by Andre Agassi
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 immovable 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 lagoon.
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 bo
th 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.