I win three of the next four tournaments. Three more beers. Each more delicious than the last. But with every sip, I taste the bitter dregs of guilt.
PERRY AND I FALL right back into our old routine. Horror movies. Long talks. Cambridge. 7-Eleven. Chipwiches. Every now and then, however, I look at him and feel the weight of my betrayal.
We’re walking from Cambridge to 7-Eleven and I can’t hold it in any longer. The guilt is eating away at me. We’re each wearing headphones plugged into Perry’s Walkman, listening to Prince. Purple Rain. I tap Perry on the shoulder and tell him to take off his headphones.
What’s up?
I don’t know how to say this.
He stares.
What is it?
Perry. I broke our pact.
No.
I had a beer in Australia.
Just one?
Four.
Four!
I look down.
He thinks. He stares off at the mountains. Well, he says, we make choices in life, Andre, and you’ve made yours. I guess that leaves me on my own.
But a few minutes later, he’s curious. He asks how the beers tasted, and again I can’t lie. I tell him they were great. I apologize again, but there’s no point in pretending to be remorseful. Perry’s right—I had a choice, for once, and I made it. Sure, I wish I hadn’t broken our pact, but I can’t feel bad about finally exercising free will.
Perry frowns like a father. Not like my father, or his father, but like a TV father. He looks as if he should be wearing a cardigan sweater and smoking a pipe. I realize that the pact Perry and I made, at its root, was a promise to become each other’s fathers. To raise each other. I apologize once more, and I realize how much I missed Perry while I was gone. I make another pact, with myself, that I won’t leave home again.
MY FATHER ACCOSTS ME IN THE KITCHEN. He says we need to talk. I wonder if he heard about the beer.
He tells me to sit at the table. He sits across from me. An unfinished Norman Rockwell separates us. He describes a story he caught recently on 60 Minutes. It was all about a tennis boarding school on the west coast of Florida, near Tampa Bay. The first school of its kind, my father says. A boot camp for young tennis players, it’s run by a former paratrooper named Nick Bollettieri.
So?
So—you’re going there.
What!
You’re not getting any better here in Las Vegas. You’ve beaten all the local boys. You’ve beaten all the boys in the West. Andre, you’ve beaten all the players at the local college! I have nothing left to teach you.
My father doesn’t say the words, but it’s obvious: he’s determined to do things differently with me. He doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes he made with my siblings. He ruined their games by holding on too long, too tight, and in the process he ruined his relationship with them. Things got so bad with Rita that she’s recently run off with Pancho Gonzalez, the tennis legend, who’s at least thirty years her senior. My father doesn’t want to limit me, or break me, or ruin me. So he’s banishing me. He’s sending me away, partly to protect me from himself.
Andre, he says, you’ve got to eat, sleep, and drink tennis. It’s the only way you’re going to be number one.
I already eat, sleep, and drink tennis.
But he wants me to do my eating, sleeping, and drinking elsewhere.
How much does this tennis academy cost?
About $12,000 a year.
We can’t afford that.
You’re only going for three months. That’s $3,000.
We can’t afford that either.
It’s an investment. In you. We’ll find a way.
I don’t want to go.
I can see from my father’s face it’s settled. End of story.
I try to look on the bright side. It’s only three months. I can take anything for three months. Also, how bad could it be? Maybe it will be like Australia. Maybe it will be fun. Maybe there will be unforeseen benefits. Maybe it will feel like playing for a team.
What about school? I ask. I’m in the middle of seventh grade.
There’s a school in the next town, my father says. You’ll go in the morning, for half a day, then play tennis all afternoon and into the night.
Sounds grueling. A short time later my mother tells me that the 60 Minutes report was actually an exposé on this Bollettieri character, who was in essence running a tennis sweatshop that employed child labor.
THEY GIVE A GOODBYE PARTY for me at Cambridge. Mr. Fong looks glum, Perry looks suicidal, my father looks uncertain. We stand around eating cake. We play tennis with the balloons, then pop them with pins. Everyone pats me on the back and says what a blast I’m going to have.
I know, I say. Can’t wait to mix it up with those Florida kids.
