I stare at Uncle Isar as he strolls through the rooms and hallways of our house. I follow him the way my father followed the British and American soldiers. As I grow familiar with Uncle Isar, as I get to know him better, I like to hang from his shoulders and swing from his arms. He likes it too. He likes to roughhouse, to be tackled and tickled by his nephews and nieces. Every night I hide behind the front door and jump out when Uncle Isar comes home, because it makes him laugh. His booming laughter is the opposite of the sounds that come from the dragon.
One day Uncle Isar goes to the store for a few things. I count the minutes. At last, the front gate clanks open, then clanks shut, meaning I have exactly twelve seconds until Uncle Isar walks through the front door. It always takes people twelve seconds to go from the gate to the door. I crouch, count to twelve, and as the door opens I leap out.
Boo!
It’s not Uncle Isar. It’s my father. Startled, he yells, steps back, then shoots out his fist. Even though he only puts a fraction of his weight into it, my father’s left hook hits my jaw flush and sends me flying. One second I’m excited, joyful, the next I’m sprawled on the ground.
My father stands over me, scowling. What the fuck is the matter with you? Go to your room.
I run to my room and throw myself on my bed. I lie there, shaking, I don’t know how long. An hour? Three? Eventually the door opens and I hear my father.
Grab your racket. Get on the court.
Time to face the dragon.
I hit for half an hour, my head throbbing, my eyes tearing.
Hit harder, my father says. Goddamn it, hit harder. Not in the fucking net!
I turn and face my father. The next ball from the dragon I hit as hard as I can, but high over the fence. I aim for the hawks and I don’t bother pretending it’s an accident. My father stares. He takes one menacing step toward me. He’s going to hit me over the fence. But then he stops, calls me a bad name, and warns me to stay out of his sight.
I run into the house and find my mother lying on her bed, reading a romance novel, her dogs at her feet. She loves animals, and our house is like Dr. Dolittle’s waiting room. Dogs, birds, cats, lizards, and one mangy rat named Lady Butt. I grab one of the dogs and hurl it across the room, ignoring its insulted yelp, and bury my head in my mother’s arm.
Why is Pops so mean?
What happened?
I tell her.
She strokes my hair and says my father doesn’t know any better. Pa has his own ways, she says. Strange ways. We have to remember that Pa wants what’s best for us, right?
Part of me feels grateful for my mother’s endless calm. Part of me, however, a part I don’t like to acknowledge, feels betrayed by it. Calm sometimes means weak. She never steps in. She never fights back. She never throws herself between us kids and my father. She should tell him to back off, ease up, that tennis isn’t life.
But it’s not in her nature. My father disturbs the peace, my mother keeps it. Every morning she goes to the office—she works for the State of Nevada—in her sensible pantsuit, and every night she comes home at six, bone tired, not uttering one word of complaint. With her last speck of energy she cooks dinner. Then she lies down with her pets and a book, or her favorite: a jigsaw puzzle.
Only every great once in a while does she lose her temper, and when she does, it’s epic. One time my father made a remark about the house being unclean. My mother walked to the cupboard, took out two boxes of cereal, and waved them around her head like flags, spraying Corn Flakes and Cheerios everywhere. She yelled: You want the house clean? Clean it yourself!
Moments later, she was calmly working on a jigsaw puzzle.
She particularly loves Norman Rockwell puzzles. There is always some half-assembled scene of idyllic family life spread across the kitchen table. I can’t imagine the pleasure my mother takes in jigsaw puzzles. All that fractured disorder, all that chaos—how can that be relaxing? It makes me think my mother and I are complete opposites. And yet, anything soft in me, any love or compassion I have for people, must come from her.
Lying against her, letting her continue to stroke my hair, I think there is so much about her that I can’t understand, and it all seems to flow from her choice of a husband. I ask how she ever ended up with a guy like my father in the first place. She gives a short, weary laugh.
It was a long time ago, she says. Back in Chicago. A friend of a friend told your father: You should meet Betty Dudley, she’s just your type. And vice versa. So your father phoned me one night at the Girls Club where I was renting a furnished room. We talked a long, long time, and your father seemed sweet.
