Open

by Andre Agassi

  My only hope is that he doesn’t play aggressive this time out. Especially since it’s cooler. In cool weather the court in New York plays slower, which favors a guy like Blake, who’s so damned fast. On a slow court Blake can get to everything, and you can’t, and thus he can make you press. You feel a need to do more than you normally do, and from there everything goes haywire.

  The moment we step onto the court, my worst nightmare comes true. Blake is Mr. Aggressive, standing inside the baseline on my second serves, taking full cuts off both wings, making me feel urgency right from the opening minute. He smothers me in the first set, 6–3. In the second set he gives me a second helping of the same: 6–3.

  Early in the third set the match takes on shades of Malisse. Except I’m Malisse. I can’t beat this guy, I know I can’t, so I may as well just try to give a good show. Freed from thoughts of winning, I instantly play better. I stop thinking, start feeling. My shots become a half-second quicker, my decisions become the product of instinct rather than logic. I see Blake take a step back and register the change. What just happened? He’s been beating my brains in for seven straight rounds, and at the end of the eighth I land one sneaky punch, wobbling him just as the bell rings. Now he’s walking to his corner, unable to believe that his hobbled, demoralized opponent still has life.

  Blake has a huge following in New York, and they’re all here tonight. Nike, which no longer endorses me, gives his supporters T-shirts and urges them to cheer. When I outplay Blake in the third, they stop cheering. When I win the set, they fall silent.

  Throughout the fourth set, Blake’s panicking, no longer being aggressive. I can see him thinking, can almost hear him thinking: Damn, I can’t do anything right.

  I win the fourth set.

  Now that Blake has seen the benefits of my not thinking, he decides he’s going to try it. As the fifth set unfolds, he turns off his brain. At last, after nearly three hours, we meet on equal terms. We’re both on fire, and his on-fire is slightly better than my on-fire. In the tenth game he has a chance to serve out the match.

  Then he starts thinking again. The contrarian brain. He presses, I hit three first-class returns, break him, and the crowd changes its mind. They chant, An-dre, An-dre.

  I serve. I hold.

  During the changeover the stadium sounds like a rock concert. My ears are ringing. My temples are pounding. It’s so loud that I wrap my head in a towel.

  He serves. He holds. We’re going to a tiebreak.

  I’ve heard old-timers say that the fifth set has nothing to do with tennis. It’s true. The fifth set is about emotion and conditioning. Slowly I leave my body. Nice knowing you, body. I’ve had several out-of-body experiences over my career, but this one is healthy. I trust my skill, and I step out of its way. I remove myself from the equation. At match point, 6–5, I hit a solid serve. He returns to my forehand. I hit a quality ball to his backhand. He’s moving around it, and I know—mistake. If he’s running around my quality ball, that means he’s pressing. He’s not thinking clearly. He’s putting himself out of position, letting the ball play him. He’s not giving himself an opportunity to hit the best possible shot. Thus I know that one of two things is about to happen. He’s going to be handcuffed by my ball and hit it weakly. Or he’s going to be forced into an error.

  Either way, I have a pretty good idea the ball is coming right here. I look at the spot where it’s sure to land. Blake wheels, throws his lower torso out of the way and coldcocks the ball. It lands ten feet from where I expected. Winner.

  I was completely wrong.

  I do the only thing I can do. Walk back. Prepare for the next point.

  At six–all we have a murderous rally, backhand to backhand, and I’m a big loose bag of rattling nerves. In a ten-stroke backhand rally, you know somebody’s going to raise the stakes at any moment, and you’re always sure it’s going to be your opponent. I wait. And wait. But with each stroke, Blake doesn’t raise the stakes. So it falls to me. I step in as if I’m going to cane the ball and instead I hit a backhand drop shot. I’m all in.

  There are times in a match when you want to put just a solid, serviceable swing on the ball, but your blood is so full of adrenaline that you hit it big. This happens often to Blake, not with his swing but his speed. He runs faster than he means to run. He feels so much urgency that he sprints to a ball and gets there sooner than he anticipated. This is what happens now. Sprinting all-out for my backhand drop, he has the racket gripped in such a way that he’s going to have to dig, but instead he gets there so fast he doesn’t need to dig. Meaning, the ball is on him and he has the wrong grip. Instead of crushing the ball, as he should, he’s forced by his grip to punch the ball. Then he holds ground at the net, and I lace a backhand up the line. It passes him by a fair margin.

