Open: An Autobiography. Andre Agassi
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 ping-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