Open (19 page)

Roland Garros provides no escape from the strangeness. It’s the only place I’ve ever played that reeks of cigars and pipes. While I’m serving, at a critical point in a match, a finger of pipe smoke curls under my nose. I want to find the person smoking that pipe and admonish him, and yet I don’t want to find that person, because I can’t imagine what sort of gnarled hobbit is sitting at an outdoor tennis match puffing on a pipe.

Despite my unease, I manage to beat my first three opponents. I even beat the great clay master Guillermo Pérez-Roldán in the quarterfinal. In the semis I run into Mats Wilander. He’s ranked number three in the world, but to my mind he’s the player of the moment. When one of his matches is on TV, I stop whatever I’m doing and watch. He’s on his way to an astounding year. He’s already won the Australian Open and is the favorite to win this tournament. I manage to take him to a fifth set, then lose 6–0, cramping badly.

I remind Nick that I’m skipping Wimbledon. I say, Why switch to grass and expend all that energy? Let’s take a month off, rest, get ready for the hard courts of summer.

He’s more than happy not to go to London. He doesn’t like Wimbledon any more than I do. Besides, he wants to hurry back to the U.S. and find me a better trainer.

N
ICK HIRES A
C
HILEAN STRONGMAN
named Pat who never asks me to do anything he’s not willing to do himself, which I respect. But Pat also has a habit of spitting on me when he talks, and leaning over me while I’m lifting weights, drizzling sweat on my face. I feel as if I should show up for Pat’s workout sessions in a plastic poncho.

The mainstay of Pat’s training regimen is a brutal daily run up and down a hill outside Vegas. The hill is remote and sunbaked, and gets hotter as you near the top, as if it’s an active volcano. It’s also an hour from my father’s house, which seems unnecessarily far. Nothing like driving to Reno for a run. Pat insists, however, that this hill is the answer to all my physical problems. When we get to the base and pile out of the car, he starts running straight up, and orders me to follow. Within minutes I’m holding my side, sweat rolling off me. By the time we reach the summit I can’t breathe. According to Pat, this is good. This is healthy.

A battered truck appears one day as Pat and I crest the hill. An ancient Native American man climbs out. He comes toward us with a pole. If he
wants to kill me, I won’t be able to fend him off, because I can’t lift my arms. And I won’t be able to run away, because I can’t draw breath.

The man asks, What are you doing here?

We’re training. What are you doing here?

Catching me some rattlesnakes.

Rattlesnakes! There are rattlesnakes out here?

There’s training out here?

When I stop laughing the Indian says, more or less, that I must have been born with a horseshoe up my ass, because this is Rattlesnake Fucking Hill. He catches twelve rattlers every day on this hill, and he expects to catch twelve more this morning. It’s a flat-out miracle that I haven’t stepped on one, big and plump and ready to strike.

I look at Pat, and feel an urge to spit on him.

I
N
J
ULY
I
GO
to Argentina as one of the youngest men ever to play for the U.S. Davis Cup team. I play well against Martín Jaite, from Argentina, and the crowd gives me its grudging respect. I’m leading two sets to none, ahead 4–0 in the third, waiting for Jaite’s serve. I’m hunched against the cold, because it’s the dead of winter in Argentina. The temperature must be thirty degrees. Jaite hits a let serve, then hits a bending unreturnable serve that I reach up and catch with my hand. A riot breaks out. The crowd thinks I’m trying to show up their countryman, disrespecting him. They boo me for several minutes.

The next day’s newspapers kill me. Rather than defend myself, I react with truculence. I say I’ve always wanted to do something like that. The truth is, I was just cold and not thinking. I was being stupid, not cocky. My reputation takes a major hit.

T
HE CROWD AT
S
TRATTON
M
OUNTAIN
welcomes me days later, however, like a prodigal. I play to please them. I play to thank them for banishing the memory of Argentina. Something about these people, these emerald mountains, this Vermont air—I win the tournament. I wake soon after to discover that I’m number four in the world. But I’m too spent to celebrate. Between Pat and Davis Cup and the grind of the tour, I’m sleeping twelve hours a night.

