Open

by Andre Agassi

  He pulls himself together in the second set, however, and gives me a two-fisted battle. I win 7–6, but feel lucky. I know it could have gone either way.

  In the third set we both raise the stakes. I feel the finish line pulling, but now he’s mentally committed to this fight. There have been times in the past when he’s given up against me, when he’s taken unnecessary risks because he hasn’t believed in himself. Not this time. He’s playing smart, proving to me that I’m going to have to rip the trophy from him if I really want it. And I do want it. So I will rip it. We have long rallies off my serve, until he realizes I’m committed, I’m willing to hit with him all day. I catch sight of him grabbing his side, winded. I start picturing how the trophy will look in the bachelor pad back in Vegas.

  There are no breaks of serve through the third set. Until 5–all. Finally I break him, and now I’m serving for the match. I hear Brad’s voice, as clearly as if he were standing behind me. Go for his forehand. When in doubt, forehand, forehand. So I hit to Stich’s forehand. Again and again he misses. The outcome feels, to both of us, I think, inevitable.

  I fall to my knees. My eyes fill with tears. I look to my box, to Perry and Philly and Gil and especially Brad. You know everything you need to know about people when you see their faces at the moments of your greatest triumph. I’ve believed in Brad’s talent from the beginning, but now, seeing his pure and unrestrained happiness for me, I believe unrestrainedly in him.

  Reporters tell me I’m the first unseeded player since 1966 to win the U.S. Open. More importantly, the first man who ever did it was Frank Shields, grandfather of the fifth person in my box. Brooke, who’s been here for every match, looks every bit as happy as Brad.

  My new girlfriend, my new coach, my new manager, my surrogate father.

  At last, the team is firmly, irrevocably, in place.

  16

  I THINK you should get rid of that hairpiece, Brooke says. And that ponytail. Shave your hair short, short, and be done with it.

  Impossible. I’d feel naked.

  You’d feel liberated.

  I’d feel exposed.

  It’s as though she’s suggesting I have all my teeth pulled. I tell her to forget it. Then I go away and think about it for a few days. I think about the pain my hair has caused me, the inconvenience of the hairpieces, the hypocrisy and the pretending and the lying. Maybe it isn’t crazy after all. Maybe it’s the first step toward sanity.

  I stand before Brooke one morning and say, Let’s do it.

  Do what?

  Cut it off. Let’s cut it all off.

  We schedule the ceremonial shearing for late at night, at an hour normally reserved for séances and raves. It’s to be in the kitchen of Brooke’s brownstone, after she returns from the theater. (She got the part in Grease.) We’ll make a party of it, she says, invite some friends.

  Perry is there. And, despite our breakup, Wendi. Brooke is openly irritated by the presence of Wendi, and vice versa. Perry is baffled by it. I explain to Brooke and Perry that despite our romantic history, Wendi is still a close friend, a lifelong friend. Being shorn is a dramatic step, and I need friends in the room for moral support, just as I needed Gil there when I had my wrist surgery. In fact, it crosses my mind that for this surgery I should also be sedated. We send out for wine.

  Brooke’s hairdresser, Matthew, puts my head over the sink, washes my hair, then pulls it all tight.

  Andre—are you sure?

  No.

  Are you ready?

  No.

  Do you want to do this in front of a mirror?

  No. I don’t want to watch.

  He puts me in a wooden chair and then—snip. There goes the pony-tail.

  Everyone applauds.

  He begins cutting the hair on the sides of my head, tight, close to the skull. I think of the mohawk at the Bradenton Mall. I close my eyes, feel my heart pound, as if I’m about to play a final. This was a mistake. Maybe the defining mistake of my life. J.P. warned me not to do this. J.P. said that whenever he attends one of my matches, he hears people talking about my hair. Women love me for it, men hate me for it. Now that J.P. has quit pastoring, devoted himself to music, he’s been doing some work in advertising, writing jingles for radio and TV commercials, so he spoke with some authority when he proclaimed: As far as the corporate world is concerned, Andre Agassi is his hair. And when Andre Agassi’s hair is gone, corporate sponsors will be gone.

  He also suggested pointedly that I reread the Bible story about Samson and Delilah.

