At the car dealership my father goes back and forth with the salesman, and the negotiation quickly turns contentious. Why am I not surprised? Every time my father makes a new offer the salesman walks off to consult his manager. My father clenches and unclenches his fists.
The salesman and my father eventually agree on a price. I’m seconds from owning my dream car. My father puts on his glasses, gives the paperwork a last look. He runs his finger down the itemized list of charges. Wait, what’s this? A charge for $49.99?
Small fee for the paperwork, the salesman says.
Ain’t my fucking paper. That’s your fucking paper. Pay for your own fucking paper.
The salesman doesn’t care for my father’s tone. Hard words are exchanged. My father gets that look in his eye, the same look he had before dropping the trucker. Just the sight of all these cars is giving him the old road rage.
Pops, the car costs $37,000, and you’re flipping out about a $50 fee?
They’re screwing you, Andre! They’re screwing me. The world is trying to screw me!
He storms out of the salesman’s office and into the main showroom, where the managers sit along a high counter. He screams at them: You think you’re safe back there? You think you’re safe behind that counter? Why don’t you come out from behind there?
His dukes are up. He’s ready to fight five men at once.
My mother puts an arm around me and says the best thing we can do now is go outside and wait.
We stand on the sidewalk and watch my father’s tirade through the plate-glass window of the dealership. He’s pounding the desk. He’s waving his hands. It’s like watching a terrible silent movie. I’m mortified, but also slightly envious. I wish I possessed some of my father’s rage. I wish I could tap into it during tough matches. I wonder what I could do in tennis if I could access that rage and aim it across the net. Instead, whatever rage I have, I turn on myself.
Mom, I ask, how do you take it? All these years?
Oh, she says, I don’t know. He hasn’t gone to jail yet. And nobody’s killed him yet. I think we’re pretty lucky, all things considered. Hopefully we’ll get through this incident without either of those two things happening, and move on.
Along with my father’s rage, I wish I had a fraction of my mother’s calm.
Philly and I go back to the dealership the next day. The salesman hands me the keys to my new Corvette, but treats me with pity. He says I’m nothing like my father, and though he means it as a compliment, I feel vaguely offended. Driving home, the thrill of my new Corvette is dampened. I tell Philly that things are going to be different from now on. Weaving in and out of traffic, gunning the engine, I tell him: The time has come. I need to take control of my money. I need to take control of my fucking life.
I’M RUNNING OUT of steam in long matches. And for me every match is long, because my serve is average. I can’t serve my way out of trouble, I get no easy points off my serve, so every opponent takes me the full twelve rounds. My knowledge of the game is improving, but my body is breaking down. I’m skinny, brittle, and my legs give out quickly, followed in short order by my nerve. I tell Nick that I’m not fit enough to compete with the best in the world. He agrees. Legs are everything, he says.
I find a trainer in Vegas, a retired military colonel named Lenny. Tough as burlap, Lenny curses like a sailor and walks like a pirate, the result of being shot in a long-ago war he doesn’t like to talk about. After one hour with Lenny I wish someone would shoot me. Few things give Lenny more pleasure than abusing me and hurling obscenities at me in the process.
In December 1987 the desert turns unseasonably cold. The blackjack dealers wear Santa hats. The palm trees are strung with lights. The hookers on the Strip wear Christmas ornaments for earrings. I tell Perry I can’t wait for this new year. I feel strong. I feel as if I’m starting to get tennis.
I win the first tournament of 1988, in Memphis, and the ball sounds alive as it leaves my racket. I’m growing into my forehand. I’m hitting the ball through opponents. Each one turns to me with a look that says, Where the hell did that come from?
I notice something on the faces of fans too. The way they watch me and ask for my autograph, the way they scream as I enter an arena, makes me uncomfortable, but also satisfies something deep inside me, some hidden craving I didn’t know was there. I’m shy—but I like attention. I cringe when fans start dressing like me—but I also dig it.
Dressing like me in 1988 means wearing denim shorts. They’re my signature. They’re synonymous with me, mentioned in every article and profile. Oddly, I didn’t choose to wear them; they chose me. It was 1987, in Portland, Oregon. I was playing the Nike International Challenge and Nike reps invited me up to a hotel suite to show me the latest demos and clothing samples. McEnroe was there, and of course he was given first choice. He held up a pair of denim shorts and said, What the fuck are these?
My eyes got big. I licked my lips and thought, Whoa. Those are cool. If you don’t want those, Mac, I’ve got dibs.
The moment Mac set them aside, I scooped them up. Now I wear them at all my matches, as do countless fans. Sportswriters murder me for it. They say I’m trying to stand out. In fact—as with my mohawk—I’m trying to hide. They say I’m trying to change the game. In fact I’m trying to prevent the game from changing me. They call me a rebel, but I have no interest in being a rebel, I’m only conducting an everyday, run-of-the-mill teenage rebellion. Subtle distinctions, but important. At heart, I’m doing nothing more than being myself, and since I don’t know who that is, my attempts to figure it out are scattershot and awkward—and, of course, contradictory. I’m doing nothing more than I did at the Bollettieri Academy. Bucking authority, experimenting with identity, sending a message to my father, thrashing against the lack of choice in my life. But I’m doing it on a grander stage.
Whatever I’m doing, for whatever reasons, it strikes a chord. I’m routinely called the savior of American tennis, whatever that means. I think it has to do with the atmosphere at my matches. Besides wearing my outfits, fans come sporting my hairdo. I see my mullet on men and women. (It looks better on the women.) I’m flattered by the imitators, embarrassed, thoroughly confused. I can’t imagine all these people trying to be like Andre Agassi, since I don’t want to be Andre Agassi.