I fly to New York in the late summer to play a minor tournament in New Jersey, a tune-up for the 1988 U.S. Open. I reach the final and face Tarango. I beat him soundly, a delicious victory, because I can still close
my eyes and see Tarango cheating me when I was eight. My first loss. I’ll never forget. Each time I hit a winner I think, Fuck you, Jeff. Fuck. You.

At the U.S. Open I reach the quarters. I’m due to face Jimmy Connors. Before the match I approach him meekly in the locker room and remind him that we once met. In Las Vegas? I was four? You were playing at Caesars Palace? We hit some balls together?

Nope, he says.

Oh. Well. Actually, we met again, several times, when I was seven. I used to deliver rackets to you? My father strung your rackets whenever you came to town, and I’d bring them to you at your favorite restaurant on the Strip?

Nope, he says again, then lies back on a bench and pulls a long white towel over his legs and closes his eyes.

Dismissed.

This gibes with everything I’ve heard about Connors from other players. Asshole, they say. Rude, condescending, egomaniac prick. But I thought he’d treat me differently, I thought he’d show me some love, given our longtime connection.

Just for that, I tell Perry, I’m beating this guy in three easy sets—and he’s going to win no more than nine games.

The crowd is pulling for Connors. It’s the opposite of Stratton. Here, I’m cast as the bad guy. I’m the impertinent upstart who dares to oppose the elder statesman. The crowd wants Connors to defy the odds, and Father Time, and I’m standing in the way of that dream scenario. Each time they cheer I think: Do they realize what this guy is like in the locker room? Do they know what his peers say about him? Do they have any concept of how he responds to a friendly hello?

I’m cruising, winning easily, when a man in the upper bleachers calls out,
C’mon, Jimmy, he’s a punk—you’re a legend!
The words hang in midair for a moment, bigger and louder than the Goodyear Blimp overhead, and then twenty thousand fans guffaw. Connors cracks a sly smile, nods, and hits a ball as a souvenir to the man who yelled.

Now the crowd erupts. A standing ovation.

Running on adrenaline and anger, I punk the legend in the final set, 6–1.

After the match, I tell reporters about my pre-match prediction, and then they tell Connors.

He says: I enjoy playing guys who could be my children. Maybe he’s one of them. I spent a lot of time in Vegas.

In the semis I lose again to Lendl. I take him to a fourth set, but he’s too strong. Trying to wear him out, I wear myself out. Despite the best efforts of Limping Lenny and Pat the Spitting Chilean, I’m not able to stay with a man of Lendl’s caliber. I tell myself that when I get back to Vegas, the search must continue for someone, anyone, who can make me battle ready.

B
UT NO ONE CAN MAKE
me ready for the battle with the media, because it’s not really a battle, it’s a massacre. Each day brings another anti-Agassi screed in another magazine or newspaper. A dig from a fellow player. A diatribe from a sportswriter. A fresh piece of libel, served up as analysis. I’m a punk, I’m a clown, I’m a fraud, I’m a fluke. I have a high ranking because of a conspiracy, a cabal of networks and teenagers. I don’t rate the attention I get because I haven’t won a slam.

Millions of fans like me, apparently. I get potato sacks full of fan mail, including naked pictures of women with their phone numbers scrawled along the margin. And yet each day I’m vilified because of my look, because of my behavior, because of no reason at all. I absorb the role of villain-rebel, accept it, grow into it. The role seems like part of my job, so I play it. Before long, however, I’m being typecast. I’m to be the villain-rebel forever, in every match and every tournament.

I turn to Perry. I fly back east and visit him for a weekend. He’s studying business at Georgetown. We go out for big dinners, and he takes me to his favorite local bar, the Tombs, and over beers he does what Perry has always done. He reshapes my anguish, makes it more logical and articulate. If I’m a returner, he’s a reworder. First, he redefines the problem as a negotiation between me and the world. Then he clarifies the terms of the negotiation. He grants that it’s horrible to be a sensitive person who’s publicly excoriated every day, but he insists it’s only temporary. There’s a time limit to this torture. Things will get better, he says, the moment I start to win Grand Slams.

Win? What’s the point? Why should winning change people’s minds about me? Win or lose, I’ll still be the same person. That’s why I need to win? To shut people up? To satisfy a bunch of sportswriters and reporters who don’t know me? Those are the terms of this negotiation?