The lie sounds like a deliberate miss, like a ball off the wooden rim of my racket.
As the day of my departure draws closer, I don’t sleep well. I wake up thrashing, sweating, twisted up in the sheets. I can’t eat. All at once the concept of homesickness makes perfect sense. I don’t want to leave my home, my siblings, my mother, my best friend. Despite the tension of my home, the occasional terror, I’d give anything to stay. For all the pain my father has caused me, the one constant has been his presence. He’s always been there, at my back, and now he won’t be. I feel abandoned. I thought the one thing I wanted was to be free of him, and now that he’s sending me away, I’m heartbroken.
I spend my last days at home hoping that my mother will come to my rescue. I look at her imploringly, but she looks back with a face that says: I’ve seen him break three kids. You’re lucky to be getting out while you’re whole.
My father drives me to the airport. My mother wants to go but can’t miss a day of work. Perry takes her place. He doesn’t stop talking the whole way. I can’t decide if he’s trying to cheer me up or himself. It’s only three months, he says. We’ll write letters, postcards. You’ll see, it’s going to be fine. You’re going to learn so much. Maybe I’ll even come visit.
I think about Visiting Hours, the cheesy horror movie we saw the night our friendship was born. Perry is acting now the way he acted then, the way he always reacts to fear—twitching, jumping out of his seat. And I’m reacting in my typical way. A cat thrown into a room full of dogs.
5
THE AIRPORT SHUTTLE pulls into the compound just after sunset. The Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, built on an old tomato farm, is nothing fancy, just a few outbuildings that look like cell blocks. They’re named like cell blocks too: B Building, C Building. I look around, half expecting to find a guard tower and razor wire. More ominously, stretching off into the distance I see row after row of tennis courts.
As the sun sinks beyond the inky black marshes, the temperature plummets. I huddle into my T-shirt. I thought Florida was supposed to be hot. A staff member greets me as I step out of the van and marches me straight to my barracks, which are empty and eerily quiet.
Where is everyone?
Study hall, he says. In a few minutes it’ll be free hour. That’s the hour between study hall and bedtime. Why don’t you go down to the rec center and introduce yourself to the others?
In the rec center I find two hundred wild boys, plus a few tough-looking girls, separated into tight cliques. One of the largest cliques is pressed around a Nerf ping-pong table, screaming insults at two boys playing. I press my back against a wall and scan the room. I recognize a few faces, including one or two from the Australia trip. That kid over there—I played him in California. That evil-looking homey right there—I played a tough three-setter against him in Arizona. Everyone looks talented, supremely confident. The kids are all colors, all sizes, all ages, and from all around the world. The youngest is seven, the oldest nineteen. After ruling Las Vegas my whole life, I’m now a tiny fish in a vast pond. Or marsh. And the biggest of the big fish are the best players in the country—teenage Supermen who form the tightest clique in a far corner.
I try to watch the pi
ng-pong game. Even there I’m outclassed. Back home, nobody could beat me at Nerf ping-pong. Here? Half these guys would cream me.
I can’t imagine how I’ll ever fit in at this joint, how I’ll make friends. I want to go home, right now, or at least phone home, but I’d have to call collect and I know my father wouldn’t accept the charges. Just knowing I can’t hear my mother’s voice, or Philly’s, no matter how much I need to, makes me feel panicky. When free hour ends I hurry back to the barracks and lie on my bunk, waiting to disappear into the black marsh of sleep.
Three months, I tell myself. Just three months.
PEOPLE LIKE TO CALL the Bollettieri Academy a boot camp, but it’s really a glorified prison camp. And not all that glorified. We eat gruel—beige meats and gelatinous stews and gray slop poured over rice—and sleep in rickety bunks that line the plywood walls of our military-style barracks. We rise at dawn and go to bed soon after dinner. We rarely leave, and we have scant contact with the outside world. Like most prisoners we do nothing but sleep and work, and our main rock pile is drills. Serve drills, net drills, backhand drills, forehand drills, with occasional match play to establish the pecking order, strong to weak. Sometimes it feels as though we’re gladiators, preparing underneath the Colosseum. Certainly the thirty-five instructors who bark at us during drills think of themselves as slave drivers.
