Open

by Andre Agassi

  Now Ivanisevic’s serving at 4–5. He double-faults. Twice. He’s down love–30. He’s cracking 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 affairs, 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 go
od 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 acquaintances 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 enrolled 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.