. I’m up two sets to none and then wear out. Krickstein wins the next two sets. As the fifth set starts I’m cramping. I’m still not where I need to be, physically, to reach the next level. I lose.

I go to Isle of Palms, near Charleston, and win my third tournament. In the middle of the tournament I turn eighteen. The tournament director rolls a cake out to center court, and everyone sings. I’ve never liked birthdays. No one ever took note of my birthday when I was growing up. But this feels different. I’m legal, everyone keeps saying. In the eyes of the law, you’re a grown-up.

Then the law is an ass.

I go to New York City, the Tournament of Champions, a significant milestone because it’s a clash of the top players in the world. Once more I square off against Chang, who’s developed a bad habit since we last met. Every time he beats someone, he points to the sky. He thanks God—credits God—for the win, which offends me. That God should take sides in a tennis match, that God should side against me, that God should be in Chang’s box, feels ludicrous and insulting. I beat Chang and savor every blasphemous stroke. Then I take revenge on Krickstein. In the final I face Slobodan Zivojinovic, a Serb better known for his doubles play. I beat him in straight sets.

I’m winning more often. I should be happy. Instead I’m uptight, because it’s over. I’ve enjoyed a triumphant hard-court season, my body wants to keep playing on hard courts, but clay season is starting. The sudden switch from one surface to another changes everything. Clay is a different game, thus your game must become different, and so must your body. Instead of sprinting from side to side, stopping short and starting, you must slide and lean and dance.

Familiar muscles now play supporting roles, dormant muscles dominate. It’s painful enough, under the best of circumstances, that I don’t know who I am. To suddenly become a different person, a clay person, adds another degree of frustration and anxiety.

A friend tells me that the four surfaces in tennis are like the four seasons. Each asks something different of you. Each bestows different gifts and exacts different costs. Each radic-ally alters your outlook, remakes you on a molecular level. After three rounds of the Italian Open, in May 1988, I’m no longer Andre Agassi. And I’m no longer in the tournament.

I go to the 1988 French Open expecting more of the same. Walking into the locker room at Roland Garros, I see all the clay experts leaning against the walls, leering. Dirt rats, Nick calls them. They’ve been here for months, practicing, waiting for the rest of us to finish hard courts and fly into their clay lair.

Disorienting as the new surface is, Paris itself is more of a shock to the system. The city has all the same logistical problems of New York and London, the large crowds and cultural anomalies, but with an added language barrier. Also, the presence of dogs in restaurants unsettles me. The first time I walk into a café, on the Champs-Élysées, a dog raises its leg and unleashes a stream of pee against the table next to mine.

Roland Garros provides no escape from the strangeness. It’s the only place I’ve ever played that reeks of cigars and pipes. While I’m serving, at a critical point in a match, a finger of pipe smoke curls under my nose. I want to find the person smoking that pipe and admonish him, and yet I don’t want to find that person, because I can’t imagine what sort of gnarled hob-bit is sitting at an outdoor tennis match puffing on a pipe.

Despite my unease, I manage to beat my first three opponents. I even beat the great clay master Guillermo Pérez-Roldán in the quarterfinal. In the semis I run into Mats Wilander. He’s ranked number three in the world, but to my mind he’s the player of the moment. When one of his matches is on TV, I stop whatever I’m doing and watch. He’s on his way to an astounding year. He’s already won the Australian Open and is the favorite to win this tournament. I manage to take him to a fifth set, then lose 6–0, cramping badly.

I remind Nick that I’m skipping Wimbledon. I say, Why switch to grass and expend all that energy? Let’s take a month off, rest, get ready for the hard courts of summer.

He’s more than happy not to go to London. He doesn’t like Wimbledon any more than I do.

Besides, he wants to hurry back to the U.S. and find me a better trainer.

NICK HIRES A CHILEAN STRONGMAN named Pat who never asks me to do anything he’s not willing to do himself, which I respect. But Pat also has a habit of spitting on me when he talks, and leaning over me while I’m lifting weights, drizzling sweat on my face. I feel as if I should show up for Pat’s workout sessions in a plastic poncho.

The mainstay of Pat’s training regimen is a brutal daily run up and down a hill outside Vegas. The hill is remote and sunbaked, and gets hotter as you near the top, as if it’s an active volcano. It’s also an hour from my father’s house, which seems unnecessarily far. Nothing like driving to Reno for a run. Pat insists, however, that this hill is the answer to all my physical problems. When we get to the base and pile out of the car, he starts running straight up, and orders me to follow. Within minutes I’m holding my side, sweat rolling off me. By the time we reach the summit I can’t breathe. According to Pat, this is good. This is healthy.

A battered truck appears one day as Pat and I crest the hill. An ancient Native American man climbs out. He comes toward us with a pole. If he wants to kill me, I won’t be able to fend him off, because I can’t lift my arms. And I won’t be able to run away, because I can’t draw breath.

The man asks, What are you doing here?

We’re training. What are you doing here?

Catching me some rattlesnakes.

Rattlesnakes! There are rattlesnakes out here?

There’s training out here?

When I stop laughing the Indian says, more or less, that I must have been born with a horseshoe up my ass, because this is Rattlesnake Fucking Hill. He catches twelve rattlers every day on this hill, and he expects to catch twelve more this morning. It’s a flat-out miracle that I haven’t stepped on one, big and plump and ready to strike.

I look at Pat, and feel an urge to spit on him.

IN JULY I GO to Argentina as one of the youngest men ever to play for the U.S. Davis Cup team. I play well against Martín Jaite, from Argentina, and the crowd gives me its grudging respect. I’m leading two sets to none, ahead 4–0 in the third, waiting for Jaite’s serve. I’m hunched against the cold, because it’s the dead of winter in Argentina. The temperature must be thirty degrees. Jaite hits a let serve, then hits a bending unreturnable serve that I reach up and catch with my hand. A riot breaks out. The crowd thinks I’m trying to show up their countryman, disrespecting him. They boo me for several minutes.

The next day’s newspapers kill me. Rather than defend myself, I react with truculence. I say I’ve always wanted to do something like that. The truth is, I was just cold and not thinking.

I was being stupid, not cocky. My reputation takes a major hit.

THE CROWD AT STRATTON MOUNTAIN welcomes me days later, however, like a prodigal. I play to please them. I play to thank them for banishing the memory of Argentina.

Something about these people, these emerald mountains, this Vermont air—I win the tournament. I wake soon after to discover that I’m number four in the world. But I’m too spent to celebrate. Between Pat and Davis Cup and the grind of the tour, I’m sleeping twelve hours a night.

I fly to New York in the late summer to play a minor tournament in New Jersey, a tune-up for the 1988 U.S. Open. I reach the final and face Tarango. I beat him soundly, a delicious victory, because I can still close my eyes and see Tarango cheating me when I was eight. My first loss. I’ll never forget. Each time I hit a winner I think, Fuck you, Jeff. Fuck. You.

At the U.S. Open I reach the quarters. I’m due to face Jimmy Connors. Before the match I approach him meekly in the locker room and remind him that we once met. In Las Vegas? I was four? You were playing at Caesars Palace? We hit some balls together?

Nope, he says.

Oh. Well. Actually, we met again, several times, when I was seven. I used to deliver rackets to you? My father strung your rackets whenever you came to town, and I’d bring them to you at your favorite restaurant on the Strip?

Nope, he says again, then lies back on a bench and pulls a long white towel over his legs and closes his eyes.

Dismissed.

This gibes with everything I’ve heard about Connors from other players. Asshole, they say. Rude, condescending, egomaniac prick. But I thought he’d treat me differently, I thought he’d show me some love, given our longtime connection.

Just for that, I tell Perry, I’m beating this guy in three easy sets—and he’s going to win no more than nine games.

The crowd is pulling for Connors. It’s the opposite of Stratton. Here, I’m cast as the bad guy. I’m the impertinent upstart who dares to oppose the elder statesman. The crowd wants Connors to defy the odds, and Father Time, and I’m standing in the way of that dream scenario. Each time they cheer I think: Do they realize what this guy is like in the locker room? Do they know what his peers say about him? Do they have any concept of how he responds to a friendly hello?

I’m cruising, winning easily, when a man in the upper bleachers calls out, C’mon, Jimmy, he’s a punk—you’re a legend! The words hang in midair for a moment, bigger and louder than the Goodyear Blimp overhead, and then twenty thousand fans guffaw. Connors cracks a sly smile, nods, and hits a ball as a souvenir to the man who yelled.

Now the crowd erupts. A standing ovation.

Running on adrenaline and anger, I punk the legend in the final set, 6–1.

After the match, I tell reporters about my pre-match prediction, and then they tell Connors.

He says: I enjoy playing guys who could be my children. Maybe he’s one of them. I spent a lot of time in Vegas.

In the semis I lose again to Lendl. I take him to a fourth set, but he’s too strong. Trying to wear him out, I wear myself out. Despite the best efforts of Limping Lenny and Pat the Spitting Chilean, I’m not able to stay with a man of Lendl’s caliber. I tell myself that when I get back to Vegas, the search must continue for someone, anyone, who can make me battle ready.

BUT NO ONE CAN MAKE me ready for the battle with the media, because it’s not really a battle, it’s a massacre. Each day brings another anti-Agassi screed in another magazine or newspaper. A dig from a fellow player. A diatribe from a sportswriter. A fresh piece of libel, served up as analysis. I’m a punk, I’m a clown, I’m a fraud, I’m a fluke. I have a high ranking because of a conspiracy, a cabal of networks and teenagers. I don’t rate the attention I get because I haven’t won a slam.

Millions of fans like me, apparently. I get potato sacks full of fan mail, including naked pictures of women with their phone numbers scrawled along the margin. And yet each day I’m vilified because of my look, because of my behavior, because of no reason at all. I absorb the role of villain-rebel, accept it, grow into it. The role seems like part of my job, so I play it. Before long, however, I’m being typecast. I’m to be the villain-rebel forever, in every match and every tournament.

I turn to Perry. I fly back east and visit him for a weekend. He’s studying business at Georgetown. We go out for big dinners, and he takes me to his favorite local bar, the Tombs, and over beers he does what Perry has always done. He reshapes my anguish, makes it more logical and articulate. If I’m a returner, he’s a reworder. First, he redefines the problem as a negotiation between me and the world. Then he clarifies the terms of the negotiation. He grants that it’s horrible to be a sensitive person who’s publicly excoriated every day, but he insists it’s only temporary. There’s a time limit to this torture. Things will get better, he says, the moment I start to win Grand Slams.

Win? What’s the point? Why should winning change people’s minds about me? Win or lose, I’ll still be the same person. That’s why I need to win? To shut people up? To satisfy a bunch of sportswriters and reporters who don’t know me? Those are the terms of this negotiation?

PHILLY SEES THAT I’M SUFFERING, that I’m searching. He’s searching too. He’s been searching all his life, and recently he’s stepped up the search. He tells me he’s been going to a church, or a kind of church, in an office complex on the west side of Vegas. It’s nondenom-inational, he says, and the pastor is different.

He drags me to the church and I have to admit, he’s right, the pastor, John Parenti, is different. He wears jeans, a T-shirt and he has long, sandy-brown hair. He’s more surfer than pastor. He’s unconventional, which I respect. He’s—no other way to say it—a rebel. I also like his prominent aquiline nose, his sad canine eyes. Above all, I like the casual vibe of his service. He simplifies the Bible. No ego, no dogma. Just common sense and clear thinking.

Parenti is so casual, he doesn’t want to be called Pastor Parenti. He insists we call him J.P. He says he wants his church to feel unlike a church. He wants it to feel like a home where friends gather. He doesn’t have any answers, he says. He just happens to have read the Bible a few dozen times, front to back, and he has some observations to share.

I think he has more answers than he’s letting on. And I need answers. I consider myself a Christian, but J.P.’s church is the first one where I’ve felt truly close to God.

I attend with Philly every week. We time our arrival so that we walk in just as J.P. starts talking, and we always sit in the back, slouched low, so we don’t get recognized. One Sunday Philly says he wants to meet J.P. I hang back. Part of me would like to meet J.P. too, but part of me is wary of strangers. I’ve always been shy, but the recent avalanche of bad press has made me borderline paranoid.

Days later I’m driving around Vegas, feeling gutted after reading the latest attacks on me. I find myself parked outside J.P.’s church. It’s late, all the lights are off—except one. I peer in the window. A secretary is doing some paperwork. I knock at the door and tell the woman I need to speak with J.P. She says he’s at home. She doesn’t say, Where you should be. With a shaky voice I ask if she could please phone him. I really need to talk to him. To somebody.

She dials J.P. and hands me the receiver.

Hello? he says.

Hi. Yes. You don’t know me. My name is Andre Agassi, I’m a tennis player, and, well, it’s just—

I know you. I’ve seen you in church the last six months. I recognized you, of course. I just didn’t want to bother you.

I thank him for his discretion, for respecting my privacy. I haven’t been getting that kind of respect lately. I say, Look, I wonder if we could spend some time together. Talk.

When?

Now?

Oh. Well, I guess I could come down to the office and meet you.

With all due respect, can I come to wherever you are? I have a fast car, and I think I can get there faster than you can get here.

He pauses. OK, he says.

I’m there in thirteen minutes. He meets me on his doorstep.

Thanks for agreeing to see me. I feel like I have nowhere else to turn.

What is it you need?

I wonder if we can just, um, get to know each other?

He smiles. Listen, he says, I don’t do father figure real well.

I nod, laugh at myself. I say, Right, right. But maybe you could give me some assignments? Life assignments? Reading assignments?

Like a mentor?

Yeah.

I don’t do mentor real well either.

Oh.

Talking, listening, fellowship—those things I can do.

I frown.

Look, J.P. says, my life is as screwed up as the next guy’s. Maybe more. I can’t offer much in the way of shepherding. I’m not that kind of pastor. If you’re looking for advice, I’m sorry. If you’re looking for a friend, that we can do, maybe.

I nod.

He holds open the door, asks if I’d like to come in. But I ask if he’d like to go for a drive. I think better when I drive.

He cranes his neck and sees my white Corvette. It looks like a small private plane parked in his driveway. The color drains a bit from his face.

