Open (24 page)

I’m in the final—at last. My first final at a slam. I’m facing Gómez, from Ecuador, whom I just beat weeks ago. He’s thirty, on the verge of retiring—in fact, I thought he
was
retired. At last, the newspapers say, Agassi is going to realize his potential.

T
HEN, CATASTROPHE STRIKES
. The night before the final, I’m taking a shower and I feel the hairpiece Philly bought me suddenly disintegrate in my hands. I must have used the wrong kind of conditioner. The weave is coming undone—the damned thing is falling apart.

In a state of abject panic I summon Philly to my hotel room.

Fucking disaster, I tell him. My hairpiece—look!

He examines it.

We’ll let it dry, then clip it in place, he says.

With what?

Bobby pins.

He runs all over Paris looking for bobby pins. He can’t find any. He phones me and says, What the hell kind of city is this? No bobby pins?

In the hotel lobby he bumps into Chris Evert and asks her for bobby pins. She doesn’t have any. She asks why he needs them. He doesn’t answer. At last he finds a friend of our sister Rita, who has a bag full of bobby pins. He helps me reconfigure the hairpiece and set it in place, and keeps it there with no fewer than twenty bobby pins.

Will it hold? I ask.

Yeah, yeah. Just don’t move around a lot.

We both laugh darkly.

Of course I could play without my hairpiece. But after months and months of derision, criticism, mockery, I’m too self-conscious.
Image Is Everything?
What would they say if they knew I’ve been wearing a hairpiece all this time? Win or lose, they wouldn’t talk about my game. They would talk only about my hair. Instead of a few kids at the Bollettieri Academy laughing at me, or twelve thousand Germans at Davis Cup, the whole world would be laughing. I can close my eyes and almost hear it. And I know I can’t take it.

W
ARMING UP BEFORE THE MATCH
, I pray. Not for a win, but for my hairpiece to stay on. Under normal circumstances, playing in my first final of a slam, I’d be tense. But my tenuous hairpiece has me catatonic. Whether or not it’s slipping, I imagine that it’s slipping. With every lunge, every leap, I picture it landing on the clay, like a hawk my father shot from the sky. I can hear a gasp going up from the crowd. I can picture millions of people suddenly leaning closer to their TVs, turning to each other and in dozens of languages and dialects saying some version of: Did Andre Agassi’s
hair
just fall off?

My game plan for Gómez reflects my jangled nerves, my timidity. Knowing he doesn’t have young legs, knowing he’ll fold in a fifth set, I plan to stretch out the match, orchestrate long rallies, grind him down. As the match begins, however, it’s clear that Gómez also knows his age, and thus he’s trying to speed everything up. He’s playing quick, risky tennis. He wins the first set in a hurry. He loses the second set, but also in a hurry. Now I know that the longest we’ll be out here is three hours, rather than four, which means conditioning won’t play a role. This is now a shot-making match, the kind Gómez can win. With two sets completed, and not much time off the clock, I’m facing a guy who’s going to be fresh throughout, even if we go five.

Of course my game plan was fatally flawed from the start. Pathetic, really. It couldn’t work, no matter how long the match, because you can’t win the final of a slam by playing not to lose, or waiting for your opponent to lose. My attempt to orchestrate long rallies merely emboldens Gómez. He’s a veteran who knows this might be his last shot at a slam. The only way to beat him is to take away his belief and his desire, by being aggressive. When he sees me playing conservative, orchestrating instead of dominating, it gives him heart.

He wins the third set. As the fourth set begins I realize I’ve made yet another miscalculation. Most players, when they tire late in a match, lose some zip on their serve. They have trouble getting up high on tired legs. But Gómez has a slingshot serve. He never gets up high on his legs. He leans into the ball. When he tires, therefore, he leans that much more, and his natural slingshot action becomes more pronounced. I’ve been waiting for his serve to weaken, and instead it’s getting sharper.

