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I tell him about my spine, my spondylolisthesis, the vertebra that’s out of sync. He jots a note, says he’ll look up the condition in the medical books and learn all about it for me.

Bottom line, he says, if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to have a short career. Big-time back problems, knee problems. Plus, keep doing curls the way I saw you doing them, you’re going to have elbow problems.

While spelling it all out, Gil sometimes literally spells it out. He likes to emphasize a point by spelling the key word. He likes to break words down for me, crack them open, reveal the knowledge inside, like the meat inside a nut.
Calorie
, for instance. He says it comes from the Latin
calor
, which is a measure of heat. People think calories are bad, Gil says, but calories are just measures of heat, and we need heat. With food, you feed your body’s natural furnace. How can that be bad? It’s
when
you eat,
how much
you eat, the
choices
you make—that’s what makes all the difference.

People think eating is bad, he says, but we need to stoke our internal fire.

Yes, I think. My internal fire needs stoking.

Speaking of heat, Gil mentions casually that he hates the warm weather. He can’t bear it. He’s unusually sensitive to high temperatures, and his idea of torture is sitting under the direct sun. He turns up the air-conditioning.

I make a note.

I tell him about running with Pat on Rattlesnake Hill, how I feel I’ve hit a plateau. He asks, How much do you run every day?

Five miles.

Why?

I don’t know.

Have you ever run five miles in a match?

No.

How often in a match do you run more than five steps in one direction before stopping?

Not very.

I don’t know anything about tennis, but it seems
to me
that, by the third step, you’d better be thinking about stopping. Otherwise you’re going to hit the ball and keep running, which means you’ll be out of position for your next shot. The trick is to throttle down, then hit, then slam on the brakes, then hustle back. The way I see it, your sport isn’t about running, it’s about starting and stopping. You need to focus on building the muscles necessary for starting and stopping.

I laugh and tell him that might be the smartest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about tennis.

When it’s time to lock up for the night, I help Gil clean the gym, turn off the lights. We sit in my car and talk. Eventually, he notices that my teeth are chattering.

Doesn’t this fancy car have a heater?

Yes.

Why don’t you turn it on?

Because you said you’re sensitive to heat.

He stammers. He says he can’t believe I remembered. And he can’t bear to think I’ve been suffering all this time. He turns up the car heater full blast. We continue talking, and soon I notice that beads of sweat are forming on Gil’s brow and upper lip. I turn off the heat and roll down the windows. We talk for another half hour, until he notices that I’m starting to turn blue. He turns on the heater full blast. In this way, back and forth, we talk, and demonstrate our respect for each other, until the early hours of the morning.

I tell Gil a little about my story. My father, the dragon, Philly, Perry. I tell him about being banished to the Bollettieri Academy. Then he tells me his story. He talks about growing up outside Las Cruces, New Mexico. His people were farmworkers. Pecans and cotton. Hard work. Wintertime, pick the pecans. Summertime, cotton. Then they moved to East LA., and Gil grew up fast on the hard streets.

It was war, he says. I got shot. Still have the bullet hole in my leg. Also, I didn’t speak English, only Spanish, so I’d sit in school, self-conscious, not talking. I learned English by reading Jim Murray in the
Los Angeles Times
and listening to Vin Scully calling Dodger games on the radio. I had a little transistor. KABC, every night. Vin Scully was my English teacher.

After mastering English, Gil decided to master the body God gave him.

He says, Only the strong survive, right? Well, we couldn’t afford weights in our neighborhood, so we made our own. Guys who’d been in the joint showed us how. For instance, we filled coffee cans with cement, stuck them on the ends of a pole, and that’s how we made a bench press. We used milk crates for the actual bench.

He tells me about getting his black belt in karate. He tells me about some of his twenty-two professional fights, including one in which he got his jaw shattered. But I wasn’t knocked out, he says proudly.

When it’s time to say goodnight, because the sky is growing lighter, I reluctantly shake Gil’s hand and tell him I’ll be back tomorrow.

I know, he says.