I drive J.P. all over Vegas, up and down the Strip, then into the mountains that circle the town. I show him what the Vette can do, open up the engine on a lonely stretch of highway, then open up myself. I tell him my story, in a ragged and disorderly fashion, and he has Perry’s knack for saying it all back to me, artfully reworded. He understands my contradictions, and reconciles a few of them.

You’re a kid who still lives with his parents, he says, but you’re known around the planet.

That’s got to be hard. You’re trying to express yourself freely and creatively and artistically, and you’re slammed at every turn. That’s very hard.

I tell him about the knock on me, that I’ve snuck up on my high ranking, that I’ve never beaten anyone good, that I’ve been lucky. Horseshoe up my ass. He says I’m experiencing backlash, and never even got to enjoy the lash.

I laugh.

He says it must be bizarre to have strangers think they know me, and love me beyond reason, while others think they know me and resent me beyond reason—all while I’m a relative stranger to myself.

What makes it perverse, I tell him, is that it all revolves around tennis, and I hate tennis.

Right, sure. But you don’t actually hate tennis.

Yes. Yes, I do.

I talk about my father. I tell J.P. about the yelling, the pressure, the rage, the abandonment. J.P. gets a funny look on his face. You do realize, don’t you, that God isn’t anything like your father? You know that—don’t you?

I almost drive the Corvette onto the shoulder.

God, he says, is the opposite of your father. God isn’t mad at you all the time. God isn’t yelling in your ear, harping on your imperfections. That voice you hear all the time, that angry voice? That’s not God. That’s still your father.

I turn to him: Do me a favor? Say that again.

He does. Word for word.

Say it once more.

He does.

I thank him. I ask about his own life. He tells me that he hates what he does. He can’t abide being a pastor. He no longer wants to be responsible for people’s souls. It’s a round-the-clock job, he says, and it leaves him no time for reading and reflection. (I wonder if this is a slight jab at me.) He’s also hounded by death threats. Prostitutes and drug pushers come to his church and reform, and then their pimps and junkies and families, who’ve depended on that stream of income, blame J.P.

What do you think you’d like to do instead?

Actually, I’m a songwriter. A composer. I’d like to make music for a living.

He says he’s written a song, When God Ran, that’s a huge hit on the Christian charts. He sings a few bars. He has a nice voice and the song is moving.

I tell him that if he wants it bad enough, and works hard enough, he’ll succeed.

When I start talking like a motivational speaker, I know I’m tired. I look at my watch. Three in the morning. Wow, I say, stifling a yawn, if you don’t mind, can you just drop me off at my parents’ house? I live right up here at the corner and I’m exhausted. I can’t drive another minute. Take my car, take yourself home, bring it back to me when you can.

I don’t want to take your car.

Why not? Fun car. Goes like the wind.

I see that. But what if I wreck it?

If you wreck it, as long as you’re okay, I would laugh. I don’t give a shit about the car.

How long do you want me to—I mean, when should I bring it back?

Whenever.

He brings it back the next day.

Driving to church in this thing was awkward enough, he says, tossing me the keys. But, Andre, I officiate at funerals. You cannot drive up to a funeral in a white Corvette.

I INVITE J.P. TO MUNICH for Davis Cup. I look forward to Davis Cup, because it’s not about me, it’s about country. I imagine it’s as close as I’ll ever get to playing on a team, so I expect the trip to be a pleasant diversion, the matches to be easy, and I want to share the experience with my new friend.

Early on I find myself pitted against Becker, who’s attained godlike status in West Germany. The fans are bringing down the house, twelve thousand Germans cheering his every swing, booing me. And yet I’m unfazed, because I’m in a zone. Maybe not the zone, but my zone. I can’t miss. Also, I promised myself months ago that I’d never again lose to Becker, and I’m making good on that promise. I jump out to a two-set lead. J.P. and Philly and Nick are the only people cheering for me, and I can hear them. A fine day in Munich.

Then I lose my concentration, followed by my confidence. I drop a game and head for my chair during the changeover, discouraged.

Suddenly several German officials are gabbling at me. They’re calling me back onto the court.

The game isn’t over.

Come back, Mr. Agassi, come back.

Becker giggles. The audience roars with laughter.

I walk back onto the court, feeling my eyes throb. Once again I’m at the Bollettieri Academy, being humiliated by Nick in front of the other kids. I have enough trouble being laughed at in the press, but I can’t handle being laughed at in person. I lose the game. I lose the match.

Showered, climbing into a car outside the arena, I ignore J.P. and turn to Nick and Philly. I tell them: The first person who talks to me about tennis is fired.

I SIT ON THE BALCONY of my Munich hotel room, alone, staring out over the city.

Without thinking, I begin lighting things on fire. Paper, clothes, shoes. For years this has been one of my furtive ways of coping with extreme stress. I don’t do it consciously. An impulse comes over me and I reach for the matches.

Just as I’ve got a small bonfire going, J.P. appears. He watches, then calmly adds a piece of hotel stationery to my bonfire. Then a napkin. I add the room-service menu. We feed the bonfire for fifteen minutes, neither of us saying a word. As the last flame dies down he asks, Do you want to go for a walk?

We wind our way through the beer gardens of downtown Munich. Everywhere we look, people are being boisterous, festive. They’re drinking from one-liter tankards, singing and laughing. The laughter gives me the shakes.

We come to a large stone bridge with a cobblestone walkway. We cross. Far below is a rushing river. At the apex of the bridge we stop. No one is around. The singing and laughter have subsided. We hear nothing but the rushing water. I stare into the river and ask J.P.: What if I’m no good? What if today wasn’t a bad day, but my best day? I’m always making excuses when I lose. I could have beaten him if such-and-such. If I’d wanted it. If I’d had my A game. If I’d gotten the calls. But what if I’m playing my best, and I care, and I want it, and I’m still not the best in the world?

Well—what if?

I think I’d rather die.

I lean against the railing, sobbing. J.P. has the decency, the wisdom, to say and do nothing. He knows there is nothing to say, nothing to do, but to wait for this fire to burn out.

I FACE CARL-UWE STEEB, another German, the following afternoon. Spent, physically and emotionally, I play Steeb exactly the wrong way. Yes, I’m attacking his backhand, which is his weakest shot, but I’m doing it with pace. If I were to give him no pace, he’d have to generate his own, and his backhand would be much weaker. His greatest flaw would be on display. Using my pace, however, he can hit a low slice that stays down on this fast surface. I’m making him better than he is, all because I’m trying to hit bigger than I need to, trying to be perfect. With a cordial smile Steeb accepts my gifts, settling into his legs and his Agassi-augmented backhand, having a marvelous time. Later, the captain of the Davis Cup team accuses me of tanking, as does a prominent sportswriter.

PART OF THE PROBLEM with my game in 1989 is my racket. I’ve always used a Prince, but Nick has convinced me to sign with a new company, Donnay. Why? Because Nick’s got money troubles, and for delivering me to Donnay he gets a lucrative contract for himself.

Nick, I tell him—I love my Prince.

You could play with a broomstick, he says. It wouldn’t matter.

Now, with the Donnay, I feel as if I am playing with a broomstick. I feel as if I’m playing left-handed, as if I’ve suffered a brain injury. Everything is slightly off. The ball doesn’t listen to me. The ball doesn’t do what I say.

I’m in New York, hanging out with J.P. It’s well after midnight. We’re sitting in a seedy deli with garish fluorescent lights and loud countermen arguing in several Eastern European languages. We’re each having a cup of coffee and I’m holding my head in my hands, telling J.P.

over and over: When I hit the ball with this new racket, I don’t know where it’s going.

You’ll find a solution, J.P. says.

How? What?

I don’t know. But you will. This is a momentary crisis, Andre. One of many. As sure as we’re sitting here, there will be others. Bigger, smaller, and everything in between. Treat this crisis as practice for the next crisis.

And then the crisis is resolved during a practice. Days later, I’m in Florida, hitting at the Bollettieri Academy and someone hands me a new Prince. I hit three balls, just three, and it’s something like a religious experience. Every ball goes like a laser to the spot where I want it to go. The court opens before me like Xanadu.

I don’t care about any deals, I tell Nick. I can’t sacrifice my life to a deal.

I’ll handle it, he says.

He doctors a Prince racket, stencils it to look like a Donnay, and I cruise to several easy victories at Indian Wells. I lose in the quarters, but I don’t care, because I have my racket back, my game back.

The next day, three Donnay execs descend on Indian Wells.

This is unacceptable, they say. It’s clear to everyone that you’re playing with a doctored Prince. You’re going to ruin us. You’re going to be liable for the destruction of our company.

Your racket is going to be liable for the destruction of me.

Seeing that I’m unrepentant, and not budging, the Donnay execs say they’ll build me a better racket. They go away and duplicate a Prince, just as Nick did, but make it look more convincing. I take my faux Donnay to Rome and play a kid I recognize from juniors, Pete Something. Sampras, I think. Greek kid from California. When I played him in juniors, I beat him handily. I was ten, he was nine. The next time I saw him was some months ago, at a tournament. I can’t recall which one. I was sitting on a beautiful grassy hill beside my hotel, just after winning my match. Philly and Nick were sitting alongside me. We were stretched out, enjoying the fresh air, and watching Pete, who’d just taken a beating in his match. He was on the hotel court for a post-match practice, and nearly every ball he hit looked bad. He missed three of every four swings. His backhand was awkward, and one-handed, which was new.

Someone had tinkered with his backhand, and it was clearly going to cost him a career.

This guy will never make it on the tour, Philly said.

He’ll be lucky to qualify into tournaments, I said.

Whoever did that to his game should be ashamed, Nick said.

They should be indicted, Philly said. He has all the physical gifts. He’s six foot one, moves great, but someone has turned him into a mess. Someone is responsible for that shit.

Someone should pay.

At first I was taken aback by Philly’s vehemence. Then I realized: Philly was projecting. He was seeing himself in Pete. He knew what it was like to try and fail to make it on tour, particularly with an involuntary one-handed backhand. In Pete’s plight, in Pete’s fate, Philly saw his own.

Now, in Rome, I see that Pete has improved since that day, but not much. He has a big serve, but not extraordinary, not a Becker serve. He has a fast arm, good action, an easy motion, and comes close to his spots. He wants to ace you out wide, and when he misses it’s not by much—he’s not one of these players who try to ace you out wide and serve it by mistake into your chest. His real problem comes after his serve. He’s inconsistent. He can’t keep three balls in a row between the lines. I beat him, 6–2, 6–1, and as I walk off the court I think to myself that he’s got a long and painful slog ahead. I feel bad for the guy. He seems like a good soul. But I don’t expect to see him again on the tour, ever.

I go on to reach the final. I face Alberto Mancini. Strong, stocky, with tree-trunk legs, he pounds the ball with tremendous weight, penetration, and a tornado spin that causes it to hit your racket like a medicine ball. I have match point against him in the fourth set, but I lose the point—then fall apart. Somehow I lose the match.

Back in my hotel I sit in my room for hours, watching Italian TV, setting things on fire.

People, I think, don’t understand the pain of losing in a final. You practice and travel and grind to get ready. You win for one week, four matches in a row. (Or, at a slam, two weeks, six matches.) Then you lose that final match and your name isn’t on the trophy, your name isn’t in the record books. You lost only once, but you’re a loser.

I go to the 1989 French Open and in the third round I face Courier, my schoolmate from the Bollettieri Academy. I’m the chalk, the heavy favorite, but Courier scores the upset, then rubs my nose in it. He pumps his fist, glares at me and Nick. Moreover, in the locker room, he makes sure everyone sees him lacing up his running shoes and going for a jog. Message: Beating Andre just didn’t provide enough cardio.

Later, when Chang wins the tournament, and thanks Jesus Christ for making the ball go over the net, I feel sickened. How could Chang, of all people, have won a slam before me?

Again, I skip Wimbledon. I hear another chorus of jeers from the media. Agassi doesn’t win the slams he enters, and then he skips the slams that matter most. But it feels like a drop in the ocean. I’m becoming desensitized.

EVEN THOUGH I’M A PUNCHING BAG for sportswriters, big companies beg me to pose with their products. In the middle of 1989 one of my corporate sponsors, Canon, schedules a series of photo shoots, including one in the wilds of Nevada, in the Valley of Fire. I like the sound of that. I walk every day through a valley of fire.

Since the ad campaign is for a camera, the director wants a colorful setting. Vivid, he says. Cinematic. He builds an entire tennis court in the middle of the desert, and as I watch the workmen I can’t help thinking of my father building his tennis court in his desert. I’ve come a long way. Or have I?

For a full day the director films me playing tennis by myself, the flame-red mountains and orange rock formations in the background. I’m weary, sunburned, ready for a break, but the director isn’t done with me. He tells me to take off my shirt. I’m known for taking off my shirt, in moments of teenage exuberance, and throwing it into crowds.

Then he wants to film me in a cave, hitting a ball at the camera, as if to shatter the lens.

Then, at Lake Mead, we film several scenes against the watery backdrop.

It all seems silly, goofy, but harmless.

Back in Vegas we do a series of shots on the Strip, then around a swimming pool. As luck would have it, they choose the pool at good old Cambridge Racquet Club. Finally, we set up for one last shot at a Vegas country club. The director puts me in a white suit, then has me drive up to the front portico in a white Lamborghini. Step out of the car, he says, turn to the camera, lower your black sunglasses, and say, Image Is Everything.

Image Is Everything?

Yes. Image Is Everything.

Between takes I look around and in the crowd of spectators I see Wendi, the former ballgirl, my childhood crush, all grown up. Now she’s definitely come a long way since the Alan King tournament.

She’s carrying a suitcase. She’s just dropped out of college and she’s just come home.

You were the first person I wanted to see, she says.

She looks beautiful. Her brown hair is long, curly, and her eyes are impossibly green.

She’s all I can think about while the director is ordering me around. As the sun goes down, the director yells, Cut! That’s a wrap! Wendi and I jump into my new Jeep, the doors and top off, and go roaring away like Bonnie and Clyde.

Wendi says, What was that slogan they kept making you say into the camera?

Image Is Everything.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Beats me. It’s for a camera company.