  As Matthew cuts and cuts, and cuts, I realize I should have listened to J.P. When has J.P. ever steered me wrong? With clumps of my hair falling to the floor, I feel clumps of me falling away.

  It takes eleven minutes. Then Matthew whisks away the smock and says, Ta-dah!

  I walk to the mirror. I see a person I don’t recognize. Before me stands a total stranger. My reflection isn’t different, it’s simply not me. But, really, what the hell have I lost? Maybe I’ll have an easier time being this guy. All this time with Brad, trying to fix what’s in my head, it never occurred to me to fix what’s on my head. I smile at my reflection, run a hand over my scalp. Hello. Nice to meet you.

  As night turns to morning, as we work our way through several bottles of wine, I feel exhilarated, and heavily indebted to Brooke. You were right, I tell her. My hairpiece was a shackle, and my natural hair, grown to absurd lengths, dyed three different colors, was a weight as well, holding me down. It seems so trivial—hair. But hair has been the crux of my public image, and my self-image, and it’s been a sham.

  Now the sham is lying on Brooke’s floor in tiny haystacks. I feel well rid of it. I feel true. I feel free.

  And I play like it. At the 1995 Australian Open I come out like the Incredible Hulk. I don’t drop one set in a take-no-prisoners blitz to the final. This is the first time I’ve played in Australia, and I can’t imagine why I’ve waited so long. I like the surface, the venue—the heat. Having grown up in Vegas, I don’t feel the heat the way other players do, and the defining characteristic of the Australian Open is the unholy temperature. Just as cigar and pipe smoke lingers in the memory after playing Roland Garros, the hazy memory of playing in a giant kiln stays with you for weeks after you leave Melbourne.

  I also enjoy the Australian people, and they apparently enjoy me, even though I’m not me, I’m this new bald guy in a bandana and a goatee and a hoop earring. Newspapers go to town with my new look. Everyone has an opinion. Fans who rooted for me are disoriented. Fans who rooted against me have a new reason to dislike me. I read and hear a remarkable succession of pirate jokes. I never knew there could be so many pirate jokes. But I don’t care. I tell myself that everyone is going to have to deal with this pirate, accept this pirate, when I hoist that trophy.

  In the final I run smack into Pete. I lose the first set in nothing flat. I lose it gutlessly, on a double fault. Here we go again.

  I take time before the second set to collect myself. I glance toward my box. Brad looks frustrated. He’s never believed that Pete is the better player. His face says, You’re the better player, Andre. Don’t respect him so much.

  Pete is serving live grenades, one after another, a typical Pete fusillade. But in the middle of the second set, I feel him tiring. His grenades still have the pins in them. He’s wearing down physically, and emotionally, because he’s been through hell these last few days. His longtime coach, Tim Gullickson, suffered two strokes, and then they discovered a tumor in his brain. Pete is traumatized. As the match turns my way, I feel guilty. I’d be willing to stop, let Pete go into the locker room, get an IV, and come back as that other Pete who likes to kick my ass at slams.

  I break him twice. He slumps his shoulders, concedes the set.

  The third set comes down to a jittery tiebreak. I grab a 3–0 lead and then Pete wins the next four points. Suddenly he’s up 6–4, serving for the set. I let out a caveman scream, as if I’m in the weight room with Gil, and put every
thing I’ve got into a return that nicks the net and stays inside the line. Pete stares at the ball, then me.

  On the next point he hits a forehand that sails long. We’re deadlocked at 6. A furious rally ends when I shock him by coming to the net and hitting a soft backhand drop volley. It works so well, I do it again. Set, Agassi. Momentum, ditto.

  The fourth set is a foregone conclusion. I keep my foot on the gas and win, 6–4. Pete looks resolved. Too much hill to climb. In fact, he’s maddeningly unruffled as he comes to the net.

  It’s my second slam in a row, my third overall. Everyone says it’s my best slam yet, because it’s my first victory over Pete in a slam final. But I think twenty years from now I’ll remember it as my first bald slam.

  THE TALK TURNS IMMEDIATELY to my reaching number one. Pete’s been number one for seventy weeks, and everyone on my team says I’m destined to kick him off the top of that vaunted mountain. I tell them that tennis has nothing to do with destiny. Destiny has better things to do than count ATP points.