P
HILLY SEES THAT
I’
M SUFFERING
, that I’m searching. He’s searching too. He’s been searching all his life, and recently he’s stepped up
the search. He tells me he’s been going to a church, or a kind of church, in an office complex on the west side of Vegas. It’s nondenominational, he says, and the pastor is different.

He drags me to the church and I have to admit, he’s right, the pastor, John Parenti, is different. He wears jeans, a T-shirt and he has long, sandy-brown hair. He’s more surfer than pastor. He’s unconventional, which I respect. He’s—no other way to say it—a rebel. I also like his prominent aquiline nose, his sad canine eyes. Above all, I like the casual vibe of his service. He simplifies the Bible. No ego, no dogma. Just common sense and clear thinking.

Parenti is so casual, he doesn’t want to be called Pastor Parenti. He insists we call him J.P. He says he wants his church to feel unlike a church. He wants it to feel like a home where friends gather. He doesn’t have any answers, he says. He just happens to have read the Bible a few dozen times, front to back, and he has some observations to share.

I think he has more answers than he’s letting on. And I need answers. I consider myself a Christian, but J.P.’s church is the first one where I’ve felt truly close to God.

I attend with Philly every week. We time our arrival so that we walk in just as J.P. starts talking, and we always sit in the back, slouched low, so we don’t get recognized. One Sunday Philly says he wants to meet J.P. I hang back. Part of me would like to meet J.P. too, but part of me is wary of strangers. I’ve always been shy, but the recent avalanche of bad press has made me borderline paranoid.

Days later I’m driving around Vegas, feeling gutted after reading the latest attacks on me. I find myself parked outside J.P.’s church. It’s late, all the lights are off—except one. I peer in the window. A secretary is doing some paperwork. I knock at the door and tell the woman I need to speak with J.P. She says he’s at home. She doesn’t say,
Where you should be
. With a shaky voice I ask if she could please phone him. I really need to talk to him. To somebody. She dials J.P. and hands me the receiver.

Hello? he says.

Hi. Yes. You don’t know me. My name is Andre Agassi, I’m a tennis player, and, well, it’s just—

I know you. I’ve seen you in church the last six months. I recognized you, of course. I just didn’t want to bother you.

I thank him for his discretion, for respecting my privacy. I haven’t been getting that kind of respect lately. I say, Look, I wonder if we could spend some time together. Talk.

When?

Now?

Oh. Well, I guess I could come down to the office and meet you.

With all due respect, can I come to wherever you are? I have a fast car, and I think I can get there faster than you can get here.

He pauses. OK, he says.

I’m there in thirteen minutes. He meets me on his doorstep.

Thanks for agreeing to see me. I feel like I have nowhere else to turn.

What is it you need?

I wonder if we can just, um, get to know each other?

He smiles. Listen, he says, I don’t do father figure real well.

I nod, laugh at myself. I say, Right, right. But maybe you could give me some assignments? Life assignments? Reading assignments?

Like a mentor?

Yeah.

I don’t do mentor real well either.

Oh.

Talking, listening, fellowship—those things I can do.

I frown.

Look, J.P. says, my life is as screwed up as the next guy’s. Maybe more. I can’t offer much in the way of shepherding. I’m not that kind of pastor. If you’re looking for advice, I’m sorry. If you’re looking for a friend, that we can do, maybe.

I nod.

He holds open the door, asks if I’d like to come in. But I ask if he’d like to go for a drive. I think better when I drive.

He cranes his neck and sees my white Corvette. It looks like a small private plane parked in his driveway. The color drains a bit from his face.

I drive J.P. all over Vegas, up and down the Strip, then into the mountains that circle the town. I show him what the Vette can do, open up the engine on a lonely stretch of highway, then open up myself. I tell him my story, in a ragged and disorderly fashion, and he has Perry’s knack for saying it all back to me, artfully reworded. He understands my contradictions, and reconciles a few of them.

You’re a kid who still lives with his parents, he says, but you’re known around the planet. That’s got to be hard. You’re trying to express yourself freely and creatively and artistically, and you’re slammed at every turn. That’s
very
hard.

I tell him about the knock on me, that I’ve snuck up on my high ranking, that I’ve never beaten anyone good, that I’ve been lucky. Horseshoe
up my ass. He says I’m experiencing backlash, and never even got to enjoy the lash.