WEEKS LATER I BEGIN TO HEAR this slogan twice a day. Then six times a day. Then ten. It reminds me of those Vegas windstorms, the kind that begin with a faint, ominous rust-ling of leaves, and ultimately turn into high-pitched, gale-force, three-day blows.

Overnight the slogan becomes synonymous with me. Sportswriters liken this slogan to my inner nature, my essential being. They say it’s my philosophy, my religion, and they predict it’s going to be my epitaph. They say I’m nothing but image, I have no substance, because I haven’t won a slam. They say the slogan is proof that I’m just a pitchman, trading on my fame, caring only about money and nothing about tennis. Fans at my matches begin taunting me with the slogan. Come on, Andre—image is everything! They yell this if I show any emotion. They yell it if I show no emotion. They yell it when I win. They yell it when I lose.

This ubiquitous slogan, and the wave of hostility and criticism and sarcasm it sets off, is excruciating. I feel betrayed—by the advertising agency, the Canon execs, the sportswriters, the fans. I feel abandoned. I feel the way I did when I arrived at the Bollettieri Academy.

The ultimate indignity, however, is when people insist that I’ve called myself an empty image, that I’ve proclaimed it, simply because I spoke the line in a commercial. They treat this ridiculous throwaway slogan as if it’s my Confession, which makes as much sense as arresting Marlon Brando for murder because of a line he uttered in The Godfather.

As the ad campaign widens, as this insidious slogan creeps its way into every article about me, I change. I develop an edge, a mean streak. I stop giving interviews. I lash out at linesmen, opponents, reporters—even fans. I feel justified, because the world is against me, the world is trying to screw me. I’m becoming my father.

When crowds boo, when they yell, Image is everything, I yell back. As much as you don’t want me here, that’s how much I don’t want to be here! In Indianapolis, after a particularly bad loss, and a sonorous booing, a reporter asks me what went wrong. You didn’t seem like yourself today, he says with a smile that isn’t a smile. Something bothering you?

I tell him, in so many words, to kiss my ass.

No one counsels me that you should never snap at reporters. No one bothers to explain that snapping, baring your fangs, makes reporters more rabid. Don’t show them fear, but don’t show them your fangs, either. Even if someone were to give me this sensible advice, I don’t know that I could take it.

Instead I hide. I act like a fugitive, and my accomplices in seclusion are Philly and J.P. We go every night to an old coffee shop on the Strip, a place called the Peppermill. We drink bottomless cups of coffee and eat slabs of pie and talk and talk—and sing. J.P. has made the leap from pastor to composer-musician. He’s moved to Orange County and rededicated his life to music. Along with Philly we belt out our favorite songs until the other customers at the Peppermill turn and stare.

J.P. is also a frustrated comedian, a devotee of Jerry Lewis, and he slips in and out of slapstick routines that leave Philly and me weak from laughter. We then try to out-slapstick J.P. We dance around the waitress, crawl along the floor, and eventually the three of us are laughing so hard that we can’t breathe. I laugh more than I’ve laughed since I was a boy, and even though it’s tinged with hysteria, the laughter has healing properties. For a few hours, late at night, laughter makes me feel like the old Andre, whoever that is.

10

NOT FAR FROM MY FATHER’S HOUSE is the sprawling concrete campus of the University of Nevada–Las Vegas, which in 1989 is gaining a reputation for its sports teams. The basketball squad is a powerhouse, with NBA-ready stars, and the football team is vastly improved. The Runnin’ Rebels are known for their speed and superb conditioning. Plus, they’re the Rebels—that’s my kind of mascot. Pat says there might be someone at UNLV who can help me get in shape when he’s not in town.

We drive to the campus one day and make our way to the gym, a new building that I find as daunting as the Sistine Chapel. So many perfect bodies. So many full-grown men. I’m five foot eleven, 148 pounds, and my Nike clothes hang off me. I tell myself this was a mistake.

Apart from feeling woefully undersized, I still feel edgy in a school, any kind of school.

Pat, who am I kidding? I don’t belong here.

We’re here, he says, spitting.

We find the office of the school’s strength coach. I tell Pat to wait, I’ll go in and talk to the guy. I poke my head in the doorway, and there, across the office, in the far corner, behind a desk the size of my Corvette, I see a real-life giant. He looks like the statue of Atlas fronting Rockefeller Center, which I saw during my first U.S. Open, except this Atlas has long black hair and black eyes as large and round as the weights neatly stacked in the gym. He looks as if he’ll flatten the first person who disturbs him.

I jump back through the doorway.

You go, Pat.

He walks in. I hear him say something. I hear a deep baritone rumble in response. It sounds like a truck engine. Then Pat calls to me.

I hold my breath and again go through the doorway.

Hello, I say.

Hello, the giant says.

Um, yeah, well, my name is Andre Agassi. I play tennis, and uhh, I live here in Vegas, and—

I know who you are.

He stands. He’s six feet tall, with a chest at least fifty-six inches around. For a moment I think he might tip the desk over in anger. Instead he comes around from behind and extends his hand. The largest hand I’ve ever seen. A hand that goes with his shoulders, biceps, and legs, also record-setters in my personal experience.

Gil Reyes, he says.

Nice to meet you, Mr. Reyes.

Call me Gil.

OK. Gil. I know you must be very busy. I don’t want to take up your time. I was just wondering—that is, Pat and I were wondering—if we could talk to you about using your facilities now and then. I’m really struggling to improve my conditioning.

Sure, he says. His voice makes me think of the bottom of the ocean and the core of the earth. But it’s also a voice as soft as it is deep.

He shows us around, introduces us to several student-athletes. We talk about tennis, basketball, the differences, the similarities. Then the football team walks in.

Excuse me, Gil says. I need to speak with the fellas. Make yourself at home. Use whatever machines or weights you want to use. But please, be careful. And be discreet.

Technically speaking, you know, it’s against the rules.

Thank you.

Pat and I do a few bench presses, leg lifts, sit-ups, but I’m more interested in watching Gil.

The football players gather before him and gaze up at him with awe. He’s like a Spanish general addressing his conquistadors. He gives them their orders. You—take this bench.

You—grab that machine. You—that squat rack. While he’s speaking, no one looks away. He doesn’t demand their attention, he simply compels it. Lastly, he tells them to gather round, closer, reminds them that hard work is the answer, the only answer. Everyone bring it in.

Hands together. One two three—Rebels!

They break, then fan out and hit the weights. I’m reminded how much better off I’d be on a team.

· · ·

PAT AND I GO BACK to the gym at UNLV every day, and while doing curls and bench presses I can feel Gil keeping tabs on us. I sense that he’s noting my bad form. I sense that the other athletes are noticing too. I feel amateurish, and often want to leave, but Pat always stops me.

After a few weeks, Pat needs to fly back east. Family emergency. I knock at the door to Gil’s office and tell him that Pat is gone, but he left a regimen for me to follow. I hand Gil the piece of paper with Pat’s regimen and ask if he might be willing to help me go through it.

Sure, Gil says. But he sounds put-upon.

With each exercise, Gil arches an eyebrow. He looks over Pat’s regimen, turns the paper in his hands, frowns. I encourage him to tell me what’s on his mind, but he only frowns more deeply.

He asks, What’s the point of this exercise?

I’m not sure.

Tell me again, how long have you been doing this?

Long time.

I beg him to speak his mind.

I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes, he says. I don’t want to speak out of turn. But I can’t lie to you: if somebody can write down your routine on a piece of paper, it isn’t worth the piece of paper it’s written on. You’re asking me to put you through a workout here that leaves no room for where you are, how you’re feeling, what you need to focus on. It doesn’t allow for change.

That makes sense. Could you help me? Maybe give me some tips?

Well, look, what are your goals?

I tell him about my recent loss to Alberto Mancini, from Argentina. He out-physicalled me, pushed me around like an old-time bully at the beach kicking sand in my face. I had the match won, I had my foot on the man’s neck, but I couldn’t finish him off. I was serving for the match, and Mancini broke me, then won the tiebreak, then broke me three times in the fifth set. I had nothing left. I need to get strong so that I never let that happen again. Losing is one thing; being outgunned is another. I can’t bear that feeling anymore.

Gil listens, not moving, not interrupting, soaking it all in.

That fuzzy ball takes some fuzzy bounces, I tell him, and I can’t control it all the time. But one thing I think maybe I can control is my body. At least, I could, maybe, if I had the right information.

Gil fills his fifty-six-inch chest with air and then breathes out slowly. He says, What’s your schedule?

I’ll be gone the next five weeks. Summer hard courts. But when I get back, I’d really consider it an honor if we could work together.

All right, Gil says. We’ll figure something out. Good luck on your road trip. I’ll see you when you get back.

AT THE 1989 U.S. OPEN I play Connors again in the quarters. It’s the first five-set win of my career, after five straight losses. Somehow it only earns me a new wave of criticism: I should have finished Connors off in three. Someone claims to have heard me yelling to Philly in my box: I’m going to take him five sets and give him some pain!

Mike Lupica, a columnist for the New York Daily News, points to my nineteen unforced errors in the third set and says I carried Connors merely to prove that I was tough enough to go the distance. If they’re not trashing me for losing on purpose, they’re ragging me for the way I win.

WHEN I WALK BACK INTO the gym, I see from Gil’s face that he’s been expecting me.

We shake hands. The start of something.

He walks me over to the weight racks and tells me that many of the exercises I’ve been doing are wrong, dead wrong, but the way I’ve been doing them is worse. I’m courting disaster. I’m going to hurt myself.

He gives me a fast primer on the mechanics of the body, the physics and hydraulics and architecture of human anatomy. To know what your body wants, he says, to understand what it needs and what it doesn’t, you need to be part engineer, part mathematician, part artist, part mystic.

I don’t fare well in lectures, but if all lectures were like Gil’s, I’d still be in school. I soak up every fact, every insight, confident that I’ll never forget a single word.

It’s amazing, Gil says, how many fallacies there are about the human body, how little we know about our own bodies. For instance: guys do incline benches for their upper pecs. It’s not an efficient use of time, he says. I haven’t done an incline in thirty years. Is it possible that my chest would be bigger if I did inclines?

No, sir.

The step-ups you’re doing, the exercises where you hold a heavy weight on your back as you walk upstairs? You’re asking for a catastrophic injury. You’re lucky you haven’t already ruined your knee.

How so?

It’s all about angles, Andre. At one angle, you’re engaging your quad. Fine, great. At another angle, you’re engaging your knee, putting loads of pressure on that knee. Engage that knee too many times—it’ll break off the engagement.

The best exercises, he says, exploit gravity. He tells me how to use gravity and resistance to break down a muscle, so it will come back stronger. He shows me how to do a proper, safe bicep curl. He walks me over to a dry-erase board and diagrams my muscles, arms, joints, tendons. He talks about a bow and arrow, shows me the pressure points along a bow as it’s pulled taut, then uses this model to explain my back, why it hurts after matches and workouts.

I tell him about my spine, my spondylolisthesis, the vertebra that’s out of sync. He jots a note, says he’ll look up the condition in the medical books and learn all about it for me.

Bottom line, he says, if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to have a short career. Big-time back problems, knee problems. Plus, keep doing curls the way I saw you doing them, you’re going to have elbow problems.

While spelling it all out, Gil sometimes literally spells it out. He likes to emphasize a point by spelling the key word. He likes to break words down for me, crack them open, reveal the knowledge inside, like the meat inside a nut. Calorie, for instance. He says it comes from the Latin calor, which is a measure of heat. People think calories are bad, Gil says, but calories are just measures of heat, and we need heat. With food, you feed your body’s natural furnace. How can that be bad? It’s when you eat, how much you eat, the choices you make—that’s what makes all the difference.

People think eating is bad, he says, but we need to stoke our internal fire.

Yes, I think. My internal fire needs stoking.

Speaking of heat, Gil mentions casually that he hates the warm weather. He can’t bear it.

He’s unusually sensitive to high temperatures, and his idea of torture is sitting under the direct sun. He turns up the air-conditioning.

I make a note.

I tell him about running with Pat on Rattlesnake Hill, how I feel I’ve hit a plateau. He asks, How much do you run every day?

Five miles.

Why?

I don’t know.

Have you ever run five miles in a match?

No.

How often in a match do you run more than five steps in one direction before stopping?

Not very.

I don’t know anything about tennis, but it seems to me that, by the third step, you’d better be thinking about stopping. Otherwise you’re going to hit the ball and keep running, which means you’ll be out of position for your next shot. The trick is to throttle down, then hit, then slam on the brakes, then hustle back. The way I see it, your sport isn’t about running, it’s about starting and stopping. You need to focus on building the muscles necessary for starting and stopping.

I laugh and tell him that might be the smartest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about tennis.

When it’s time to lock up for the night, I help Gil clean the gym, turn off the lights. We sit in my car and talk. Eventually, he notices that my teeth are chattering.

Doesn’t this fancy car have a heater?

Yes.

Why don’t you turn it on?

Because you said you’re sensitive to heat.

He stammers. He says he can’t believe I remembered. And he can’t bear to think I’ve been suffering all this time. He turns up the car heater full blast. We continue talking, and soon I notice that beads of sweat are forming on Gil’s brow and upper lip. I turn off the heat and roll down the windows. We talk for another half hour, until he notices that I’m starting to turn blue. He turns on the heater full blast. In this way, back and forth, we talk, and demonstrate our respect for each other, until the early hours of the morning.

I tell Gil a little about my story. My father, the dragon, Philly, Perry. I tell him about being banished to the Bollettieri Academy. Then he tells me his story. He talks about growing up outside Las Cruces, New Mexico. His people were farmworkers. Pecans and cotton. Hard work. Wintertime, pick the pecans. Summertime, cotton. Then they moved to East LA., and Gil grew up fast on the hard streets.

It was war, he says. I got shot. Still have the bullet hole in my leg. Also, I didn’t speak English, only Spanish, so I’d sit in school, self-conscious, not talking. I learned English by reading Jim Murray in the Los Angeles Times and listening to Vin Scully calling Dodger games on the radio. I had a little transistor. KABC, every night. Vin Scully was my English teacher.