Sweet?
I know, I know. But he did. So I agreed to meet him. He showed up the next day in a spiffy new Volkswagen. He drove me around town, no place in particular, just round and round, telling me his story. Then we stopped to get something to eat and I told him my story.
My mother told my father about growing up in Danville, Illinois, 170 miles from Chicago, the same small town where Gene Hackman and Donald O’Connor and Dick Van Dyke grew up. She told him about being a twin. She told him about her father, a crotchety English teacher, a stickler for proper English. My father, with his broken English, must have cringed. More likely, he didn’t hear. I imagine my father not capable of listening to my mother on their first date. He would have been too mesmerized by her flaming auburn hair and bright blue eyes. I’ve seen pictures. My mother was a rare beauty. I wonder if he liked her hair best because it was the color of a clay tennis court. Or was it her height? She’s several inches taller than he. I can imagine him perceiving that as a challenge.
My mother says it took eight blissful weeks for my father to convince her that they should combine their stories. They ran away from her crotchety father and her twin sister and eloped. Then they kept running. My father drove my mother clear out to Los Angeles, and when they had trouble finding jobs there, he drove her across the desert, to a new gambling boomtown. My mother landed her job with the state government, and my father caught on at the Tropicana Hotel, giving tennis lessons. It didn’t pay much, so he got a second job waiting tables at the Landmark Hotel. Then he got a job as a captain at the MGM Grand casino, which kept him so busy he dropped the other two jobs.
My parents, Mike and Betty Agassi, 1959, newlyweds in Chicago
Over their first ten years of marriage, my parents had three kids. Then, in 1969, my mother went to the hospital with ominous stomach pains. Need to do a hysterectomy, the doctor said. But a second round of tests showed she was pregnant. With me. I was born April 29, 1970, at Sunrise Hospital, two miles from the Strip. My father named me Andre Kirk Agassi, after his bosses at the casino. I ask my mother why my father named me after his bosses. Were they friends? Did he admire them? Did he owe them money? She doesn’t know. And it’s not the kind of question you can ask my father directly. You can’t ask my father anything directly. So I file it away with all the other things I don’t know about my parents—permanently missing pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that is me.
MY FATHER WORKS HARD, puts in long hours on the night shift at the casino, but tennis is his life, his reason for getting out of bed. No matter where you sit in the house, you see scattered evidence of his obsession. Aside from the backyard court, and the dragon, there is my father’s laboratory, also known as the kitchen. My father’s stringing machine and tools take up half the kitchen table. (My mother’s latest Norman Rockwell takes up the other half—two obsessions vying for one busy room.) On the kitchen counter stand several stacks of rackets, many sawed in half so my father can study their guts. He wants to know everything about tennis, everything, which means dissecting its various parts. He’s forever conducting experiments on this or that piece of equipment. Lately, for instance, he’s been using old tennis balls to extend the lives of our shoes. When the rubber starts to wear down, my father cuts a tennis ball in half and puts one half on each toe.
I tell Philly: It’s not bad enough that we live in a tennis laboratory
—now we have to wear tennis balls on our feet?
I wonder why my father loves tennis. Yet another question I can’t ask him directly. Still, he drops clues. He talks sometimes about the beauty of the game, its perfect balance of power and strategy. Despite his imperfect life—or maybe because of it—my father craves perfection. Geometry and mathematics are as close to perfection as human beings can get, he says, and tennis is all about angles and numbers. My father lies in bed and sees a court on the ceiling. He says he can actually see it there, and on that ceiling court he plays countless imaginary matches. It’s a wonder he has any energy when he goes to work.
As a casino captain it’s my father’s job to seat people at the shows. Right this way, Mr. Johnson. Nice to see you again, Miss Jones. The MGM pays him a small salary, the rest he earns in tips. We live on tips, which makes life unpredictable. Some nights my father comes home with his pockets bulging with cash. Other nights his pockets are perfectly flat. Whatever he pulls from his pockets, no matter how little, gets carefully counted and stacked, then stashed in the family safe. It’s nerve-wracking, never knowing how much Pops is going to be able to tuck in the safe.