Upon winning the match, Gómez is exceedingly gracious and charming. He weeps. He waves to the cameras. He knows he’ll be a national hero in his native Ecuador. I wonder what it’s like in Ecuador. Maybe I’ll move there. Maybe that’s the only place I’ll be able to hide from the shame I feel at this moment. I sit in the locker room, head bowed, imagining what the hundreds of columnists and headline writers will say, not to mention my peers. I can hear them now. Image Is Everything, Agassi Is Nothing. Mr. Hot Lava Is a Hot Mess.

Philly walks in. I see in his eyes that he doesn’t just sympathize—he lives it. This was his defeat too. He aches. Then he says the right thing, striking the right tone, and I know I’ll always love him for it.

Let’s get the fuck outta this town.

G
IL PUSHES THE BIG TROLLEY
with our bags through Charles de Gaulle Airport. I’m walking a step ahead. I stop to look at the Arrivals and Departures. Gil keeps going. The trolley has a sharp metal edge, and it pushes into my soft, exposed Achilles—I’m wearing loafers with no socks. A jet of my blood spurts onto the glassy floor. Then another. The Achilles is gushing. Gil hurries to get a bandage out of his bag, but I tell him to relax, take his time. It’s good, I say. It’s fitting. There should be a pint of my blood from my Achilles’ heel on the floor before we leave Paris.

I
SKIP
W
IMBLEDON AGAIN
, train hard with Gil all summer. His home garage is finished, filled with a dozen handmade machines and many other unique touches. In the window he’s mounted a massive air-conditioner. On the floor he’s nailed a spongy Astroturf. And in the corner he’s put an old pool table. We shoot nine-ball between reps and sets. Many nights we’re in the gym until four in the morning, Gil searching for new ways to build up my mind, my confidence, along with my body. He’s shaken by the French Open, as am I. One morning, before the sun comes up, he passes along some words his mother always tells him.

Qué lindo es soñar despierto
, he says. How lovely it is to dream while you are awake. Dream while you’re awake, Andre. Anybody can dream while they’re asleep, but you need to dream all the time, and say your dreams out loud, and believe in them.

In other words, when in the final of a slam, I must dream. I must play to win.

I thank him. I give him a gift. It’s a necklace with a gold pyramid, and inside the pyramid are three hoops. It represents the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I designed it, had a jeweler in Florida make it for me, and I have an earring that matches.

He puts it around his neck, and I can tell it will be a cold day in hell before he takes it off.

With Gil in the desert outside Las Vegas, not long after we started working together full-time in 1990

Gil likes to yell at me when I’m working out, but it’s nothing like my father’s yelling. Gil yells love. If I’m trying to set a new personal best, if I’m preparing to lift more than I’ve ever lifted, he stands in the background and yells,
Come on, Andre! Let’s go! Big Thunder!
His yelling makes my heart club against my ribs. Then, for an added dash of inspiration, he’ll sometimes tell me to step aside, and he’ll lift his personal best—550 pounds. It’s an awesome sight to see a man put that much iron above his chest, and it always makes me think that anything is possible. How beautiful to dream. But dreams, I tell Gil, in one of our quiet moments, are so damned tiring.

He laughs.

I can’t promise you that you won’t be tired, he says. But please know this. There’s a lot of good waiting for you on the other side of tired. Get yourself tired, Andre. That’s where you’re going to know yourself. On the other side of tired.

Under Gil’s care and close supervision I pack on ten pounds of muscle by August 1990. We go to New York for the U.S. Open and I feel lean and rangy and dangerous. I take out Andrei Cherkasov, from the Soviet Union, in an easy three-setter. I punch and scratch my way to the semis, beat Becker in four furious sets, and still have plenty of rocket fuel in my tank. Gil and I drive back to the hotel and watch the other men’s semi to see who I’ll get tomorrow. McEnroe or Sampras.

It doesn’t seem possible, but the kid I thought I’d never see again has reconstituted his game. And he’s giving McEnroe the fight of his life. Then I realize he’s not giving McEnroe a fight—McEnroe is giving him a fight, and losing. My opponent tomorrow, incredibly, will be Pete.