After mastering English, Gil decided to master the body God gave him.

He says, Only the strong survive, right? Well, we couldn’t afford weights in our neighborhood, so we made our own. Guys who’d been in the joint showed us how. For instance, we filled coffee cans with cement, stuck them on the ends of a pole, and that’s how we made a bench press. We used milk crates for the actual bench.

He tells me about getting his black belt in karate. He tells me about some of his twenty-two professional fights, including one in which he got his jaw shattered. But I wasn’t knocked out, he says proudly.

When it’s time to say goodnight, because the sky is growing lighter, I reluctantly shake Gil’s hand and tell him I’ll be back tomorrow.

I know, he says.

I WORK WITH GIL throughout the fall of 1989. The gains are big, and our bond is strong.

Eighteen years older than I, Gil can tell that he’s a father figure. On some level I also sense that I’m the son he never had. (He has three children, all daughters.) It’s one of the few things that go unspoken between us. Everything else gets hashed out, spelled out.

Gil and his wife, Gaye, have a lovely tradition. Thursday nights, everyone in the family can order whatever they want for dinner and Gaye will cook it. One daughter wants hot dogs?

Fine. Another wants chocolate chip pancakes? No problem. I make a habit of stopping by Gil’s house on Thursdays, eating off everyone’s plates. Before long I’m eating at Gil’s every other night. When it’s late, when I don’t feel like driving home, I crash on his floor.

Gil has another tradition. No matter how uncomfortable a person looks, if they’re asleep, they can’t be all that uncomfortable, you should leave them be. So he never wakes me. He just throws a light afghan over me and lets me sleep until morning.

Listen, Gil says one day, we love having you here, you know that. But I have to ask.

Good-looking kid, wealthy kid, kid who can be lots of places—and yet you come to my house for Thursday-night hot dogs. You sleep curled on my floor.

I like sleeping on floors. My back feels better.

I’m not talking about the floor. I mean, here. Are you sure you want to be—here? You must have better places to be.

Can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be, Gil.

He gives me a hug. I thought I knew what a hug was, but you’ve really never been hugged until you’ve been hugged by a man with a fifty-six-inch chest.

On Christmas Eve, 1989, Gil asks if I’d like to come over to the house, celebrate the holiday with his family.

Thought you’d never ask.

While Gaye bakes cookies, while their daughters are upstairs sleeping, Gil and I sit on the living-room floor putting together toys and train sets from Santa. I tell Gil that I don’t know when I’ve felt so peaceful.

You wouldn’t be happier at a party? With friends?

I’m right where I want to be.

I stop putting together the toy in my hand and fix Gil with a look. I tell him my life has never for one day belonged to me. My life has always belonged to someone else. First, my father.

Then Nick. And always, always, tennis. Even my body wasn’t my own until I met Gil, who is doing the one thing fathers are supposed to do. Making me stronger.

So being here, Gil, with you and your family, I feel for the first time in my life that I’m where I belong.

Enough said. I’ll never ask again. Merry Christmas, son.

11

IF I MUST PLAY TENNIS, the loneliest sport, then I’m sure as hell going to surround myself with as many people as I can off the court. And each person will have his specific role.

Perry will help with my disordered thoughts. J.P. will help with my troubled soul. Nick will help with the basics of my game. Philly will help with details, arrangements, and always have my back.

Sportswriters rip me about my entourage. They say I travel with all these people because it feeds my ego. They say I need this many people around me because I can’t be alone.

They’re half right. I don’t like to be alone. But these people around me aren’t an entourage, they’re a team. I need them for company, for counsel, and for a kind of rolling education.

They’re my crew, but also my gurus, my blue-ribbon panel. I study them and steal from them.

I take an expression from Perry, a story from J.P., an attitude or gesture from Nick. I learn about myself, create myself, through imitation. How else could I do it? I spent my childhood in an isolation chamber, my teen years in a torture chamber.

In fact, rather than make my team smaller, I want to grow it. I want to add Gil, formally. I want to hire him, full-time, to help me with my strength and conditioning. I phone Perry at Georgetown and tell him my problem.

What problem? he says. You want to work with Gil? So hire Gil.

But I’ve got Pat. The Spitting Chilean. I can’t just fire the guy. I can’t fire anyone. And even if I could, how do I then ask Gil to leave a high-profile, high-paying job with UNLV—to work exclusively for me? Who the fuck am I?

Perry tells me to have Nick reassign Pat to work with the other tennis players Nick coaches. Then, he says, sit down with Gil and put it to him. Let him decide.

In January 1990 I ask Gil if he would do me the great honor of working with me, traveling with me, training me.

Leave my job here at UNLV?

Yes.

But I don’t know anything about tennis.

Don’t worry, I don’t either.

He laughs.

Gil, I think I can accomplish a lot. I think I can do—things. But after our short time together, I’m reasonably certain that I can only do them with your help.

He doesn’t need a hard sell. Yes, he says. I would like to work with you.

He doesn’t ask how much I’ll pay him. He doesn’t mention the word money. He says we’re two kindred spirits, embarking on a great adventure. He says he’s known it almost from the day we met. He says I have a destiny. He says I’m like Lancelot.

Who’s that?

Sir Lancelot. You know, King Arthur. Knights of the Round Table. Lancelot was Arthur’s greatest knight.

Did he kill dragons?

Every knight kills dragons.

There is only one obstacle in our path. Gil doesn’t have a gym at his house. He’ll need to convert his garage into a full-scale gym—which will take lots of time, because he wants to build the weight machines himself.

Build them?

I want to weld the metal, make the ropes and pulleys, with my own hands. I don’t want to leave anything to chance. I won’t have you injured. Not on my watch.

I think of my father, building his ball machines and blowers, and wonder if this is the one and only thing he and Gil have in common.

Until Gil’s gym is complete, we continue to work out at UNLV. He keeps his job, works with the Rebels basketball team through a brilliant season, culminating in a blowout win over Duke for the national title. When his duties are done, when his home gym is almost done, Gil says he’s ready.

Andre, now, are you ready? One last time, are you sure you want to do this?

Gil, I am more sure about this than I’ve ever been about anything I’ve ever done.

Me too.

He says he’s going to drive to the college this morning and turn in his keys.

Hours later, as he walks outside the college, there I am, waiting. He laughs when he sees me, and we go for cheeseburgers, to celebrate new beginnings.

SOMETIMES A WORKOUT WITH GIL is actually a conversation. We don’t touch a single weight. We sit on the free benches and free-associate. There are many ways, Gil says, of getting strong, and sometimes talking is the best way. When he’s not teaching me about my body, I’m teaching him about tennis, the life on tour. I tell him how the game is organized, the circuit of minor tournaments and the four majors, or Grand Slams, that all players use as yardsticks. I tell him about the tennis calendar, how we start the year on the other side of the world, at the Australian Open, and then just chase the sun. Next comes clay season, in Europe, which culminates in Paris with the French Open. Then comes June, grass season, and Wimbledon. I stick out my tongue and make a face. Then come the dog days, the hard-court season, which concludes with the U.S. Open. Then the indoor season—Stuttgart, Paris, the World Championships. It’s all very Groundhog Day. Same venues, same opponents, only the years and scores are different, and over time the scores all run together like phone numbers.

I try to tell Gil about my psyche. I start at the beginning, the central truth.

He laughs. You don’t actually hate tennis, he says.

I do, Gil, I really do.

He gets a look on his face, and I wonder if he’s thinking he might have quit his job at UN-LV too soon.

If that’s true, he says, why play?

I’m not suited for anything else. I don’t know how to do anything else. Tennis is the only thing I’m qualified for. Also, my father would have a fit if I did anything different.

Gil scratches his ear. This is a new one on him. He’s known hundreds of athletes, but he’s never known one who hated athletics. He doesn’t know what to say. I reassure him that there’s nothing to be said. I don’t understand it myself. I can only tell him how it is.

I also tell Gil about the Image Is Everything debacle. I feel, somehow, that he needs to know, so he’ll understand what he’s got himself into. The whole thing still makes me angry, but now the anger has seeped down deep. Hard to talk about, hard to reach. It feels like a spoonful of acid in the pit of my stomach. Hearing about it, Gil feels angry too, but he has less trouble accessing his anger. He wants to act on it, right now. He wants to punch out an advertising exec or two. He says: Some slap-dick on Madison Avenue puts together a silly ad campaign, and gets you to say a line into a camera, and it means something about you?

Millions of people think so. And say so. And write so.

They took advantage of you, he says. Plain and simple. Not your fault. You didn’t know what you were saying, you didn’t know how it would be taken and twisted and misinterpreted.

Our talks carry beyond the weight room. We go out for dinner. We go out for breakfast.

We’re on the phone six times a day. I call Gil late one night and we talk for hours. As the conversation winds down he says, Do you want to come over tomorrow and get in a workout?

I’d love to, but I’m in Tokyo.

We’ve been talking for three hours and you’re in Tokyo? I thought you were across town. I feel guilty, man. I’ve been keeping you all this—.

He stops himself. He says, You know what? I don’t feel guilty. Nah. I feel honored. You needed to talk to me, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in Tokyo or Timbuktu. I get it. All right, man, I get it.

From the start, Gil keeps a careful record of my workouts. He buys a brown ledger and marks down every rep, every set, every exercise—every day. He records my weight, my diet, my pulse, my travel. In the margins he draws diagrams and even pictures. He says he wants to chart my progress, compile a database he can refer to in the coming years. He’s making a study of me, so he can rebuild me from the ground up. He’s like Michelangelo appraising a block of marble, but he’s not put off by my flaws. He’s like da Vinci getting it all down in his notebooks. I see in Gil’s notebooks, in the care he takes with them, in the way he never skips a day, that I inspire him, and this inspires me.

It goes without saying that Gil will travel with me to many tournaments. He needs to watch my conditioning in matches, monitor my food, make sure I’m always hydrated. (But not just hydrated. Gil has a special concoction of water, carbs, salt, and electrolytes that I need to drink the night before every match.) His training doesn’t end on the road. If anything, it becomes more important on the road.

Our first trip together, we agree, will be February 1990, to Scottsdale. I tell Gil we’ll need to be there a couple of nights before the tournament starts, for the hit-and-giggle.

Hit-and-what?

It’s an exhibition with some celebrities to raise money for charity, to make corporate sponsors feel good, to entertain the fans.

Sounds fun.

What’s more, I tell him, we’re going to drive over in my new Corvette. I can’t wait to show him how fast it goes.

But when I pull up to Gil’s house I realize that I might not have thought this all the way through. The car is very small, and Gil is very big. The car is so small that it makes Gil look twice as big. He contorts himself to fit into the passenger side, and even then he needs to tilt sideways, and even then his head touches the roof. The Corvette looks as if, at any moment, it might burst apart.

Seeing Gil squished and uncomfortable, I’m motivated to go very fast. Of course I don’t need extra motivation in the Corvette. The car is supersonic. We crank the music and fly out of Vegas, across Hoover Dam, down toward the craggy Joshua tree forests of northwest Arizona. We decide to stop for lunch outside Kingman. The prospect of food, combined with the speed of the Corvette, and the loud music, and the presence of Gil, makes me mash the gas.

We hit Mach 1. I see Gil make a face and twirl a finger. I look in the rearview mirror—a highway patrol car inches from my back fender.

The patrolman quickly gives me a speeding ticket.

Not my first, I tell Gil, who shakes his head.

In Kingman we stop at Carl’s Jr. and eat an enormous lunch. We both love to eat, and we both have a secret weakness for fast food, so we fall off the nutrition wagon, ordering French fries, then ordering seconds, refilling our sodas. When I squeeze Gil back into the Corvette I realize we’re well behind schedule. We need to make up time. I floor it and zoom back onto U.S. 95. Two hundred miles to Scottsdale. Two hours of driving.

Twenty minutes later, Gil makes the same twirling gesture.

A different patrolman this time. He takes my license and registration and asks, Have you received a speeding ticket recently?

I look at Gil. He frowns.

Well, if you consider an hour ago recent, then yes, Officer, I have.

Wait right here.

He walks back to his car. One minute later, he returns.

The judge wants you back in Kingman.

Kingman? What?

Come with me, sir.

Come with—what about the car?

Your friend can drive it.

But, but, can’t I just follow you?

Sir, you are going to listen to everything I say and do everything I say and that’s why you’re not going back to Kingman in handcuffs. You will sit in the back of my car and your friend will follow us. Now. Step out.

I’m in the back of a police car, Gil following in a Corvette that fits him like a whalebone cor-set. We’re in the middle of nowhere and I’m hearing the crazy-ass plinking banjos from Deliverance. It takes forty-five minutes to reach Kingman Municipal Court. I follow the patrolman in-to a side door and find myself before the small, elderly judge, who wears a cowboy hat and a belt buckle the size of a pie tin.

The banjos are getting louder.

I look around for a certificate on the wall, something to prove that this is in fact a courthouse and he’s a real judge. All I see are heads of dead animals.

The judge begins by rattling off a series of random questions.

You’re playing in Scottsdale?

Yes, sir.

You’ve played that tournament before?

Uh—yes, sir.

What kind of draw do you have?

Pardon?

Who do you play in the first round?

The judge, it turns out, is a tennis fan. Also, he’s followed my career closely. He thinks I should’ve beaten Courier at the French Open. He has a slew of opinions about Connors, Lendl, Chang, the state of the game, the scarcity of great American players. After sharing his opinions with me, liberally, for twenty-five minutes, he asks, Would you mind signing something for my kids?

No problem, sir. Your honor.

I sign everything he puts before me, then await sentencing.

All right, the judge says. I sentence you to go give ’em hell down in Scottsdale.

Sorry? I don’t under—. I mean, your honor, I drove back here, thirty-some miles, sure I was going to be sent to jail, or at least fined.

No! No, no, no, I just wanted to meet you. But you’d better have your friend out there drive you to Scottsdale, because one more ticket today and I will have to keep you in Kingman until the cows come home.

I walk out of the courthouse but sprint to the Corvette, where Gil is waiting. I tell him the judge is a tennis buff who wanted to meet me. Gil thinks I’m lying. I beg him to please just drive us away from this courthouse. He pulls away—slowly. Under normal circumstances, Gil is a cautious driver. But so unnerved is he by our run-in with Arizona law enforcement that he keeps the car in sixth gear and goes fifty-four miles per hour all the way to Scottsdale.