My father loves money, makes no apologies for loving it, and he says there’s good money to be made in tennis. Clearly this is one big part of his love for tennis. It’s the shortest route he can see to the American dream. He takes me to the Alan King Tennis Classic and we watch a beautiful woman dressed as Cleopatra being carried onto center court by four half-naked musclemen in togas, followed by a man dressed as Caesar, pushing a wheelbarrow full of silver dollars. First prize for the winner of the tournament. My father stares at that silvery haze sparkling in the Vegas sun and looks drunk. He wants that. He wants me to have that.
Soon after that fateful day, when I’m almost nine years old, he finagles me a job as a ball boy for the Alan King tournament. But I don’t give a damn about silver dollars—I want a mini Cleopatra. Her name is Wendi. She’s one of the ball girls, about my age, a vision in her blue uniform. I love her instantly, with all my heart and part of my spleen. I lie awake at night, picturing her on the ceiling.
During matches, as Wendi and I dart past each other along the net, I shoot her a smile, try to get her to give me a smile in return. Between matches I buy her Cokes and sit with her, trying to impress her with my knowledge of tennis.
The Alan King tournament attracts big-time players, and my father cajoles most of them into hitting a few balls with me. Some are more willing than others. Borg acts as if there is nowhere else he’d rather be. Connors clearly wants to say no, but can’t, because my father is his stringer. Ilie Nastase tries to say no, but my father pretends to be deaf. A champion of Wimbledon and the French Open, ranked number one in the world, Nastase has other places he’d rather be, but he quickly discovers that refusing my father is next to impossible. The man is relentless.
As Nastase and I hit, Wendi watches from the net post. I’m nervous, Nastase is visibly bored—until he spots Wendi.
Hey, he says. Is this your girlfriend, Snoopy? Is this pretty thing over here your sweetheart?
I stop. I glare at Nastase. I want to punch this big, stupid Romanian in the nose, even though he’s got two feet and 100 pounds on me. Bad enough that he calls me Snoopy, but then he dares to mention Wendi in such a disrespectful way. A crowd has gathered, two hundred people at least. Nastase begins playing to the crowd, calling me Snoopy again and again, teasing me about Wendi. And I thought my father was relentless.
Eight years old, hitting a few balls with my idol, Björn Borg
At the very least, I wish I had the courage to say: Mr. Nastase, you’re embarrassing me, please stop. But all I can do is keep hitting harder. Hit harder. Then Nastase makes yet another wisecrack about Wendi, and that’s it, I can’t take any more. I drop my racket and walk off the court. Up yours, Nastase.
My father stares, openmouthed. He’s not angry, he’s not embarrassed—he’s incapable of embarrassment, and he recognizes his own genes when he sees them in action. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him prouder.
BESIDES THE OCCASIONAL EXHIBITION with a top-ranked player, my public matches are mostly hustle jobs. I have a slick routine to lure in the suckers. First, I pick a highly visible court, where I play by myself, knocking the ball all over the place. Second, when some cocky teenager or drunken guest strolls by I invite them to play. Third, I let them beat me, soundly. Finally, in my most pitiful voice I ask if they’d like to play for a dollar. Maybe five? Before they know what’s happening, I’m serving for match point and twenty bucks, enough to keep Wendi in Cokes for a month.
Philly taught me how to do it. He gives tennis lessons and often hustles his students, plays them for the price of the lesson, then double or nothing. But Andre, he says, with your size and youth, you should be raking in the dough. He helps me develop and rehearse the routine. Now and then it occurs to me that I only think I’m hustling, that people are happy to shell out for the show. Later they can brag to their friends that they saw a nine-year-old tennis freak who never misses.
I don’t tell my father about my side business. Not that he’d think it was wrong. He loves a good hustle. I just don’t feel like talking to my father about tennis any more than is absolutely necessary. Then my father stumbles into his own hustle. It happens at Cambridge. As we walk in one day, my father points to a man talking with Mr. Fong.