  Still, I make it my goal to be number one, because my team wants it.

  I cloister myself in Gil’s gym and train with fury. I tell him about the goal, and he draws up a battle plan. First, he designs a course of study. He sets about collecting a master list of phone numbers and addresses for the world’s most acclaimed sports doctors and nutritionists, and reaches out to all of them, turns them into his private consultants. He huddles with experts at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. He flies coast to coast, interviewing the best and brightest, famed researchers on health and wellness, recording every word they tell him in his da Vinci notebooks. He reads everything, from muscle magazines to obscure medical studies and dry reports. He subscribes to the New England Journal of Medicine. In no time he makes himself a portable university, with one professor and one subject. The student body: me.

  Then he determines my physical limit, and pushes me right up to it. He soon has me bench-pressing almost twice my weight, five to seven sets of more than three hundred pounds. He has me lifting fifty-pound dumbbells in excruciating sets of three-ways: back-to-back-to-back flexes that burn three different muscles in my shoulders. Then we work on biceps and triceps. We burn my muscles to ashes. I like when Gil talks about burning muscles, setting them afire. I like being able to put my pyromania to constructive use.

  Next we concentrate on my midsection, beginning with a special machine Gil designed and built. As with all his machines, he chopped it, cut it, re-welded it. (The blueprints in his da Vinci notebooks are stunning.) It’s the only machine of its kind in the world, he says, because it allows me to work my abs without engaging my fragile back. We’re going to stack heavy on your abs, he says, work them until they’re on fire, and then we’re going to do Russian Twists: you’ll hold a forty-five-pound iron plate, a big wheel, and rotate left, right, left, right. That will burn down your sides and obliques.

  Last, we move to Gil’s homemade lat machine. Unlike every lat machine in every gym the world over, Gil’s doesn’t compromise my back or neck. The bar I pull to work my lats is slightly in front of me. I’m never awkwardly positioned.

  While I’m lifting, Gil also feeds me constantly, every twenty minutes. He wants me taking in four parts carbs to one part protein, and he times my intake to the nanosecond. When you eat, he says, and how you eat, that’s the thing. Every time I turn around he’s shoving a bowl of high-protein oatmeal at me, or a bacon sandwich, or a bagel with peanut butter and honey.

  Finally, my upper body and gut pleading for mercy, we go outside and run up and down the hill behind Gil’s house. Gil Hill. Quick bursts of power and speed, up and down, up and down, I run until my mind begs me to stop, and then I run some more, ignoring my mind.

  Easing into my car at dusk, I often don’t know that I’ll be able to drive home. Sometimes I don’t try. If I don’t have the strength to turn the key in the ignition, I go back inside and curl up on one of Gil’s benches and fall asleep.

  After my mini boot camp with Gil, I look as if I’ve traded in my old body, upgraded to the newest model. Still, there’s room for improvement. I could be better about what I eat outside the gym. Gil, however, doesn’t crack the whip about my lapses. He certainly doesn’t like the way I eat when I’m not with him—Taco Bell, Burger King—but he says I need comfort food now and then. My psyche, he says, is more fragile than my back, and he doesn’t want to overstress it. Besides, a man needs one or two vices.

  Gil is a paradox, and we both know it. He can lecture me about nutrition while watching me sip a milkshake. He doesn’t slap the milkshake from my hand. On the contrary, he might even take a sip. I like people with contradictions, of course. I also like that Gil’s not a taskmaster. I’ve had enough taskmasters to last me a lifetime. Gil understands me, coddles me, and occasionally—just occasionally—indulges my taste for junk, maybe because he shares it.

  At Indian Wells, I face Pete again. If I can beat him I’ll be within an inch of the top spot. I’m in peak condition, but we play a sloppy match, filled with unforced errors. Each of us is distracted. Pete is still distressed about his coach. I’m worried about my father, who’s having open-heart surgery in a few days. This time, Pete manages to rise above his turmoil, while I let mine consume me. I lose in three sets.