  Now he’s serving at 6–7. I have match point again. He misses the first serve. I have a nanosecond to decide where he’s coming with his second serve. Aggressive? Safe? I decide he’s going to err on the side of safety. He’s going to roll it to my backhand. So how aggressive do I want to be? Where do I want to station myself? Should I make an irrevocable decision, stand where I can kill the ball if I’m correct, but where I won’t be able to reach it if I’m wrong? Or should I split the difference, stand in the middle ground, where I’ll be able to hit a moderately good shot on most serves, and a perfect shot on none?

  If there is to be a final decision in this match, one final decision on this night of 100,000 decisions, I want that final decision to be mine. I irrevocably commit. He serves, as expected, to my backhand. It hangs just where I thought it would hang, like a soap bubble. I feel all the hairs on my body rise. I feel the crowd rise. I tell myself: Quality cut, rip it, rip it, rip it, you fuck. As the ball leaves my racket I track every inch of its flight. I see the shadow of the ball converging with the ball itself. As they slowly become one, I’m saying aloud: Ball, please please find a hole.

  It does.

  When Blake hugs me at the net, we know we’ve done something special. But I know it better, because I’ve played eight hundred more matches than he has. And this match stands apart from the others. I’ve never been more intellectually aware, never felt the need to be more intellectually aware, and I take a certain intellectual pride in the finished product. I want to sign it.

  After they cut the tape off my feet, after the news conference, Gil and Perry and Darren and Philly and I go to P. J. Clarke’s for food and drinks. By the time I get back to the hotel it’s four in the morning. Stefanie is asleep. As I come in she sits up in bed and smiles.

  You’re crazy, she says.

  I laugh.

  That was unbelievable, she says. You went places out there.

  I did, baby. I went places.

  I lie on the floor next to the bed, try to fall asleep, but I can’t stop replaying the match.

  I hear her voice in the darkness somewhere above me, like an angel.

  How do you feel?

  It was a pretty cool way to spend an evening.

  IN THE SEMIS I’m due to play Robby Ginepri, a touted kid from Georgia. CBS wants mine to be the late match. I go to the tournament director on my knees. I tell him, If I’m lucky enough to get through this match, I’ll have to come back tomorrow. Please don’t make a thirty-five-year-old man get home later than his twenty-two-year-old opponent in the final.

  He reschedules my match, makes it the early semi.

  After two five-setters in a row, no one gives me a chance against Ginepri. He’s fast, solid off both sides, playing the best tennis of his life—and young. And even before dealing with Ginepri, I know the first thing I’ll have to do is chisel through a wall of my own fatigue. The last three sets against Blake are the best tennis I’ve ever played, and the most draining. I tell myself to come out against Ginepri and manufacture adrenaline, pretend I’m down two sets, try to relocate that mindless state I found against Blake.

  It works. Feigning urgency, I win the first set. Now my goal is to conserve en
ergy for tomorrow’s final. I begin to play safe tennis, thinking about my next opponent, and of course that lets Ginepri swing freely, take chances. He wins the second set.

  I banish from my mind all thought of the final. I give Ginepri my full attention. He’s gassed after expending so much energy to tie the match, and I win the third.

  But he wins the fourth.

  I need to start the fifth with fury. I also need to acknowledge that I can’t win every point. I can’t run after everything, can’t lunge for each dink and drop. I can’t go full-speed against a kid who’s still teething. He wants to be out here all night, but I have forty-five minutes of energy left, forty-five minutes of a functioning body. Or maybe just thirty-five.

  I win the set. It’s not possible, but I’m in the final of the U.S. Open at thirty-five years old. Darren, Gil, and Stefanie scoop me off the locker-room floor and go into triage mode. Darren grabs my rackets and runs them to Roman, the stringer. Gil hands me my Gil Water. Stefanie helps me to the car. We race back to the Four Seasons to watch Federer and Hewitt fight for the privilege of playing the old cripple from Vegas.