Naturally I’m late to the hit-and-giggle. As we roll into the parking lot of the stadium, I pull on my tennis gear. We stop at the security hut and tell the guard I’m expected, I’m one of the players. He doesn’t believe me. I show him my driver’s license, which I feel fortunate to still have in my possession. He waves our car through.

Gil says, Don’t worry about the car, I’ll take care of it. Just go.

I grab my tennis bag and sprint through the parking lot. Gil tells me later that when I entered the arena, he heard the applause. The windows of the Corvette were rolled up, but he still heard the crowd. In that moment he had a sense of what I’d been trying to tell him. After the command performance for the Old West judge, after hearing the stadium greet my arrival with a frenzied roar, he understood. He confesses that until this trip, he didn’t realize the life was so—insane. He really didn’t know what he was signing on for. I tell him that makes two of us.

WE HAVE A WONDERFUL TIME in Scottsdale. We learn about each other, fast, the way you learn about people on the road. During one midday match I halt play and wait for a tournament official to hurry an umbrella over to where Gil is sitting. He’s in direct sunlight, perspir-ing fiercely. When the official hands Gil the umbrella, Gil looks confused. Then he looks down, sees me waving, understands. He flashes a fifty-six-inch smile, and we both laugh.

We go to dinner one night at the Village Inn. It’s late, we’re eating a combo platter of dinner and breakfast. Four guys burst into the restaurant and sit one booth away. They talk and laugh about my hair, my clothes.

Probably gay, one says.

Definitely homo, says his buddy.

Gil clears his throat, wipes his mouth with a paper napkin, tells me to enjoy the rest of my meal. He’s done.

Aren’t you going to eat, Gilly?

No, man. Last thing I want during a fight is a full stomach.

When I’m finished, Gil says he has some business to take care of at the next table. If anything happens, he says, I shouldn’t worry—he knows the way home. He stands very slowly.

He sidles over to the four guys. He leans on their table. The table groans. He fans his chest in their faces and says, You enjoy ruining people’s meals? That’s how you like to spend your time, huh? Gee, I’m going to have to try that myself. What are you having there? Hamburger?

He picks up the man’s burger and eats half in one bite.

Needs ketchup, Gil says, his mouth full. You know what? Now I’m thirsty. I think I’ll take a sip of your soda. Yeah. And then I think I’ll spill it all over the table as I set it down. I want—I want—one of you to try to stop me.

Gil takes a long sip, then slowly, almost as slowly as he drives, pours the rest of the soda over the table.

Not one of the four guys moves.

Gil sets down the empty glass and looks at me. Andre, are you ready to go?

I DON’T WIN THE TOURNAMENT, but it doesn’t matter. I’m content, happy as we start back on the road to Vegas. Before leaving town we stop for a bite at Joe’s Main Event. We talk about all that’s happened in the last seventy-two hours, and we agree that this trip feels like the start of a bigger trip. In his da Vinci notebook Gil draws a picture of me in handcuffs.

Outside, we stand in the parking lot and look at the stars. I feel such overwhelming love, and gratitude, for Gil. I thank him for all he’s done, and he tells me I never need to thank him again.

Then he gives a speech. Gil, who learned English from newspapers and baseball games, delivers a flowing, lilting, poetic monologue, right outside Joe’s, and one of the great regrets of my life is that I don’t have a tape recorder with me. Still, I remember it nearly word for word.

Andre, I won’t ever try to change you, because I’ve never tried to change anybody. If I could change somebody, I’d change myself. But I know I can give you structure and a blueprint to achieve what you want. There’s a difference between a plow horse and a racehorse.

You don’t treat them the same. You hear all this talk about treating people equally, and I’m not sure equal means the same. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a racehorse, and I’ll always treat you accordingly. I’ll be firm, but fair. I’ll lead, never push. I’m not one of those people who expresses or articulates feelings very well, but from now on, just know this: It’s on, man.

It is on. You know what I’m saying? We’re in a fight, and you can count on me until the last man is standing. Somewhere up there is a star with your name on it. I might not be able to help you find it, but I’ve got pretty strong shoulders, and you can stand on my shoulders while you’re looking for that star. You hear? For as long as you want. Stand on my shoulders and reach, man. Reach.

12

AT THE 1990 FRENCH OPEN I make headlines by wearing pink. It’s on the front page of the sports pages, and in some cases the news pages. Agassi in the Pink. Specifically, pink compression pants under acid-washed shorts. I tell reporters: It’s not pink, it’s technically Hot Lava. I’m astonished by how much they care. I’m astonished by how much I care that they get it right. But my feeling is, let them write about the color of my shorts rather than the flaws in my character.

Gil and Philly and I don’t want to deal with the press, the crowds, Paris. We don’t enjoy feeling alien, getting lost, having people stare at us because we speak English. So we lock ourselves in my hotel room, turn up the air-conditioning and send out for McDonald’s and Burger King.

Nick, however, gets a nasty case of cabin fever. He wants to go out, see the sights. Guys, he says, we’re in Paris! Eiffel Tower? The frickin’ Louvre?

Been there, done that, Philly says.

I don’t want to go near the Louvre. And I don’t have to. I can close my eyes and see the scary painting of the man hanging from the cliff while his father clutches at his neck and his other loved ones hang from his limbs.

I tell Nick, I don’t want to see anything or anyone. I just want to win this fucking thing and go home.

I MARCH THROUGH THE EARLY ROUNDS, playing well, and then run into Courier again. He wins the first set in a tiebreak but falters and gives me the second. I take the third and then, in the fourth, he curls up and dies, 6–0. His face turns red. His face turns Hot Lava.

I want to tell him: I hope that was enough cardio for you. But I don’t. Maybe I’m maturing.

Without question I’m getting stronger.

Next up is Chang. The defending champ. I play with a chip on my shoulder, because I still can’t believe he’s won a slam before me. I envy his work ethic, admire his court discipline—but I just don’t like the guy. He continues to say without compunction that Christ is on his side of the court, a blend of egotism and religion that chafes me. I beat him in four.

In the semis I play Jonas Svensson. He has a massive serve that kicks like a mule, and he’s never afraid to come to the net. He plays better on fast surfaces, however, so I feel good about catching him on the clay. Since he has a big, looping forehand, I decide early that I’m going to bum-rush his backhand. Again and again I go to that vulnerable backhand, seizing a quick lead, 5–1. Svensson doesn’t recover. Set, Agassi. In the second set I grab a 4–0 lead.

He breaks back to 3–4. That’s as close as I let him get. To his credit, he finds a ray of confidence and wins the third set. Normally I’d be rattled. But this year I look to my box and see Gil.

I replay his parking lot speech, and win the fourth set, 6–3.

I’m in the final—at last. My first final at a slam. I’m facing Gómez, from Ecuador, whom I just beat weeks ago. He’s thirty, on the verge of retiring—in fact, I thought he was retired. At last, the newspapers say, Agassi is going to realize his potential.

THEN, CATASTROPHE STRIKES. The night before the final, I’m taking a shower and I feel the hairpiece Philly bought me suddenly disintegrate in my hands. I must have used the wrong kind of conditioner. The weave is coming undone—the damned thing is falling apart.

In a state of abject panic I summon Philly to my hotel room.

Fucking disaster, I tell him. My hairpiece—look!

He examines it.

We’ll let it dry, then clip it in place, he says.

With what?

Bobby pins.

He runs all over Paris looking for bobby pins. He can’t find any. He phones me and says, What the hell kind of city is this? No bobby pins?

In the hotel lobby he bumps into Chris Evert and asks her for bobby pins. She doesn’t have any. She asks why he needs them. He doesn’t answer. At last he finds a friend of our sister Rita, who has a bag full of bobby pins. He helps me reconfigure the hairpiece and set it in place, and keeps it there with no fewer than twenty bobby pins.

Will it hold? I ask.

Yeah, yeah. Just don’t move around a lot.

We both laugh darkly.

Of course I could play without my hairpiece. But after months and months of derision, criticism, mockery, I’m too self-conscious. Image Is Everything? What would they say if they knew I’ve been wearing a hairpiece all this time? Win or lose, they wouldn’t talk about my game. They would talk only about my hair. Instead of a few kids at the Bollettieri Academy laughing at me, or twelve thousand Germans at Davis Cup, the whole world would be laughing. I can close my eyes and almost hear it. And I know I can’t take it.

WARMING UP BEFORE THE MATCH, I pray. Not for a win, but for my hairpiece to stay on. Under normal circumstances, playing in my first final of a slam, I’d be tense. But my tenu-ous hairpiece has me catatonic. Whether or not it’s slipping, I imagine that it’s slipping. With every lunge, every leap, I picture it landing on the clay, like a hawk my father shot from the sky. I can hear a gasp going up from the crowd. I can picture millions of people suddenly leaning closer to their TVs, turning to each other and in dozens of languages and dialects saying some version of: Did Andre Agassi’s hair just fall off?

My game plan for Gómez reflects my jangled nerves, my timidity. Knowing he doesn’t have young legs, knowing he’ll fold in a fifth set, I plan to stretch out the match, orchestrate long rallies, grind him down. As the match begins, however, it’s clear that Gómez also knows his age, and thus he’s trying to speed everything up. He’s playing quick, risky tennis. He wins the first set in a hurry. He loses the second set, but also in a hurry. Now I know that the longest we’ll be out here is three hours, rather than four, which means conditioning won’t play a role. This is now a shot-making match, the kind Gómez can win. With two sets completed, and not much time off the clock, I’m facing a guy who’s going to be fresh throughout, even if we go five.

Of course my game plan was fatally flawed from the start. Pathetic, really. It couldn’t work, no matter how long the match, because you can’t win the final of a slam by playing not to lose, or waiting for your opponent to lose. My attempt to orchestrate long rallies merely em-boldens Gómez. He’s a veteran who knows this might be his last shot at a slam. The only way to beat him is to take away his belief and his desire, by being aggressive. When he sees me playing conservative, orchestrating instead of dominating, it gives him heart.

He wins the third set. As the fourth set begins I realize I’ve made yet another miscalcula-tion. Most players, when they tire late in a match, lose some zip on their serve. They have trouble getting up high on tired legs. But Gómez has a slingshot serve. He never gets up high on his legs. He leans into the ball. When he tires, therefore, he leans that much more, and his natural slingshot action becomes more pronounced. I’ve been waiting for his serve to weaken, and instead it’s getting sharper.

Upon winning the match, Gómez is exceedingly gracious and charming. He weeps. He waves to the cameras. He knows he’ll be a national hero in his native Ecuador. I wonder what it’s like in Ecuador. Maybe I’ll move there. Maybe that’s the only place I’ll be able to hide from the shame I feel at this moment. I sit in the locker room, head bowed, imagining what the hundreds of columnists and headline writers will say, not to mention my peers. I can hear them now. Image Is Everything, Agassi Is Nothing. Mr. Hot Lava Is a Hot Mess.

Philly walks in. I see in his eyes that he doesn’t just sympathize—he lives it. This was his defeat too. He aches. Then he says the right thing, striking the right tone, and I know I’ll always love him for it.

Let’s get the fuck outta this town.

GIL PUSHES THE BIG TROLLEY with our bags through Charles de Gaulle Airport. I’m walking a step ahead. I stop to look at the Arrivals and Departures. Gil keeps going. The trol-ley has a sharp metal edge, and it pushes into my soft, exposed Achilles—I’m wearing loafers with no socks. A jet of my blood spurts onto the glassy floor. Then another. The Achilles is gushing. Gil hurries to get a bandage out of his bag, but I tell him to relax, take his time. It’s good, I say. It’s fitting. There should be a pint of my blood from my Achilles’ heel on the floor before we leave Paris.

I SKIP WIMBLEDON AGAIN, train hard with Gil all summer. His home garage is finished, filled with a dozen handmade machines and many other unique touches. In the window he’s mounted a massive air-conditioner. On the floor he’s nailed a spongy Astroturf. And in the corner he’s put an old pool table. We shoot nine-ball between reps and sets. Many nights we’re in the gym until four in the morning, Gil searching for new ways to build up my mind, my confidence, along with my body. He’s shaken by the French Open, as am I. One morning, before the sun comes up, he passes along some words his mother always tells him.

Qué lindo es soñar despierto, he says. How lovely it is to dream while you are awake.

Dream while you’re awake, Andre. Anybody can dream while they’re asleep, but you need to dream all the time, and say your dreams out loud, and believe in them.

In other words, when in the final of a slam, I must dream. I must play to win.

I thank him. I give him a gift. It’s a necklace with a gold pyramid, and inside the pyramid are three hoops. It represents the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I designed it, had a jeweler in Florida make it for me, and I have an earring that matches.

He puts it around his neck, and I can tell it will be a cold day in hell before he takes it off.

With Gil in the desert outside Las Vegas, not long after we started working together full-time in 1990

Gil likes to yell at me when I’m working out, but it’s nothing like my father’s yelling. Gil yells love. If I’m trying to set a new personal best, if I’m preparing to lift more than I’ve ever lifted, he stands in the background and yells, Come on, Andre! Let’s go! Big Thunder! His yelling makes my heart club against my ribs. Then, for an added dash of inspiration, he’ll sometimes tell me to step aside, and he’ll lift his personal best—550 pounds. It’s an awesome sight to see a man put that much iron above his chest, and it always makes me think that anything is possible. How beautiful to dream. But dreams, I tell Gil, in one of our quiet moments, are so damned tiring.

He laughs.

I can’t promise you that you won’t be tired, he says. But please know this. There’s a lot of good waiting for you on the other side of tired. Get yourself tired, Andre. That’s where you’re going to know yourself. On the other side of tired.

Under Gil’s care and close supervision I pack on ten pounds of muscle by August 1990.

We go to New York for the U.S. Open and I feel lean and rangy and dangerous. I take out Andrei Cherkasov, from the Soviet Union, in an easy three-setter. I punch and scratch my way to the semis, beat Becker in four furious sets, and still have plenty of rocket fuel in my tank. Gil and I drive back to the hotel and watch the other men’s semi to see who I’ll get tomorrow.