When we’re not drilling, we’re studying the psychology of tennis. We take classes on mental toughness, positive thinking, and visualization. We’re taught to close our eyes and picture ourselves winning Wimbledon, hoisting that gold trophy above our heads. Then we go to aerobics, or weight training, or out to the crushed-shell track, where we run until we drop.
The constant pressure, the cutthroat competition, the total lack of adult supervision—it slowly turns us into animals. A kind of jungle law prevails. It’s Karate Kid with rackets, Lord of the Flies with forehands. One night two boys get into an argument in the barracks. A white boy and an Asian boy. The white boy uses a racial slur, then walks out. For a full hour the Asian boy stands in the middle of the barracks, stretching, shaking out his legs and arms, rolling his neck. He runs through a progression of judo moves, then carefully, methodically tapes his ankles. When the white boy returns, the Asian boy spins, whipsaws his leg through the air, and unleashes a kick that shatters the white boy’s jaw.
The shocking part is that neither boy gets expelled, which greatly adds to the overall sense of anarchy.
Another two boys have a low-grade, long-running feud. It’s mostly taunts, teases, minor stuff—until one boy ups the ante. For days he urinates and defecates into a bucket. Then, late one night, he bursts into the other boy’s barracks and dumps the bucket on his head.
The jungle feeling, the constant threat of violence and ambush, is reinforced, just before lights out, by the sound of drums in the distance.
I ask one of the boys: What the hell is that?
Oh. That’s just Courier. He likes to pound a drum set his parents sent him.
Who?
Jim Courier. From Florida.
Within days I get my first glimpse of the warden, founder, and owner of the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. He’s fiftysomething, but looks 250, because tanning is one of his obsessions, along with tennis and getting married. (He’s got five or six ex-wives, no one is quite sure.) He’s soaked up so much sun, baked himself so deeply beneath so many ultraviolet sunlamps, he’s permanently altered his pigmentation. The one portion of his face that isn’t the color of beef jerky is his mustache, a black, meticulously trimmed quasi-goatee, only without the chin hair, so it looks like a permanent frown. I see Nick striding across the compound, an angry red man in wraparound shades, berating someone who jogs alongside, trying to keep pace, and I pray that I never have to deal with Nick directly. I watch as he slides into a red Ferrari and zooms away, leaving a dorsal fin of dust in his wake.
A boy tells me it’s our job to keep Nick’s four sports cars washed and polished.
Our job? That’s bullshit.
Tell it to the judge.
I ask some of the older boys, some of the veterans, about Nick. Who is he? What makes him tick? They say he’s a hustler, a guy who makes a very nice living off tennis, but he doesn’t love the game or even know it all that well. He’s not like my father, captivated by the angles and numbers and beauty of tennis. Then again, he’s just like my father. He’s captivated by cash. He’s a guy who flunked the exam for Navy pilots, dropped out of law school, then landed one day on the idea of teaching tennis. Stepped in shit. Through a bit of hard work, and a ton of luck, he’s turned himself into this image of a tennis titan, mentor to prodigies. You can learn a few things from him, the other kids say, but he’s no miracle worker.
He doesn’t sound like a guy who can make me stop hating the game.
· · ·
I’M PLAYING A PRACTICE MATCH, putting a fairly good whooping on a kid from the East Coast, when I become aware that Gabriel, one of Nick’s henchmen, is behind me, staring.
After a few more points Gabriel stops the match. He asks, Has Nick seen you play yet?
No, sir.
He frowns, walks off.
Later, over the loudspeaker that carries across all the courts of the Bollettieri Academy, I hear:
Andre Agassi to the indoor supreme court! Andre Agassi, report to the indoor supreme court—immediately!
I’ve never been to the indoor supreme court, and I can’t imagine there’s a good reason for my being summoned now. I run there and find Gabriel and Nick, standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting.
Gabriel says to Nick: You’ve got to see this kid hit.
Nick strolls off into the shadows. Gabriel gets on the other side of the net. He puts me through drills for half an hour. I sneak occasional glances over my shoulder: I can vaguely make out the silhouette of Nick, concentrating, stroking his mustache.