Now and then I start to explain this in an interview, but it never comes out right. I try to be funny, and it falls flat or offends someone. I try to be profound, and I hear myself making no sense. So I stop, fall back on pat answers and platitudes, tell journalists what they seem to want to hear. It’s the best I can do. If I can’t understand my motivations and demons, how can I hope to explain them to journalists on deadline?
To make matters worse, journalists write down exactly what I say, while I’m saying it, word for word, as if this represented the literal truth. I want to tell them, Hold it, don’t write that down, I’m only thinking out loud here. You’re asking about the subject I understand least—me. Let me edit myself, contradict myself. But there isn’t time. They need black-and-white answers, good and evil, simple plot lines in seven hundred words, and then they’re on to the next thing.
Eighteen years old, wearing a frosted mullet and denim shorts, my first signature look
If I had time, if I were more self-aware, I would tell journalists that I’m trying to figure out who I am, but in the meantime I have a pretty good idea of who I’m not. I’m not my clothes. I’m certainly not my game. I’m not anything the public thinks I am. I’m not a showman simply because I come from Vegas and wear loud clothes. I’m not an enfant terrible, a phrase that appears in every article about me. (I think you can’t be something you can’t pronounce.) And, for heaven’s sake, I’m not a punk rocker. I listen to soft, cheesy pop, like Barry Manilow and Richard Marx.
Of course the key to my identity, the thing I know about myself but can’t bring myself to tell journalists, is that I’m losing my hair. I wear it long and fluffy to conceal its rapid departure. O
nly Philly and Perry know, because they’re fellow sufferers. In fact Philly recently flew to New York to meet with an owner of Hair Club for Men, to buy himself a few toupees. He’s finally given up on the headstands. He phones to tell me about the astonishing variety of toupees the Hair Club offers. It’s a hair smorgasbord, he says. It’s like the salad bar at Sizzler, only all hair.
I ask him to pick one up for me. Every morning I find a little more of my identity on my pillow, in my sink, in my drain.
I ask myself: You’re going to wear a hairpiece? During tournaments?
I answer: What choice do I have?
AT INDIAN WELLS, in February 1988, I blaze my way to the semis, where I meet Boris Becker, from West Germany, the most famous tennis player in the world. He cuts an imposing figure, with a shock of hair the color of a new penny and legs as wide as my waist. I catch him at the peak of his powers, but win the first set. Then I lose the next two, including a hard, tough third. We walk off the court glowering at each other like rutting bulls. I promise myself I won’t lose to him the next time we meet.
In March, at Key Biscayne, I face an old schoolmate from the Bollettieri Academy, Aaron Krickstein. We’re often compared to each other, because of our connection with Nick and our precocious skills. I’m up two sets to none and then wear out. Krickstein wins the next two sets. As the fifth set starts I’m cramping. I’m still not where I need to be, physically, to reach the next level. I lose.
I go to Isle of Palms, near Charleston, and win my third tournament. In the middle of the tournament I turn eighteen. The tournament director rolls a cake out to center court, and everyone sings. I’ve never liked birthdays. No one ever took note of my birthday when I was growing up. But this feels different. I’m legal, everyone keeps saying. In the eyes of the law, you’re a grown-up.
Then the law is an ass.
I go to New York City, the Tournament of Champions, a significant milestone because it’s a clash of the top players in the world. Once more I square off against Chang, who’s developed a bad habit since we last met. Every time he beats someone, he points to the sky. He thanks God—credits God—for the win, which offends me. That God should take sides in a tennis match, that God should side against me, that God should be in Chang’s box, feels ludicrous and insulting. I beat Chang and savor every blasphemous stroke. Then I take revenge on Krickstein. In the final I face Slobodan Zivojinovic, a Serb better known for his doubles play. I beat him in straight sets.
I’m winning more often. I should be happy. Instead I’m uptight, because it’s over. I’ve enjoyed a triumphant hard-court season, my body wants to keep playing on hard courts, but clay season is starting. The sudden switch from one surface to another changes everything. Clay is a different game, thus your game must become different, and so must your body. Instead of sprinting from side to side, stopping short and starting, you must slide and lean and dance. Familiar muscles now play supporting roles, dormant muscles dominate. It’s painful enough, under the best of circumstances, that I don’t know who I am. To suddenly become a different person, a clay person, adds another degree of frustration and anxiety.
A friend tells me that the four surfaces in tennis are like the four seasons. Each asks something different of you. Each bestows different gifts and exacts different costs. Each radically alters your outlook, remakes you on a molecular level. After three rounds of the Italian Open, in May 1988, I’m no longer Andre Agassi. And I’m no longer in the tournament.
I go to the 1988 French Open expecting more of the same. Walking into the locker room at Roland Garros, I see all the clay experts leaning against the walls, leering. Dirt rats, Nick calls them. They’ve been here for months, practicing, waiting for the rest of us to finish hard courts and fly into their clay lair.
Disorienting as the new surface is, Paris itself is more of a shock to the system. The city has all the same logistical problems of New York and London, the large crowds and cultural anomalies, but with an added language barrier. Also, the presence of dogs in restaurants unsettles me. The first time I walk into a café, on the Champs-Élysées, a dog raises its leg and unleashes a stream of pee against the table next to mine.
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.
NICK HIRES A CHILEAN 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.
IN JULY 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 think
ing. I was being stupid, not cocky. My reputation takes a major hit.
THE CROWD AT STRATTON MOUNTAIN 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.