McEnroe or Sampras.

It doesn’t seem possible, but the kid I thought I’d never see again has reconstituted his game. And he’s giving McEnroe the fight of his life. Then I realize he’s not giving McEnroe a fight—McEnroe is giving him a fight, and losing. My opponent tomorrow, incredibly, will be Pete.

The camera moves close on Pete’s face, and I see that he has nothing left. Also, the commentators say his heavily taped feet are covered with blisters. Gil makes me drink Gil Water until I’m ready to throw up, and then I go to bed with a smile, thinking about all the fun I’m going to have, running Pete’s ass off. I’ll have him sprinting from side to side, left to right, from San Francisco to Bradenton, until those blisters bleed. I think of my father’s old maxim: Put a blister on his brain. Calm, fit, cocksure, I sleep like a pile of Gil’s dumbbells.

In the morning I feel ready to play a ten-setter. I have no hairpiece issues—because I’m not wearing my hairpiece. I’m using a new, low-maintenance camouflaging system that involves a thicker headband and brightly colored highlights. There’s simply no way I can lose to Pete, that hapless kid I watched with sympathy last year, that poor klutz who couldn’t keep the ball in the court.

Then a different Pete shows up. A Pete who doesn’t ever miss. We’re playing long points, demanding points, and he’s flawless. He’s reaching everything, hitting everything, bounding back and forth like a gazelle. He’s serving bombs, flying to the net, bringing his game right to me. He’s laying wood to my serve. I’m helpless. I’m angry. I’m telling myself: This is not happening.

Yes, this is happening.

No, this cannot be happening.

Then, instead of thinking how I can win, I begin to think of how I can avoid losing. It’s the same mistake I made against Gómez, with the same result. When it’s all over I tell reporters that Pete gave me a good old-fashioned New York street mugging. An imperfect metaphor.

Yes, I was robbed. Yes, something that belonged to me was taken away. But I can’t fill out a police report, and there is no hope of justice, and everyone will blame the victim.

HOURS LATER MY EYES FLY OPEN. I’m in bed at the hotel. It was all a dream. For a splendid half second I believe that I must have fallen asleep on that breezy hill while Philly and Nick were laughing about Pete’s ruined game. I dreamed that Pete, of all people, was beating me in the final of a slam.

But no. It’s real. It happened. I watch the room slowly grow lighter, and my mind and spirit grow palpably darker.

13

EVER SINCE WENDI CAME to watch me film the Image Is Everything commercial, she and I have been a couple. She travels with me, takes care of me. We’re a perfect match, because we grew up together, and we figure we can keep growing up together. We come from the same place, want the same things. We love each other madly, though we agree that ours should be an open relationship—her word. She says we’re too young to make a commitment, too confused. She doesn’t know who she is. She grew up Mormon, then decided she didn’t believe the tenets of that religion. She went to college, then discovered that it was the completely wrong college for her. Until she knows who she is, she says, she can’t give herself to me completely.

In 1991 we’re in Atlanta with Gil, celebrating my twenty-first birthday. We’re in a bar, a seedy old place in Buckhead, with cigarette-scorched pool tables and plastic beer mugs. The three of us are laughing, drinking, and even Gil, who never touches the stuff, is letting himself get tipsy. To record this night for posterity, Wendi has brought her camcorder. She hands it to me and tells me to film her shooting baskets at one of those tented arcade games. She’s going to school me, she says. I film her shooting for three seconds and then let the camera pan slowly down her body.

Andre, she says, please get the camera off my ass.

In comes a mob of loudmouths. Roughly my age, they look like a local football or rugby team. They make several rude remarks about me, then focus their attention on Wendi.

They’re drunk, crude, trying to embarrass me in front of her. I think of Nastase, doing the same thing fourteen years ago.

The rugby team slaps a stack of quarters on the edge of our pool table. One of them says, We got next. They walk off, smirking.

Gil puts down his plastic mug, picks up the quarters, and walks slowly to a vending machine. He buys a bag of peanuts and comes back to the table. Slowly he works his way through the peanuts, never taking his eyes off the rugby players, until they wisely decide to try another bar.

Wendi giggles and suggests that, in addition to his many functions and duties, Gil should be my bodyguard.

He already is, I tell her. And yet that word doesn’t cut it. That word isn’t adequate to what he is. Gil guards my body, my head, my game, my heart, my girlfriend. He’s the one immov-able object in my life. He’s my life guard.

I particularly enjoy when people—reporters, fans, kooks—ask Gil if he’s my bodyguard. A smile always plays across his lips as he says, Touch him and find out.

AT THE 1991 FRENCH OPEN I batter my way through six rounds and reach the final. My third slam final. I’m facing Courier, and I’m favored. Everyone says I’ll beat him. I say I’ll beat him. I need to beat him. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to make three slam finals in a row and not win.

The good news is, I know how to beat Courier. I beat him just last year at this same tournament. The bad news is, it’s personal, which makes me tight. We began in the same place, in the same barracks at the Bollettieri Academy, our bunk beds a few feet apart. I was so much better than Courier, so much more favored by Nick, that losing to him in the final of a slam will feel like the hare losing to the tortoise. Bad enough that Chang has won a slam before me. And Pete. But Courier too? I can’t let that happen.

I come out playing to win. I’ve learned from my mistakes at the last two slams. I cruise through the first set, winning 6–3, and in the second set, leading 3–1, I have break point. If I win this point I’ll have a choke hold on the set and match. Suddenly the rain starts to fall. Fans cover themselves and run for shelter. Courier and I retreat to the locker room, where we both pace like caged lions. Nick comes in and I look to him for advice, encouragement, but he says nothing. Nothing. I’ve known for some time that I continue with Nick out of habit and loyalty, and not for any real coaching. Still, in this moment, it’s not coaching I need but a show of humanity, which is one of the duties of any coach. I need some recognition of the adrenaline-charged moment in which I find myself. Is that too much to ask?

After the rain delay, Courier stations himself farther behind the baseline, hoping to take some of the steam off my shots. He’s had time to rest, and reflect, and recharge, and he storms back to keep me from breaking, then wins the second set. Now I’m angry. Furious. I win the third set, 6–2. I establish in Courier’s mind, and in my own, that the second set was a fluke. Up two sets to one, I can feel the finish line pulling me. My first slam. Six little games away.

As the fourth set opens, I lose twelve of the first thirteen points. Am I unraveling or is Courier playing better? I don’t know. I’ll never know. But I do know that this feeling is familiar.

Hauntingly familiar. This sense of inevitability. This weightlessness as momentum slips away.

Courier wins the set, 6–1.

In the fifth set, tied 4–4, he breaks me. Now, all at once, I just want to lose.

I can’t explain it any other way. In the fourth set I lost the will, but now I’ve lost the desire.

As certain as I felt about victory at the start of this match, that’s how certain I am now of defeat. And I want it. I long for it. I say under my breath: Let it be fast. Since losing is death, I’d rather it be fast than slow.

I no longer hear the crowd. I no longer hear my own thoughts, only a white noise between my ears. I can’t hear or feel anything except my desire to lose. I drop the tenth and decisive game of the fifth set, and congratulate Courier. Friends tell me it’s the most desolate look they’ve ever seen on my face.

Afterward, I don’t scold myself. I coolly explain it to myself this way: You don’t have what it takes to get over the line. You just quit on yourself—you need to quit this game.

THE LOSS LEAVES A SCAR. Wendi says she can almost see it, a mark as if I’ve been struck by lightning. That’s about all she says on the long flight back to Vegas.

As we walk through the front door of my parents’ house, my father meets us in the foyer.

He starts right in on me. Why didn’t you make adjustments after the rain delay? Why didn’t you hit to his backhand? I don’t answer. I don’t move. I’ve been expecting his tirade for the last twenty-four hours and I’m already numb to it. But Wendi isn’t. She does something no one’s ever done, something I always hoped my mother would do. She throws herself between us. She says, Can we just not talk about tennis for two hours? Two hours—no tennis?

My father stops, gapes. I fear that he’ll slap her. But then he wheels and storms up the hall to his bedroom.

I gaze at Wendi. I’ve never loved her more.

· · ·

I DON’T TOUCH MY RACKETS. I don’t open my tennis bag. I don’t train with Gil. I lie around watching horror movies with Wendi. Only horror movies can distract me, because they capture something of the feeling in that fifth set against Courier.

Nick nags me to play Wimbledon. I laugh in his tanned face.

Back on the horse, he says. It’s the only way, my boy.

Fuck that horse.

Come on, Wendi says. Honestly, how much worse can it get?

Too depressed to argue, I let Nick and Wendi push me onto a plane to London. We rent a beautiful two-story house, hidden from the main road, close to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. It has a charming garden in the back, with pink roses and every variety of songbird, a little haven where I can sit and nearly forget why I’m in England. Wendi makes the house feel like home. She fills it with candles, groceries—and her perfume. She fixes delicious meals at night, and in the morning she packs box lunches for me to bring to the practice courts.

The tournament is delayed five days by rain. On the fifth day, though the house is cozy, we’re going stir crazy. I want to get out on the court. I want to get rid of the bad taste in my mouth from the French Open, or else lose and go home. Finally the rain lets up. I play Grant Connell, a serve-and-volleyer who’s made his living off fast surfaces. It’s an awkward first-round opponent for my first grass match in years. He’s expected to trounce me. Somehow I eke out a five-set win.

I reach the quarters, where I play David Wheaton. I’m up two sets to one, up two breaks in the fourth set, and all of a sudden I pull something in my hip flexor, the muscle that bends the joint. Hobbled, it’s all I can do to finish the match. Wheaton wins easily.

I tell Wendi that I could have won the thing. I started to feel better than I’d felt at the French Open. Damned hip.

The good news, I suppose, is that I wanted to win. Maybe I’ve got my desire turned around and pointed in the right direction.

I’M A FAST HEALER. After a few days my hip is fine. My mind, however, continues to throb. I go to the U.S. Open and lose in the first round. The first round. But the scary part is the way I lose. I play Krickstein, good old Krickstein, and again I just don’t want it. I know I can beat him, and yet it’s not worth the trouble. I don’t expend the necessary energy. I feel a strange clarity about my lack of effort. It’s lack of inspiration, plain and simple. I don’t question it. I don’t bother wishing it away. While Krickstein is running and leaping and lunging, I’m watching him with only mild interest. Only afterward does the shame set in.

I NEED TO DO SOMETHING RADICAL, something to break the seductive grip that losing seems to have on me. I decide to move out on my own. I buy myself a three-bedroom tract home in southwest Vegas and turn it into the ultimate bachelor pad, almost a parody of a bachelor pad. I make one bedroom an arcade, with all the classic games—Asteroids, Space Invaders, Defender. I’m terrible at them, but I intend to get better. I turn the formal living room into a movie theater, with state-of-the-art sound equipment and woofers in the couches. I turn the dining room into a billiard room. Throughout the house I scatter fantastically plush leather chairs, except in the main living room, where I install a massive, modular, green chenille, double-stuffed goosedown couch. In the kitchen I place a soda machine stocked with Mountain Dew, my favorite, and beer taps. Out back I install a hot tub and a black-bottomed la-goon.

Best of all, I make the bedroom a cave, everything jet black, with blackout curtains that don’t admit the tiniest slit of daylight. It’s the house of an arrested adolescent, a boy-man determined to shut out the world. I walk around this new house, this deluxe playpen, daring to think how grown-up I am.

I skip the Australian Open again at the start of 1992. I’ve never played it, and now doesn’t seem like the time to start. Still, I play Davis Cup and do fairly well, maybe because it’s in Hawaii. We face Argentina. I win both my matches. Then, the night before the last day, Wendi and I go out drinking with McEnroe and his wife, Tatum O’Neal. We overdo it, and I go to bed at four in the morning, assuming someone will take my place on Sunday, in a meaningless match, often called a dead rubber.

Apparently that’s not the case. Though I’m hungover and dehydrated, I need to go out and play Jaite, whose serve I once caught with my hand. Happily, Jaite’s hungover too. It’s fitting that this is a dead rubber; we both look dead and rubbery. To conceal my bloodshot eyes I play wearing Oakley sunglasses, and somehow I play well. I play relaxed. I walk off the court a winner, wondering if there’s a lesson in this. Can I tap this sort of relaxation when the stakes are real, when it’s a slam? Should I just go into every match hungover?

The next week I find myself on the cover of Tennis magazine, hitting a winner in my Oakley glasses. Hours after the magazine hits the newsstands, Wendi and I are at the bachelor pad when a delivery truck pulls up to the door. We go outside. Sign here, the deliveryman says.

What is this?

Gift. From Jim Jannard, founder of Oakley.

The back of the truck comes down, and a red Dodge Viper slowly descends.

Nice to know that, even if I’ve lost my game, I can still move product.

MY RANKING PLUMMETS. I fall out of the top ten. The only time I feel fairly competent on the court is when I play Davis Cup. In Fort Meyers I help the U.S. beat Czechoslovakia, winning both matches. Otherwise, the only game at which I show any improvement is Asteroids.

At the 1992 French Open I beat Pete, which feels good. Then I run into Courier again, this time in the semis. The memories of last year are still fresh, still painful, and I lose again—in straight sets. Once again Courier laces up his running shoes and goes for a jog afterward. I still can’t burn enough calories for him.

I limp to Florida and crash at Nick’s house. I don’t pick up a racket the whole time I’m there. Then, reluctantly, I have one short practice on a hard court at the Bollettieri Academy, and we all fly to Wimbledon.

The talent assembled in London in 1992 is stunning. There’s Courier, ranked number one, fresh off two slam victories. There’s Pete, who keeps getting better. There’s Stefan Edberg, who’s playing out of his mind. I’m the twelfth seed, and the way I’ve been playing I should be seeded lower.

In my first-round match, against Andrei Chesnokov, from Russia, I play like a low seed. I lose the first set. Frustrated, I rip into myself, curse myself, and the umpire gives me an official warning for saying fuck. I almost turn to him and fire a few fuck-fuck-fucks. Instead I decide to shock him, shock everyone, by taking a breath and being composed. Then I do something more shocking. I win the next three sets.