  I race to the UCLA Medical Center and find my father strapped to machines with long tubes. They remind me of the ball machine of my youth. You can’t beat the dragon. My mother hugs me. He watched you play yesterday, she says. He watched you lose to Pete.

  I’m sorry, Pops.

  He’s on his back, drugged, helpless. His eyelids flutter open. He sees me and gestures with his hand. Come closer.

  I lean in. He can’t speak. He has a tube in his mouth and down his throat. He mumbles something.

  I don’t understand, Pops.

  More gestures. I don’t know what he’s trying to tell me. Now he’s getting angry. If he had the strength he’d get out of this bed and knock me out.

  He motions for a pad and pen.

  Tell me later, Pops.

  No, no. He shakes his head. He must tell me now.

  The nurses hand him a pad and pen. He scrawls a few words, then makes a brushing gesture. Like an artist, gently brushing. At last I understand.

  Backhand, he’s trying to say. Hit to Pete’s backhand. You should have hit more to Pete’s backhand.

  Vork your wolleys. Hit harder.

  I stand and feel an overpowering urge to forgive, because I realize that my father can’t help himself, that he never could help himself, any more than he could understand himself. My father is what he is, and always will be, and though he can’t help himself, though he can’t tell the difference between loving me and loving tennis, it’s love all the same. Few of us are granted the grace to know ourselves, and until we do, maybe the best we can do is be consistent. My father is nothing if not consistent.

  I put my father’s hand at his side, force him to stop gesturing, tell him that I understand. Yes, yes, to the backhand. I’ll hit to Pete’s backhand next week in Key Biscayne. And I’ll beat his ass. Don’t worry, Pops. I’ll beat him. Now rest.

  He nods. His hand still flapping against his side, he closes his eyes and falls asleep.

  The next week I beat Pete in the final of Key Biscayne.

  After the match we fly together to New York, where we’re due to catch a flight to Europe for the Davis Cup. But first, upon landing, I drag Pete to the Eugene O’Neill Theater to see Brooke as Rizzo in Grease. It’s the first time Pete has seen a Broadway show, I think, but it’s my fiftieth time seeing Grease. I can recite every word of We Go Together, a trick I’ve performed, deadpan, to much laughter on the Late Show with David Letterman.

  I like Broadway. I find the ethos of the theater familiar. The work of a Broadway actor is physical, strenuous, demanding, and the nightly pressure is intense. The best Broadway actors remind me of athletes. If they don’t give their best, they know it, and if they don’t know
it, the crowd lets them know it. All this is lost on Pete, however. From the opening number he’s yawning, fidgeting, checking his watch. He doesn’t like the theater, and he doesn’t get actors, since he’s never pretended anything in his life. In the quasi-darkness of the footlights, I smile at his discomfort. Somehow, forcing him to sit through Grease feels more satisfying than beating him in Key Biscayne. We go together, like rama lama lama …

  IN THE MORNING we catch the Concorde to Paris, then a private plane to Palermo. I’m barely settled into my hotel room when the phone rings.

  Perry.

  In my hand, he says, I hold the latest rankings.

  Hit me with it.

  You—are number one.

  I’ve knocked Pete off the mountaintop. After eighty-two weeks at number one, Pete’s looking up at me. I’m the twelfth tennis player to be number one in the two decades since they started keeping computer rankings. The next person who phones is a reporter. I tell him that I’m happy about the ranking, that it feels good to be the best that I can be.

  It’s a lie. This isn’t at all what I feel. It’s what I want to feel. It’s what I expected to feel, what I tell myself to feel. But in fact I feel nothing.

  17

  I SPEND MANY HOURS ROAMING the streets of Palermo, drinking strong black coffee, wondering what the hell is wrong with me. I did it—I’m the number one tennis player on earth, and yet I feel empty. If being number one feels empty, unsatisfying, what’s the point? Why not just retire?

  I picture myself announcing that I’m done. I choose the words I’ll speak at the news conference. Several images then come to mind. Brad, Perry, my father, each disappointed, aghast. Also, I tell myself that retiring won’t solve my essential problem, it won’t help me figure out what I want to do with my life. I’ll be a twenty-five-year-old retiree, which sounds a lot like a ninth-grade dropout.