I
WORK WITH
G
IL
throughout the fall of 1989. The gains are big, and our bond is strong. Eighteen years older than I, Gil can tell that he’s a father figure. On some level I also sense that I’m the son he never had. (He has three children, all daughters.) It’s one of the few things that go unspoken between us. Everything else gets hashed out, spelled out.

Gil and his wife, Gaye, have a lovely tradition. Thursday nights, everyone in the family can order whatever they want for dinner and Gaye will cook it. One daughter wants hot dogs? Fine. Another wants chocolate chip pancakes? No problem. I make a habit of stopping by Gil’s house on Thursdays, eating off everyone’s plates. Before long I’m eating at Gil’s every other night. When it’s late, when I don’t feel like driving home, I crash on his floor.

Gil has another tradition. No matter how uncomfortable a person looks, if they’re asleep, they can’t be all that uncomfortable, you should leave them be. So he never wakes me. He just throws a light afghan over me and lets me sleep until morning.

Listen, Gil says one day, we love having you here, you know that. But I have to ask. Good-looking kid, wealthy kid, kid who can be lots of places—and yet you come to my house for Thursday-night hot dogs. You sleep curled on my floor.

I like sleeping on floors. My back feels better.

I’m not talking about the floor. I mean, here. Are you sure you want to be—here? You must have better places to be.

Can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be, Gil.

He gives me a hug. I thought I knew what a hug was, but you’ve really never been hugged until you’ve been hugged by a man with a fifty-six-inch chest.

On Christmas Eve, 1989, Gil asks if I’d like to come over to the house, celebrate the holiday with his family.

Thought you’d never ask.

While Gaye bakes cookies, while their daughters are upstairs sleeping, Gil and I sit on the living-room floor putting together toys and train sets from Santa. I tell Gil that I don’t know when I’ve felt so peaceful.

You wouldn’t be happier at a party? With friends?

I’m right where I want to be.

I stop putting together the toy in my hand and fix Gil with a look. I tell him my life has never for one day belonged to me. My life has always belonged to someone else. First, my father. Then Nick. And always, always, tennis. Even my body wasn’t my own until I met Gil, who is doing the one thing fathers are supposed to do. Making me stronger.

So being here, Gil, with you and your family, I feel for the first time in my life that I’m where I belong.

Enough said. I’ll never ask again. Merry Christmas, son.

I
F
I
MUST PLAY TENNIS
, the loneliest sport, then I’m sure as hell going to surround myself with as many people as I can off the court. And each person will have his specific role. Perry will help with my disordered thoughts. J.P. will help with my troubled soul. Nick will help with the basics of my game. Philly will help with details, arrangements, and always have my back.

Sportswriters rip me about my
entourage
. They say I travel with all these people because it feeds my ego. They say I need this many people around me because I can’t be alone. They’re half right. I don’t like to be alone. But these people around me aren’t an entourage, they’re a team. I need them for company, for counsel, and for a kind of rolling education. They’re my crew, but also my gurus, my blue-ribbon panel. I study them and steal from them. I take an expression from Perry, a story from J.P., an attitude or gesture from Nick. I learn about myself, create myself, through imitation. How else could I do it? I spent my childhood in an isolation chamber, my teen years in a torture chamber.

In fact, rather than make my team smaller, I want to grow it. I want to add Gil, formally. I want to hire him, full-time, to help me with my strength and conditioning. I phone Perry at Georgetown and tell him my problem.

What problem? he says. You want to work with Gil? So hire Gil.

But I’ve got Pat. The Spitting Chilean. I can’t just
fire
the guy. I can’t fire anyone. And even if I could, how do I then ask Gil to leave a high-profile, high-paying job with UNLV—to work exclusively for me? Who the fuck am I?

Perry tells me to have Nick reassign Pat to work with the other tennis players Nick coaches. Then, he says, sit down with Gil and put it to him. Let him decide.

In January 1990 I ask Gil if he would do me the great honor of working with me, traveling with me, training me.

Leave my job here at UNLV?

Yes.

But I don’t know anything about tennis.

Don’t worry, I don’t either.