Hit some backhands, Nick says. His voice is like sandpaper on Velcro.
I do as I’m told. I hit backhands.
Now hit some serves.
I serve.
Come to the net.
I come to the net.
That’s enough.
He steps forward. Where are you from?
Las Vegas.
What’s your national ranking?
Number three.
How do I reach your father?
He’s at work. He works nights at the MGM.
How about your mother?
At this hour? She’s probably at home.
Come with me.
We walk slowly to his office, where he asks for my home number. He’s sitting in a tall black leather chair, turned almost away from me. My face feels redder than his face looks. He dials and speaks to my mother. She gives him my father’s number. He dials again.
He’s yelling. Mr. Agassi! Nick Bollettieri here! Right, right. Yes, well, listen to me. I’m going to tell you something very important. Your boy has more talent than anybody I’ve ever seen come through this academy. That’s right. Ever. And I’m going to take him to the top.
What the hell is he talking about? I’m only here for three months. I’m leaving here in sixty-four days. Is Nick saying he wants me to stay here? Live here—forever? Surely my father won’t go for that.
Nick says: That’s right. No, that’s no issue. I’m going to make it so you won’t pay a penny. Andre can stay, free of charge. I’m tearing up your check.
My heart sinks. I know my father can’t resist anything free. My fate is sealed.
Nick hangs up and spins toward me in his chair. He doesn’t explain. He doesn’t console. He doesn’t ask if this is what I want. He doesn’t say a thing besides: Go back out to the courts.
The warden has tacked several years to my sentence, and there’s nothing to be done but pick up my hammer and return to the rock pile.
EVERY DAY AT THE BOLLETTIERI ACADEMY starts with the stench. The surrounding hills are home to several orange-processing plants, which give off a toxic smel
l of burned orange peels. It’s the first thing that hits me when I open my eyes, a reminder that this is real, I’m not back in Vegas, I’m not in my deuce-court bed, dreaming. I’ve never cared much for orange juice, but after the Bollettieri Academy I’ll never be able to look at a gallon of Minute Maid again.
As the sun clears the marshes, burning off the morning mist, I hurry to beat the other boys into the shower, because only the first boys get hot water. Actually, it’s not a shower, just a tiny nozzle that shoots a narrow jet of painful needles, which hardly gets you wet, let alone clean. Then we all rush to breakfast, served in a cafeteria so chaotic, it’s like a mental hospital where the nurses forgot to hand out the meds. But you’d better get there early or it might be worse. The butter will be filled with everyone else’s crumbs, the bread will be gone, the plastic eggs will be ice.
Straight from breakfast we board a bus for school, Bradenton Academy, twenty-six minutes away. I divide my time between two academies, both prisons, but Bradenton Academy makes me more claustrophobic, because it makes less sense. At the Bollettieri Academy, at least I’m learning something about tennis. At Bradenton Academy, the only thing I learn is that I’m stupid.
Bradenton Academy has warped floors, dirty carpets, and a color scheme that’s fourteen shades of gray. There isn’t one window in the building, so the light is fluorescent and the air is stale, filled with a medley of foul odors, chiefly vomit, toilet, and fear. It’s almost worse than the scorched-orange smell back at the Bollettieri Academy.
Other kids, non-tennis kids from town, don’t seem to mind. Some actually thrive at Bradenton Academy, maybe because their life schedules are manageable. They don’t balance school with careers as semipro athletes. They don’t contend with waves of homesickness that rise and fall like nausea. They spend seven hours a day in class, then go home to eat dinner and watch TV with their families. Those of us who commute from the Bollettieri Academy, however, spend four and a half hours in class, then board the bus for the long slog back to our full-time jobs, hitting balls until after dusk, at which time we collapse in heaps on our wooden bunks, to grab a half hour of rest before returning to the original state of nature that is the rec center. Then we nod over our textbooks for a few futile hours before free hour and lights out. We’re always behind on schoolwork and falling ever further behind. The system is rigged, guaranteed to produce bad students as quickly and efficiently as it produces good tennis players.