That’s Jim Brown, my father whispers to me. Greatest football player of all time.
He’s an enormous block of muscle wearing tennis whites and tube socks. I’ve seen him before at Cambridge. When he’s not playing tennis for money, he’s playing backgammon, or shooting craps—also for money. Like my father, Mr. Brown talks a lot about money. At this moment he’s complaining to Mr. Fong about a money match that fell through. He was supposed to play a guy, and the guy didn’t show. Mr. Brown is taking it out on Mr. Fong.
I came to play, Mr. Brown is saying, and I want to play.
My father steps forward.
You looking for a game?
Yeah.
My son Andre will play you.
Mr. Brown looks at me, then back at my father.
I ain’t playing no eight-year-old boy!
Nine.
Nine? Oooh, well, I didn’t realize.
Mr. Brown laughs. A few men within earshot laugh too.
I can tell that Mr. Brown doesn’t take my father seriously. Big mistake. Just ask that trucker lying in the road. I close my eyes and see him, the rain pelting his face.
Look, Mr. Brown says, I don’t play for fun, OK? I play for money.
My son will play you for money.
I feel a bead of sweat start down my armpit.
Yeah? How much?
My father laughs and says, I’ll bet you my fucking house.
I don’t need your house, Mr. Brown says. I got a house. Let’s say ten grand.
Done, my father says.
I walk toward the court.
Slow down, Mr. Brown says. I need to see some money up front.
I’ll go home and get it, my father says. I’ll be right back.
My father hurries out the door. I sit in a chair and picture him opening the safe and pulling out stacks of money. All those tips I’ve seen him count through the years, all those nights of hard work. Now he’s going to let it ride on me. I feel a heaviness in the center of my chest. I’m proud, of course, to think my father has such faith in me. But mainly I’m scared. What happens to me, to my father, to my mother and my siblings, not to mention Grandma and Uncle Isar, if I lose?
I’ve played under this kind of pressure before, when my father, without warning, has chosen an opponent and ordered me to beat him. But it’s always been another kid, and there’s never been money involved. It usually happens in the middle of the afternoon. My father will wake me from a nap and yell, Grab your racket! There’s someone here you need to beat! It never occurs to him that I’m taking a nap because I’m exhausted from a morning playing the dr
agon, that nine-year-olds don’t often take naps. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes I’ll go outside and see some strange kid, some prodigy from Florida or California who happens to be in town. They’re always older and bigger—like that punk who’d just moved to Vegas, and heard about me, and rang our doorbell. He had a white Rossignol and a head like a pumpkin. He was at least three years older than I, and he smirked as I walked out of the house, because I was so small. Even after I beat him, even after I wiped that smirk off his face, it took hours for me to calm down, to shed the feeling that I’d just run along a tightrope stretched across Hoover Dam.
This thing with Mr. Brown, however, is different, and not just because my family’s life savings are riding on the outcome. Mr. Brown disrespected my father, and my father can’t knock him out. He needs me to do it. So this match will be about more than money. It will be about respect and manhood and honor—against the greatest football player of all time. I’d rather play in the final of Wimbledon. Against Nastase. With Wendi as the ballgirl.
Slowly I become aware that Mr. Brown is watching me. Staring. He walks over and introduces himself, shakes my hand. His hand is one big callus. He asks how long I’ve been playing, how many matches I’ve won, how many I’ve lost.
I never lose, I say quietly.
His eyes narrow.
Mr. Fong pulls Mr. Brown aside and says: Don’t do this, Jim.
Guy’s asking for it, Mr. Brown whispers. Fool and his money.
You don’t understand, Mr. Fong says. You are going to lose, Jim.
What the hell are you—? He’s a kid.
That’s not just any kid.
You must be crazy.
Look, Jim, I like having you come here. You’re a friend, and it’s good for business to have you at my club. But when you lose ten grand to this kid, you’ll be sore, and you might stop coming around.