  It’s the most relaxed you can be before a final, watching the other semi. You tell yourself: Whatever I’m feeling at this moment, it’s better than what those guys are feeling. Then Federer wins, of course. I lean back on the couch and he’s all I’m thinking about, and I know somewhere out there I’m all he’s thinking about. Between now and tomorrow afternoon I need to do everything a little better than he does it, including sleep.

  But I have children. I used to sleep until eleven thirty in the morning on the day of a match. Now I can’t sleep later than seven thirty. Stefanie keeps the children quiet, but something in my body knows they’re up, they want to see their father. More, their father wants to see them.

  After breakfast I kiss them goodbye. Driving to the stadium with Gil, I’m quiet. I know I have no chance. I’m ancient, I’ve played three five-setters in a row. Let’s be real. My only hope is if it goes three or four sets. If it’s a fast match, where conditioning doesn’t come into play, I might get lucky.

  Federer comes onto the court looking like Cary Grant. I almost wonder if he’s going to play in an ascot and a smoking jacket. He’s permanently smooth, I’m constantly rattled, even when serving at 40–15. He’s also dangerous from so many different parts of the court, there’s nowhere to hide. I don’t do well when there’s nowhere to hide. Federer wins the first set. I go into frantic mode, do anything I can to knock him off balance. I get up a break in the second. I break again and win the set.

  I think to myself: Mr. Grant might just have a problem today.

  In the third set, I break him and go up 4–2. I’m serving with a breeze at my back, and Federer is shanking balls. I’m about to go up 5–2, and for a fleeting moment, he and I both think something remarkable is about to happen here. We lock eyes. We share a moment. Then, at 30–love, I hit a kick serve to his backhand, he takes a swing, shanks it. The ball sounds sick as it leaves his racket, like one of my deliberate misfires as a kid. But this sick, ugly misfire somehow wobbles over the net and lands in. Winner. He breaks me, and we’re back on serve.

  In the tiebreak, he goes to a place that I don’t recognize. He finds a gear that other players simply don’t have. He wins 7–1.

  Now the shit is rolling downhill and doesn’t stop. My quads are screaming. My back is closing the store for the night. My decisions become poor. I’m reminded how slight the margin can be on a tennis court, how narrow the space between greatness and mediocrity, fame and anonymity, happiness and despair. We were playing a tight match. We were dead even. Now, due to a tiebreak that made my jaw drop with admiration, the rout is on.

  Walking to the net, I’m certain that I’ve lost to the better man, the Everest of the next generation. I pity the young players who will have to contend with him. I feel for the man who is fated to play Agassi to his Sampras. Though I don’t mention Pete by name, I have him uppermost in my mind when I tell reporters: It’s real simple. Most people have weaknesses. Federer has none.

  29

  I PULL OUT OF THE 2006 AUSTRALIAN OPEN, then pull out of the entire clay season. I hate to do it, but I need to save myself for the 2006 Wimbledon, which I quietly, privately decide will be my last. I’m saving myself for Wimbledon. I never thought I’d say such a thing. I never dreamed a proper, respectful goodbye to Wimbledon would feel so important.

  But Wimbledon has become hallowed ground for me. It’s where my wife shined. It’s where I first suspected that I could win, and where I proved it to myself and the world. Wimbledon is where I learned to bow, to bend my knee, to do something I didn’t want to do, wear what I didn’t want to wear, and survive. Also, no matter how I feel about tennis, the game is my home. I hated home as a boy, and then I left, and I soon found myself homesick. In the final hours of my career I’m continually chastened by that memory.

  I tell Darren this will be my last Wimbledon, and the coming U.S. Open will be my last tournament ever. We make the announcement just as Wimbledon gets under way. Immediately after, I’m startled by how differently my peers look at me. They no longer treat me as a rival, a threat. I’m retired. I’m irrelevant. A wall is let down.

  Reporters ask, Why now? Why did you choose to retire now? I tell them I didn’t. I simply can’t play anymore. That’s the finish line I’ve been seeking, the finish line with the inexorable pull. Can’t play, as opposed to won’t play. Unwittingly, I’ve been seeking that moment when I’d have no choice.

  Bud Collins, the venerable tennis commentator and historian, the coauthor of Laver’s autobiography, sums up my career by saying I’ve gone from punk to paragon. I cringe. To my thinking, Bud sacrificed the truth on the altar of alliteration. I was never a punk, any more than I’m now a paragon.