I’m in the quarters. Against Becker, who’s reached six of the last seven Wimbledon finals.

This is his de facto home court, his honey hole. But I’ve been seeing his serve well lately. I win in five sets, played over two days. Memories of Munich, put to rest.

In the semis I face McEnroe, three-time Wimbledon champion. He’s thirty-three, nearing the end of his career, and unseeded. Given his underdog status, and his legendary accomplishments, the fans want him to win, of course. Part of me wants him to win also. But I beat him in three sets. I’m in the final.

I’m expecting to face Pete, but he loses his semifinal match to Goran Ivanisevic, a big, strong serving machine from Croatia. I’ve played Ivanisevic twice before, and both times he’s shellacked me in straight sets. So I feel for Pete, and I know I’ll be joining him soon. I have no chance against Ivanisevic. It’s a middleweight versus a heavyweight. The only suspense is whether it will be a knockout or a TKO.

AS POWERFUL AS Ivanisevic’s serve is under normal circumstances, today it’s a work of art. He’s acing me left and right, monster serves that the speed gun clocks at 138 miles an hour. But it’s not just the speed, it’s the trajectory. They land at a 75-degree angle. I try not to care. I tell myself that aces happen. Each time he serves a ball past me, I say under my breath that he can’t do that every time. Just walk to the other side and get ready, Andre. The match will be decided on those few second serves.

He wins the first set, 7–6. I don’t break him once. I concentrate on not overreacting, on breathing in, breathing out, remaining patient. When the thought crosses my mind that I’m on the verge of losing my fourth slam final, I casually set that thought aside. In the second set Ivanisevic gives me a few freebies, makes a few mistakes, and I break him. I take the second set. Then the third. Which makes me feel almost worse, because once again I’m a set away from a slam.

Ivanisevic rises up in the fourth set and destroys me. I’ve made the Croat mad. He loses only a handful of points in the process. Here we go again. I can see tomorrow’s headlines as plain as the racket in my hand. As the fifth set begins I run in place to get the blood flowing and tell myself one thing: You want this. You do not want to lose, not this time. The problem in the last three slams was that you didn’t want them enough, and therefore you didn’t bring it, but this one you want, so this time you need to let Ivanisevic and everyone else in this joint know you want it.

At 3–3, I’m serving, break point. I haven’t been able to make a first serve this entire set, but now, mercifully, I make one. He returns it to the center of the court, I hit to his backhand, he hits a chip lob. I have to back up two steps. The overhead is one of the easiest shots you can play. It’s also the epitome of my struggles at slams, because it’s too easy. I don’t like things too easy. It’s there for the taking—will I take it? I swing, hit a textbook overhead, and win the point. I go on to hold serve.

Now Ivanisevic’s serving at 4–5. He double-faults. Twice. He’s down love–30. He’s crack-ing under the strain. I haven’t broken this guy in the last hour and a half and now he’s breaking himself. He misses another first serve. He’s coming apart. I know it. I see it. No one knows better than I what coming apart looks like. I also know how it feels. I know precisely what’s happening inside Ivanisevic’s body. His throat is closing. His legs are quivering. But then he quiets his body and hits a second serve to the back of the box, a beam of yellow light that barely nicks the line. A puff of chalk shoots up as if he hit the line with an assault rifle. Then he hits another unreturnable serve. Suddenly it’s 30–all.

He misses another first serve, makes the second. I crush a return, he hits a half volley, I run in and pass him and start the long walk back to the baseline. I tell myself, You can win this thing with one swing. One swing. You’ve never been this close. You may never be again.

And that’s the problem. What if I get this close and don’t win? The ridicule. The condemnation. I pause, try to shift my focus back to Ivanisevic. I need to guess which way he’s coming with his serve. OK, a typical lefty, serving to the ad court in a pressure point, hits a bending slider, out wide, that sweeps his opponent off the court. But Ivanisevic isn’t typical. His serve in a pressure point is generally a flat bomb up the middle. Why he prefers that serve, God knows. Maybe he shouldn’t. But he does. I know this about him. I know he’s coming up the middle. Sure enough, here he comes, but he nets the serve. Good thing, because that thing was a comet, right on the line. Even though I guessed right, moved right, I couldn’t have put my racket on it.

Now the crowd rises. I call time, to have a talk with myself, aloud, saying: Win this point or I’ll never let you hear the end of it, Andre. Don’t hope he double-faults, don’t hope he misses.

You control what you can control. Return this serve with all your strength, and if you return it hard but miss, you can live with that. You can survive that. One return, no regrets.

Hit harder.

He tosses the ball, serves to my backhand. I jump in the air, swing with all my strength, but I’m so tight that the ball to his backhand side has mediocre pace. Somehow he misses the easy volley. His ball smacks the net and just like that, after twenty-two years and twenty-two million swings of a tennis racket, I’m the 1992 Wimbledon champion.

I fall to my knees. I fall on my stomach. I can’t believe the emotion pouring out of me.

When I stagger to my feet, Ivanisevic appears at my side. He hugs me and says warmly, Congratulations, Wimbledon champ. You deserved it today.

Great fight, Goran.

He pats my shoulder. He smiles, walks to his chair, and wraps his head in a towel. I understand his emotions better than my own. Much of my heart is with him as I sit in my chair, trying to collect myself.

A very British man approaches and tells me to stand. He hands me a large gold loving cup. I don’t know how to hold it, or where to go with it. He points and tells me to walk in a circle around the court. Hold the trophy over your head, he says.

I walk around the court holding the trophy above my head. The fans cheer. Another man tries to take the trophy from me. I pull it back. He explains that he’s going to have it engraved.

With my name.

I look at my box, wave to Nick and Wendi and Philly. They are all clapping, beaming.

Philly is hugging Nick. Nick is hugging Wendi. I love you, Wendi. I bow to the royals and walk off the court.

In the locker room I stare at my warped reflection in the trophy. I address the trophy and the warped reflection: All the pain and suffering you’ve caused me.

I’m unnerved by how giddy I feel. It shouldn’t matter this much. It shouldn’t feel this good.

Waves of emotion continue to wash over me, relief and elation and even a kind of hysterical serenity, because I’ve finally earned a brief respite from the critics, especially the internal ones.

LATER IN THE AFTERNOON, back at the house we’ve rented, I phone Gil, who couldn’t make the trip, because he needed to be home with his family after the long clay season. He wishes so much that he could have been here. He discusses the match with me, the ins and outs—it’s shocking how much he’s learned about tennis in such a short time. I phone Perry, and J.P., and then, trembling, I dial my father in Vegas.

Pops? It’s me! Can you hear me? What’d you think?

Silence.

Pops?

You had no business losing that fourth set.

Stunned, I wait, not trusting my voice. Then I say, Good thing I won the fifth set, though, right?

He says nothing. Not because he disagrees, or disapproves, but because he’s crying.

Faintly I hear my father sniffling and wiping away tears, and I know he’s proud, just incapable of expressing it. I can’t fault the man for not knowing how to say what’s in his heart. It’s the family curse.

· · ·

THE NIGHT OF THE FINAL is the famed Wimbledon Ball. I’ve heard about it for years, and I’m dying to go, because the men’s winner gets to dance with the women’s winner, and this year, as in most years, that means Steffi Graf. I’ve had a crush on Steffi since I first saw her doing an interview on French TV. I was thunderstruck, dazzled by her understated grace, her effortless beauty. She looked, somehow, as if she smelled good. Also, as if she was good, fundamentally, essentially, inherently good, brimming with moral rectitude and a kind of dignity that doesn’t exist anymore. I thought I saw, for half a second, a halo above her head. I tried to get a message to her after last year’s French Open, but she didn’t respond. Now, I can’t wait to twirl her across a dance floor, never mind that I don’t know how to dance.

Wendi knows about my feelings for Steffi, and she’s not at all jealous. We have an open relationship, she reminds me. We’re both over twenty-one. In fact, on the eve of the final, we both go to Harrods to buy my tuxedo, in case I need it, and Wendi jokes with the salesgirl that I only want to win so that I can dance with Steffi Graf.

And so, wearing black tie for the first time ever, with Wendi on my arm, I walk smartly into the ball. We’re instantly set upon by silver-haired British couples. The men have hair in their ears, and the women smell like old liqueur. They seem delighted by my win, but mainly because it means fresh blood in the club. Someone new to talk to at these dreadful, dreadful af-fairs, someone says. Wendi and I stand with our backs to each other, like scuba divers in a school of sharks. I struggle to decipher some of the thicker British accents. I try to make clear to one older woman who looks like Benny Hill that I’m quite excited about the traditional dance with the women’s champion.

Sadly, the woman says, that dance isn’t happening this year.

Say what?

The players haven’t embraced the dance quite so enthusiastically in years past. So it’s been canceled.

She sees my face fall. Wendi turns, sees it too, and laughs.

I don’t get to dance with Steffi, but there will be a kind of consolation match: a formal introduction. I look forward to it all night. Then it happens. Shaking her hand, I tell Steffi that I tried to reach her at last year’s French Open and I hope she didn’t misunderstand my intentions. I say, I’d really love to talk with you some time.

She doesn’t respond. She merely smiles, an enigmatic smile, and I can’t tell if she’s happy about what I’ve just said, or nervous.

14

I’M SUPPOSED TO BE A DIFFERENT PERSON now that I’ve won a slam. Everyone says so. No more Image Is Everything. Now, sportswriters assert, for Andre Agassi, winning is everything. After two years of calling me a fraud, a choke artist, a rebel without a cause, they lionize me. They declare that I’m a winner, a player of substance, the real deal. They say my victory at Wimbledon forces them to reassess me, to reconsider who I really am.

But I don’t feel that Wimbledon has changed me. I feel, in fact, as if I’ve been let in on a dirty little secret: winning changes nothing. Now that I’ve won a slam, I know something that very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long as the bad. Not even close.

I do feel happier in the summer of 1992, and more substantive, but the cause isn’t Wimbledon. It’s Wendi. We’ve grown closer. We’ve whispered promises to each other. I’ve accepted that I’m not meant to be with Steffi. It was a nice fantasy while it lasted, but I’ve devoted myself to Wendi, and vice versa. She doesn’t work, doesn’t go to school. She’s been to several colleges and none was right. So now she spends all her time with me.

In 1992, however, spending time together suddenly becomes more complicated. Sitting in a movie theater, eating in a restaurant, we’re never truly alone. People appear from nowhere, requesting my picture, demanding my autograph, seeking my attention or opinion. Wimbledon has made me famous. I thought I was famous long ago—I signed my first autograph when I was six—but now I discover that I was actually infamous. Wimbledon has legitimized me, broadened and deepened my appeal, at least according to the agents and managers and marketing experts with whom I now regularly meet. People want to get closer to me; they feel they have that right. I understand that there’s a tax on everything in America. Now I discover that this is the tax on success in sports—fifteen seconds of time for every fan. I can accept this, intellectually. I just wish it didn’t mean the loss of privacy with my girl.

Wendi shrugs it off. She’s a good sport about every intrusion. She keeps me from taking anything too seriously, including myself. With her help I decide that the best approach to being famous is to forget you’re famous. I work hard at putting fame out of my mind.

But fame is a force. It’s unstoppable. You shut your windows to fame and it slides under the door. I turn around one day and discover that I have dozens of famous friends, and I don’t know how I met half of them. I’m invited to parties and VIP rooms, events and galas where the famous gather, and many ask for my phone number, or press their numbers on me. In the same way that my win at Wimbledon automatically made me a lifetime member of the All England Club, it also admitted me to this nebulous Famous People’s Club. My circle of ac-quaintances now includes Kenny G, Kevin Costner, and Barbra Streisand. I’m invited to spend the night at the White House, to eat dinner with President George Bush before his summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. I sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.

I find it surreal, then perfectly normal. I’m struck by how fast the surreal becomes the norm. I marvel at how unexciting it is to be famous, how mundane famous people are. They’re confused, uncertain, insecure, and often hate what they do. It’s something we always hear—like that old adage that money can’t buy happiness—but we never believe it until we see it for ourselves. Seeing it in 1992 brings me a new measure of confidence.

I’M SAILING NEAR VANCOUVER ISLAND, vacationing with my new friend David Foster, the music producer. Shortly after Wendi and I board Foster’s yacht, Costner comes aboard and invites us to join him on his yacht, anchored fifty yards away. We hit it off immediately.

Even though he has a yacht, Costner seems like the classic man’s man. Easy-going, funny, cool. He loves sports, follows them avidly, and assumes I do too. I tell him shyly that I don’t follow sports. That I don’t like them.

How do you mean?

I mean, I don’t like sports.

He laughs. You mean besides tennis?

I hate tennis most of all.

Right, right. I guess it’s a grind. But you don’t actually hate tennis.

I do.

Wendi and I spend much of the boating trip watching Costner’s three children. Well mannered, personable, they’re also remarkably beautiful. They look as if they tumbled out of one of my mother’s Norman Rockwell puzzles. Shortly after meeting me, four-year-old Joe Costner grabs at my pants leg and looks up at me with his big blue eyes. He shouts: Let’s play wrestle! I pick him up and hold him upside down, and the sound of his giggling is one of the most delicious sounds I’ve ever heard. Wendi and I tell ourselves we’re hopelessly charmed by the little Costners, but in reality we’re deliberately playing at being their parents.

Now and then I catch Wendi slipping away from the grownups to have another look at the children. I can see that she’s going to be a great mother. I imagine being there by her side, through it all, helping her raise three towheads with green eyes. The thought thrills me—and her. I broach the subject of family, the future. She doesn’t blink. She wants it too.

Weeks later, Costner invites us to his house in Los Angeles for a preview of his new film, The Bodyguard. Wendi and I don’t think much of the movie, but we swoon over the theme song, I Will Always Love You.

This will be our song, Wendi says.

Always.

We sing this song to each other, quote it to each other, and when the song comes on the radio we stop whatever we’re doing and make goo-goo eyes at each other, which makes everyone around us sick. We couldn’t care less.

I tell Philly and Perry that I can imagine spending the rest of my life with Wendi, that I might soon propose. Philly gives me a full nod. Perry gives me the green light.