The camera moves close on Pete’s face, and I see that he has nothing left. Also, the commentators say his heavily taped feet are covered with blisters. Gil makes me drink Gil Water until I’m ready to throw up, and then I go to bed with a smile, thinking about all the fun I’m going to have, running Pete’s ass off. I’ll have him sprinting from side to side, left to right, from San Francisco to Bradenton, until those blisters bleed. I think of my father’s old maxim:
Put a blister on his brain
. Calm, fit, cocksure, I sleep like a pile of Gil’s dumbbells.

In the morning I feel ready to play a ten-setter. I have no hairpiece issues—because I’m not wearing my hairpiece. I’m using a new, low-maintenance camouflaging system that involves a thicker headband and brightly colored highlights. There’s simply no way I can lose to Pete, that hapless kid I watched with sympathy last year, that poor klutz who couldn’t keep the ball in the court.

Then a different Pete shows up. A Pete who doesn’t ever miss. We’re playing long points, demanding points, and he’s flawless. He’s reaching everything, hitting everything, bounding back and forth like a gazelle. He’s serving bombs, flying to the net, bringing his game right to me. He’s laying wood to my serve. I’m helpless. I’m angry. I’m telling myself: This is not happening.

Yes, this is happening.

No, this cannot be happening.

Then, instead of thinking how I can win, I begin to think of how I can avoid losing. It’s the same mistake I made against Gómez, with the same result. When it’s all over I tell reporters that Pete gave me a good old-fashioned New York street mugging. An imperfect metaphor. Yes, I was robbed. Yes, something that belonged to me was taken away. But I can’t fill out a police report, and there is no hope of justice, and everyone will blame the victim.

H
OURS LATER MY EYES FLY OPEN
. I’m in bed at the hotel. It was all a dream. For a splendid half second I believe that I must have fallen asleep on that breezy hill while Philly and Nick were laughing about Pete’s ruined game. I dreamed that Pete, of all people, was beating me in the final of a slam.

But no. It’s real. It happened. I watch the room slowly grow lighter, and my mind and spirit grow palpably darker.

E
VER SINCE
W
ENDI CAME
to watch me film the
Image Is Everything
commercial, she and I have been a couple. She travels with me, takes care of me. We’re a perfect match, because we grew up together, and we figure we can keep growing up together. We come from the same place, want the same things. We love each other madly, though we agree that ours should be an
open
relationship—her word. She says we’re too young to make a commitment, too confused. She doesn’t know who she is. She grew up Mormon, then decided she didn’t believe the tenets of that religion. She went to college, then discovered that it was the completely wrong college for her. Until she knows who she is, she says, she can’t give herself to me completely.

In 1991 we’re in Atlanta with Gil, celebrating my twenty-first birthday. We’re in a bar, a seedy old place in Buckhead, with cigarette-scorched pool tables and plastic beer mugs. The three of us are laughing, drinking, and even Gil, who never touches the stuff, is letting himself get tipsy. To record this night for posterity, Wendi has brought her camcorder. She hands it to me and tells me to film her shooting baskets at one of those tented arcade games. She’s going to school me, she says. I film her shooting for three seconds and then let the camera pan slowly down her body.

Andre, she says, please get the camera off my ass.

In comes a mob of loudmouths. Roughly my age, they look like a local football or rugby team. They make several rude remarks about me, then focus their attention on Wendi. They’re drunk, crude, trying to embarrass me in front of her. I think of Nastase, doing the same thing fourteen years ago.

The rugby team slaps a stack of quarters on the edge of our pool table. One of them says, We got next. They walk off, smirking.

Gil puts down his plastic mug, picks up the quarters, and walks slowly to a vending machine. He buys a bag of peanuts and comes back to the
table. Slowly he works his way through the peanuts, never taking his eyes off the rugby players, until they wisely decide to try another bar.

Wendi giggles and suggests that, in addition to his many functions and duties, Gil should be my bodyguard.

He already is, I tell her. And yet that word doesn’t cut it. That word isn’t adequate to what he is. Gil guards my body, my head, my game, my heart, my girlfriend. He’s the one immovable object in my life. He’s my life guard.