Open

by Andre Agassi

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

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

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

  My father yells everything twice, sometimes three times, sometimes ten. Harder, he says, harder. But what’s the use? No matter how hard I hit a ball, no matter how early, the ball comes back. Every ball I send across the net joins the thousands that already cover the court. Not hundreds. Thousands. They roll toward me in perpetual waves. I have no room to turn, to step, to pivot. I can’t move without stepping on a ball—and yet I can’t step on a ball, because my father won’t bear it. Step on one of my father’s tennis balls and he’ll howl as if you stepped on his eyeball.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Now I watch him push the blower, watch the tennis balls scurry from him, and feel sympathy for the balls. If the dragon and the blower are living things, maybe the balls are too. Maybe they’re doing what I would if I could—running from my father. After blowing all the balls into one corner, my father takes a snow shovel and scoops the balls into a row of metal garbage cans, slop buckets with which he feeds the dragon.

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

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

  I hit another three.

  I can’t go on another minute.

  I go another ten.

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

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

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

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

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

  I like to think so.

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

  My father has painted the high cement wall around the house a bright forest green. Why? Because green is the color of a tennis court. Also, my father likes the convenience of directing someone to the house like this: Turn left, go down half a block, then look for the bright green wall.

  Not that we ever have any visitors.

  Surrounding the house on all sides is desert, and more desert, which to me is another word for death. Dotted with sticker bushes, tumble-weed, and coiled rattlers, the desert around our house seems to have no reason for existence, other than providing a place for people to dump things they no longer want. Mattresses, tires, other people. Vegas—the casinos, the hotels, the Strip—stands off in the distance, a glittering illusion. My father commutes to the illusion every day. He’s a captain at one of the casinos, but he refuses to live closer. We moved out here to the middle of nowhere, the heart of nothingness, because it’s only here that my father could afford a house with a yard big enough for his ideal tennis court.

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

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

  Doesn’t fit! Let’s go!

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

  Sold, he said quietly.

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

  He needed help, of course. Pouring concrete is a big job. So each morning he’d drive me to Sambo’s, a diner on the Strip, where we’d recruit a few old-timers from the gang that hung out in the parking lot. My favorite was Rudy. Battle-scarred, barrel-chested, Rudy always looked at me with a half smile, as if he understood that I didn’t know who or where I was. Rudy and his gang would follow me and my father back to our house, and there my father would tell them what needed doing. After three hours my father and I would run down to McDonald’s and buy huge sacks of Big Macs and French fries. When we returned, my father would let me ring the cowbell and call the men to lunch. I loved rewarding Rudy. I loved watching him eat like a wolf. I loved the concept of hard work leading to sweet rewards—except when hard work meant hitting tennis balls.

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

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

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

  She tells me that when I was still in the crib, my father hung a mobile of tennis balls above my head and encouraged me to slap at them with a ping-pong paddle he’d taped to my hand. When I was three he gave me a sawed-off racket and told me to hit whatever I wanted. I specialized in salt shakers. I liked serving them through glass windows. I aced the dog. My father never got mad. He got mad about many things, but never about hitting something hard with a racket.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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