  Also, several sportswriters muse about my transformation, and that word rankles. I think it misses the mark. Transformation is change from one thing to another, but I started as nothing. I didn’t transform, I formed. When I broke into tennis, I was like most kids: I didn’t know who I was, and I rebelled at being told by older people. I think older people make this mistake all the time with younger people, treating them as finished products when in fact they’re in process. It’s like judging a match before it’s over, and I’ve come from behind too often, and had too many opponents come roaring back against me, to think that’s a good idea.

  What people see now, for better or worse, is my first formation, my first incarnation. I didn’t alter my image, I discovered it. I didn’t change my mind. I opened it. J.P. helps me work through this idea, to explain it to myself. He says people have been fooled by my changing looks, my clothes and hair, into thinking that I know who I am. People see my self-exploration as self-expression. He says that, for a man with so many fleeting identities, it’s shocking, and symbolic, that my initials are A.K.A.

  Sadly, in the early summer of 2006, despite the best efforts of J.P. and others, I can’t yet explain this to reporters. Even if I could, the press room at the All England Club isn’t the place.

  I can’t explain it to Stefanie either, but I don’t need to. She knows all. In the days and hours leading up to Wimbledon, she stares into my eyes and pats my cheek. She talks to me about my career. She talks about hers. She tells me about her last Wimbledon. She didn’t know it would be her last. She says it’s better this way, to know, to go out on my own terms.

  Wearing a necklace made for me by Jaden—a chain of block letters that spells out Daddy Rocks—I face Boris Pashanski, from Serbia, in the first round. As I step on the court, the applause is loud and long. On the first serve, I can’t see the court, because my eyes are filled with tears. Despite feeling as if I’m playing in a suit of armor, with a back that will not loosen, I persist, endure. I win.

  In the second round I beat Andreas Seppi, from Italy, in straight sets. I’m playing well, which gives me hope going into my third-round match, against Nadal. He’s a brute, a freak, a force of nature, as st
rong and balletic a player as I’ve ever seen. But I feel—the delusional effects of winning—that I might be able to make inroads. I like my chances. I lose the first set, 7–6, but take hope from how close it was.

  Then he annihilates me. The match takes seventy minutes. My window of opportunity is fifty-five. That’s when I start to feel my back. Late in the match, with Nadal serving, I can no longer stand still. I need to move around, stomp my foot, get the blood flowing. The stiffness is so severe, the pain so great, returning is the last thing on my mind. I’m thinking only of remaining vertical.

  After, in a moment dripping with irony, Wimbledon officials break with tradition to hold an on-court interview with Nadal and me. They never hold on-court interviews. I tell Gil: Sooner or later, I knew I’d get Wimbledon to break with tradition.

  Gil isn’t laughing. He never laughs while a fight is still going on.

  It’s almost over, I tell him.

  I go to Washington, D.C., and play an Italian qualifier named Andrea Stoppini. He beats me as if I’m the qualifier, and I feel ashamed. I thought I needed a tune-up for the U.S. Open, but this tune-up has left me shaken. I tell reporters that I’m struggling with the end more than I expected. I tell them that the best way I can explain it is this: Many of you, I’m sure, don’t like your jobs. But imagine if someone told you right now that your story about me would be your last. After this, you’ll never be able to write another word for as long as you live. How would you feel?

  EVERYONE TRAVELS TO NEW YORK. The whole team. Stefanie, the children, my parents, Perry, Gil, Darren, Philly. We invade the Four Seasons and colonize Campagnola. The children smile to hear the applause as we walk in. To my ear, the applause sounds different this time. It has a different timbre. It has a subtext. They know this isn’t about me, it’s about all of us finishing something special together.

  Frankie seats us at the corner table. He makes a big fuss over Stefanie and the children. I watch him serve Jaden all my favorite foods, and I watch Jaden enjoy them. I watch Jaz enjoy the food too, though she insists that each entrée remain separate. They mustn’t touch. A variation of the blueberry muffin imperative. I watch Stefanie watching the kids, smiling, and I think of the four of us, four distinct personalities. Four different surfaces. And yet a matching set. Complete. On the eve of my final tournament, I enjoy that sense we all seek, that knowledge we get only a few times in life, that the themes of our life are connected, the seeds of our ending were there in the beginning, and vice versa.