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 cer- tainly not my game. I’m not anything the public thinks I am. I’m not a showman simply be- cause I come from Vegas and wear loud clothes. I’m not an enfant terrible, a phrase that ap- pears 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. Only 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 fi- nally given up on the headstands. He phones to tell me about the astonishing variety of tou- pees 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 pil- low, 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 de- veloped 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 re- venge 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 en- joyed 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 radic- ally 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 un- settles 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 hob- bit 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 man- age 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 Ve- gas. 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.
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 temper- ature 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.
THE CROWD AT STRATTON MOUNTAIN welcomes me days later, however, like a prod- igal. 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 tourna- ment. I wake soon after to discover that I’m number four in the world. But I’m too spent to cel- ebrate. 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 rack- ets 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 scen- ario. 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 Spit- ting 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.
BUT 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 pic- tures 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. Be- fore 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 Geor- getown. 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 lo- gical and articulate. If I’m a returner, he’s a reworder. First, he redefines the problem as a ne-
gotiation 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 negoti- ation?
PHILLY 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 nondenom- inational, 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 dif- ferent. 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 ser- vice. 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.
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.