Wendi is the one, I tell J.P.

What about Steffi Graf?

She blew me off. Forget her. It’s Wendi.

I’M SHOWING OFF my new toy for J.P. and Wendi.

J.P. asks, What’s this thing called again?

A Hummer. They used it in the Gulf War.

Mine is one of the first to be sold in the U.S. We’re driving it all over the desert outside Vegas when we get stuck in the sand. J.P. jokes that they must not have run into any sand during the Gulf War. We hop out and set across the desert. I have a flight this afternoon and a match tomorrow. If I can’t get us out of this desert, all kinds of people are going to be angry with me. But as we walk and walk, my match suddenly seems a trivial matter. Survival starts to be a real concern. In every direction, we see nothing, and darkness is coming on.

It feels as though this might become a turning point in our lives, J.P. says. And I don’t mean in a good way.

Thanks for the positive thinking.

Finally we come to a shack. An old hermit loans us his shovel. We hike back to the Hummer, and I hurriedly set about digging around the back wheel. Suddenly my shovel hits something hard. Caliche, the cement-like layer of soil under the Nevada desert. I feel something snap deep inside my wrist. I cry out.

What is it? Wendi says.

I don’t know.

I look at my wrist.

Rub some dirt on it, J.P. says.

I dig out the Hummer, make my flight, even win my match the next day. Days later, however, I wake in agony. The wrist feels broken. I can barely bend it back and forth. I feel as if several sewing needles and rusty razor blades have been implanted in the joint. This is bad.

This is big.

Then the pain goes away. I’m relieved. Then it comes back. I’m scared. Soon the occasional pain becomes constant. It’s tolerable in the morning, but by day’s end the needle-razor feeling is all I can think about.

A doctor says I have tendinitis. Specifically dorsal capsulitis. Tiny rips in the wrist that refuse to heal. The result of overuse, he says. The only possible cures are rest and surgery.

I choose rest. I shut myself down, gentle the wrist. After weeks of carrying the wrist around like a wounded bird, I still can’t work out, do a push-up, or open a door without grimacing.

The one upside of the wrist injury is that I get to spend more time with Wendi. Instead of hard-court season, the start of 1993 becomes Wendi Season, and I throw myself into it. She enjoys the extra attention, but she also worries that she’s neglecting her studies. She’s en-rolled in yet another college. Her fifth. Or sixth. I’ve lost track.

Driving along Rainbow Boulevard, steering with my left hand to avoid engaging my bad right wrist, I roll down the window and turn up the radio. The spring breeze flutters Wendi’s hair. She turns down the radio and says how long it’s been since she really knew what she wanted.

I nod and turn up the radio.

She turns down the radio and says she’s attended all these different colleges, lived in all these different states, she’s been searching her whole life for meaning, purpose—nothing ever feels right. She just can’t seem to figure out who she is.

Again, I nod. I agree. I know that feeling. Winning Wimbledon has done nothing to salve it.

Then I look over at Wendi and realize she’s not just idly talking, she’s going somewhere with this. She’s making a point—about us. She turns in her seat and looks me in the eye. Andre, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and I just don’t think I can be happy, really happy, until I figure out who I am and what I’m supposed to do with my life. And I don’t see how I can do that if we stay together.

She’s crying.

I can’t be your traveling companion, she says, your sidekick, your fan, anymore. Well, I’ll always be your fan, but you know what I mean.

She needs to find herself, and to do that she needs to be free.

And so do you, she says. We can’t realize our separate goals if we stay together.

Even an open relationship is too confining.

I can’t argue with her. If that’s how she feels, there’s nothing I can say. I want her to be happy. Of course at this moment our song comes on the radio. I will always love you. I stare at Wendi, try to catch her eye, but she keeps her face turned away. I make a U-turn, drive back to her house, walk her to the door. She gives me one long, last hug.

I drive away and barely make it to the end of the block before pulling over and phoning Perry. When he answers I can’t speak. I’m crying too hard. He thinks it’s a prank call.

Hello, he says, annoyed. Hel-lo?

He hangs up.

I call back, but still can’t speak. Again he hangs up.

I GO UNDERGROUND. I hole up in the bachelor pad, boozing, sleeping, eating junk. I feel shooting pains in my chest. I tell Gil. He says it sounds like a typical broken heart. Tiny rips that refuse to heal. The result of overuse.

Then he says, What are we doing about Wimbledon? Time to start thinking about getting ourselves overseas. Time to throw down, Andre. It’s on.

I can barely hold the phone, let alone a tennis racket. Still, I want to go. I could use the distraction. I could use some time on the road with Gil, working on a common goal. Also, I’m defending champion. I have no choice. Right before our flight Gil arranges for a doctor in Seattle, who’s supposed to be the best, to give me a shot of cortisone. The shot works. I arrive in Europe wiggling the wrist, pain-free.

We go first to Halle, Germany, for a tune-up tournament. Nick meets us there and immediately puts the touch on me for money. He sold the Bollettieri Academy, because he got himself into debt, and it was the biggest mistake of his life. He let it go for too little. Now he needs cash. He’s not himself—or maybe he’s more himself. He says he’s not getting paid what he’s worth. He says I’ve been an unsound investment. He’s spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing me, and he’s entitled to hundreds of thousands above the hundreds of thousands I’ve already given him. I ask if we can please talk about this back home. I have a few things weighing on my mind right now.

Of course, he says. When we get back.

I’m so shaken by the confrontation that in the Halle tournament I fall on my face in my first-round match against Steeb. He beats me in three sets. So much for the tune-up.

I’ve barely played in the last year, and when I’ve played, I’ve played badly, so I’m the lowest-seeded defending champ in Wimbledon history. My first match on center court is against Bernd Karbacher, a German whose thick hair always looks the same, from the beginning of the match to the end, which irks me, for obvious reasons. Everything about Karbacher seems designed to distract. Apart from his enviable locks, he’s bowlegged. He walks as if he not only sits on a horse all day, but as if he just dismounted, and it’s been a long ride, and his ass is chapped. Befitting his appearance, he plays a very odd game. His backhand is huge, one of the game’s best, but he uses it to avoid running. He hates running. Hates moving. At times he doesn’t care much for serving, either. He has an aggressive first serve, but not much of a second serve.

With my numbed wrist I have my own serve issues. I’ll have to alter my motion, taking only a small backswing, limiting sudden movements. Naturally this causes problems. I fall behind quickly in the first set, 2–5. I’m about to become the first defending champion in decades to get knocked out in the first round. But I collect myself, force myself to make peace with my new serve, and tough out the win. Karbacher hops on his horse and rides away.

British fans are kind. They cheer, they roar, they appreciate the effort it’s taken to get my wrist ready. British tabloids, however, are another matter. They’re filled with venom. They carry strange stories about, of all things, my chest, which I’ve recently shaved. Just a bit of innocent manscaping, but you’d think I’d cut off a limb. My wrist is broken, and they talk only about my chest. My news conferences turn into Monty Python skits, every other question about my newly smooth pectorals. British reporters are hair obsessed—if they only knew the truth about the hair on my head. Several tabloids also say I’m fat, and writers take malicious joy in calling me Burger King. Gil tries to blame my appearance on the cortisone injection in my wrist, which can cause bloating, but no one is buying it.

Nothing, however, fascinates the Brits quite like Barbra Streisand. She arrives at Centre Court to watch me play and there is practically a flurry of trumpets. Celebrities attend Wimbledon all the time, but Barbra’s appearance causes a stir like none I’ve seen. Reporters harass her, then later pester me about her, and the tabloids take great pains to dissect and belittle our relationship, which is nothing more than a passionate friendship.

They want to know how we met. I refuse to tell them, because Barbra is the shyest, most private person I know.

It began with Steve Wynn, the casino impresario, whom I’d known since I was a kid. He and I were playing golf one day, and I mentioned that I enjoyed Barbra Streisand’s music. He said she was a good friend. Thus began a series of phone calls, during which Barbra and I connected. When I won Wimbledon, she sent a sweet telegram, congratulating me, telling me, sarcastically, it was nice to put a face with the voice.

She invited me weeks later to a small get-together at her ranch in Malibu. David Foster would be there, she said, and a few other friends. Finally we’d meet.

Her ranch was dotted with cottages, one of which was a movie theater. After a luncheon we wandered down there for a sneak preview of The Joy Luck Club, a quintessential chick flick, during which I thought I might expire of boredom. Then we all wandered over to another cottage, a music salon, with a grand piano under a window. We stood around eating and talking while David sat at the piano, playing a medley of torch songs. He made several attempts to get Barbra to sing. She wouldn’t. He persisted. She refused. He kept after her until it became awkward. I wished he would stop. Barbra’s elbows were resting on the piano, and her back was to me. I saw her stiffen. She was clearly petrified about performing in front of other people.

Not five minutes later, however, she let fly a few bars. The sound filled the room from the rafters to the floorboards. Everyone stopped talking. Glasses shook. Flatware rattled. The bones in my ribs and wrist vibrated. I briefly thought someone had put one of Barbra’s albums on a Bose sound system and turned the volume up full blast. I couldn’t believe that a human being was capable of producing that much sound, that a human voice could pervade every square inch of a room.

From that moment I was even more intrigued by Barbra. The idea that she possessed such a devastating instrument, such a powerful talent, and couldn’t use it freely, for pleasure, was fascinating. And familiar. And depressing. We met soon after that day. She invited me to the ranch. We shared a pizza and talked for hours, discovering many things in common. She was a tortured perfectionist who hated doing something at which she excelled. And yet, despite years of semiretirement, despite all her self-doubts and nagging fears, she admitted that she was pondering a comeback to the concert stage. I urged her to do it. I told her it was wrong to deprive the world of that voice, that astonishing voice. Above all, I told her that it would be dangerous to surrender to fear. Fears are like gateway drugs, I said. You give in to a small one, and soon you’re giving in to bigger ones. So what if she didn’t want to perform?

She had to.

Naturally I felt like a hypocrite every time I said this to Barbra. In my own struggles with fear and perfectionism, I was losing more than I won. I talked to her the way I talked to reporters: I told her things I knew to be true, and things I hoped to be true, most of which I couldn’t bring myself to fully believe and act on.

After we’d spent one long spring afternoon playing tennis, I told Barbra about a new singer I’d seen in Vegas, a woman with a big voice not unlike Barbra’s. I asked, Do you want to hear her?

Sure.

I brought her out to my car and put in a CD by this new sensation, a Canadian named Céline Dion. Barbra listened closely, biting her thumbnail. I could tell she was thinking: I can do that. She was picturing herself back in the game. Again, I felt helpful, but also like a raging hypocrite.

My sense of hypocrisy reached a crescendo when Barbra finally did push herself to perform. There I was, front row—wearing a black baseball cap. My hairpiece was malfunctioning again, and I feared what people would think and say. Beyond being a hypocrite that night, I felt a slave to fear.

More often than not, Barbra and I laugh at the shock and scandal our dates cause. We agree that we’re good for each other, and so what if she’s twenty-eight years older? We’re simpatico, and the public outcry only adds spice to our connection. It makes our friendship feel forbidden, taboo—another piece of my overall rebellion. Dating Barbra Streisand is like wearing Hot Lava.

Still, if I’m fatigued, if I’m not in the right mood, as is the case at Wimbledon, then the public belittling can sting. And Barbra plays into the hands of the belittlers by telling a reporter that I’m a Zen master. Newspapers have a field day with this comment. I begin to hear the Zen master quote constantly; it briefly replaces Image Is Everything. I don’t understand the reaction, maybe because I don’t know what a Zen master is. I can only assume it’s a good thing, since Barbra’s a friend.

BRUSHING ASIDE THE SUBJECT OF BARBRA, avoiding newspapers and TV, I stay on task at the 1993 Wimbledon. After surviving Karbacher, I beat João Cunha-Silva, from Por-tugal, Patrick Rafter, from Australia, then Richard Krajicek, from the Netherlands. I’m in the quarters, facing Pete. As always, it’s Pete. I wonder how my wrist can possibly hold up against his serve, which he’s developed into a force. But Pete’s suffering his own aches and pains. His shoulder is sore, his game is a tad off. Or so they say. You’d never know it the way he comes out against me. He wins the first set in less time than I spent getting dressed for the match. He wins the second set just as fast.

Going to be a short day, I tell myself. I look up at my box, and there’s Barbra, flashes going off around her. I think: Is this really my life?

As the third set begins, Pete stumbles. I get a second wind. The set falls to me, as does the fourth. The wheel clicks in my direction. I see fear creep into Pete’s face. We’re tied, two sets apiece, and doubt, unmistakable doubt, is trailing him like the long afternoon shadows on the Wimbledon grass. For once, it’s not me but Pete yelling and cursing at himself.

In the fifth set, Pete’s wincing, kneading his shoulder. He asks for a trainer. During the delay, while he’s being worked on, I tell myself this match is mine. Two Wimbledons in a row—won’t that be something? We’ll see what the tabloids have to say then. Or what I’ll say.

How do you like your Burger King now?

When we resume play, however, Pete is a different person. Not revived, not reenergized—wholly different. He’s done it again, sloughed off that other doubt-ridden Pete as a snake sheds its skin. And now he’s in the process of shedding me. Leading 5–4, he starts the tenth game of the set by blasting three straight aces. But not just any aces. They even have a different sound about them. Like Civil War cannons. Triple match point.

Suddenly he’s walking toward the net, extending his hand, the victor once again. The handshake physically hurts, and it has nothing to do with my tender wrist.

· · ·

BACK AT THE BACHELOR PAD, days after losing to Pete, I have one simple goal. I want to avoid thinking about tennis for seven days. I just need a break. I’m heart sore, wrist sore, bone tired. I need to do nothing for one week—just sit and be quiet. No pain, no drama, no serves, no tabloids, no singers, no match points. I’m sipping my first cup of coffee, flipping through USA Today, when a headline catches my eye. Because my name is in it. Bollettieri Parts Ways with Agassi. Nick tells the newspaper he’s done with me. He wants to spend more time with his family. After ten years, this is how he lets me know. Not even a panda ass-up in my chair.