He laughs.

Gil, I think I can accomplish a lot. I think I can do
—things
. But after our short time together, I’m reasonably certain that I can only do them with your help.

He doesn’t need a hard sell. Yes, he says. I would like to work with you.

He doesn’t ask how much I’ll pay him. He doesn’t mention the word
money
. He says we’re two kindred spirits, embarking on a great adventure. He says he’s known it almost from the day we met. He says I have a destiny. He says I’m like Lancelot.

Who’s that?

Sir Lancelot. You know, King Arthur. Knights of the Round Table. Lancelot was Arthur’s greatest knight.

Did he kill dragons?

Every knight kills dragons.

There is only one obstacle in our path. Gil doesn’t have a gym at his house. He’ll need to convert his garage into a full-scale gym—which will take lots of time, because he wants to build the weight machines himself.

Build
them?

I want to weld the metal, make the ropes and pulleys, with my own hands. I don’t want to leave anything to chance. I won’t have you injured. Not on my watch.

I think of my father, building his ball machines and blowers, and wonder if this is the one and only thing he and Gil have in common.

Until Gil’s gym is complete, we continue to work out at UNLV. He keeps his job, works with the Rebels basketball team through a brilliant season, culminating in a blowout win over Duke for the national title. When his duties are done, when his home gym is
almost
done, Gil says he’s ready.

Andre, now, are
you
ready? One last time, are you sure you want to do this?

Gil, I am more sure about this than I’ve ever been about anything I’ve ever done.

Me too.

He says he’s going to drive to the college this morning and turn in his keys.

Hours later, as he walks outside the college, there I am, waiting. He laughs when he sees me, and we go for cheeseburgers, to celebrate new beginnings.

S
OMETIMES A WORKOUT WITH
G
IL
is actually a conversation. We don’t touch a single weight. We sit on the free benches and free-associate. There are many ways, Gil says, of getting strong, and sometimes talking is the best way. When he’s not teaching me about my body, I’m teaching him about tennis, the life on tour. I tell him how the game is organized, the circuit of minor tournaments and the four majors, or Grand Slams, that all players use as yardsticks. I tell him about the tennis calendar, how we start the year on the other side of the world, at the Australian Open, and then just chase the sun. Next comes clay season, in Europe, which culminates in Paris with the French Open. Then comes June, grass season, and Wimbledon. I stick out my tongue and make a face. Then come the dog days, the hard-court season, which concludes with the U.S. Open. Then the indoor season—Stuttgart, Paris, the World Championships. It’s all very
Groundhog Day
. Same venues, same opponents, only the years and scores are different, and over time the scores all run together like phone numbers.

I try to tell Gil about my psyche. I start at the beginning, the central truth.

He laughs. You don’t actually
hate
tennis, he says.

I do, Gil, I really do.

He gets a look on his face, and I wonder if he’s thinking he might have quit his job at UNLV too soon.

If that’s true, he says, why play?

I’m not suited for anything else. I don’t know how to do anything else. Tennis is the only thing I’m qualified for. Also, my father would have a fit if I did anything different.

Gil scratches his ear. This is a new one on him. He’s known hundreds of athletes, but he’s never known one who hated athletics. He doesn’t know what to say. I reassure him that there’s nothing to be said. I don’t understand it myself. I can only tell him how it is.

I also tell Gil about the
Image Is Everything
debacle. I feel, somehow, that he needs to know, so he’ll understand what he’s got himself into. The
whole thing still makes me angry, but now the anger has seeped down deep. Hard to talk about, hard to reach. It feels like a spoonful of acid in the pit of my stomach. Hearing about it, Gil feels angry too, but he has less trouble accessing his anger. He wants to act on it, right now. He wants to punch out an advertising exec or two. He says: Some slap-dick on Madison Avenue puts together a silly ad campaign, and gets you to say a line into a camera, and it means something about you?

Millions of people think so. And say so. And write so.

They took advantage of you, he says. Plain and simple. Not your fault. You didn’t know what you were saying, you didn’t know how it would be taken and twisted and misinterpreted.