Open: An Autobiography. Andre Agassi
he’s crowding me. He’s yelling directly into my ear. It’s not enough to hit everything the dragon fires at me; my father wants me to hit it harder and faster than the dragon. He wants me to beat the dragon. The thought makes me panicky. I tell myself: You can’t beat the dragon. How can you beat something that never stops? Come to think of it, the dragon is a lot like my father. Except my father is worse. At least the dragon stands before me, where I can see it. My father stays behind me. I rarely see him, only hear him, day and night, yelling in my ear.
More topspin! Hit harder. Hit harder. Not in the net! Damn it, Andre! Never in the net!
Nothing sends my father into a rage like hitting a ball into the net. He dislikes when I hit the ball wide, he yells when I hit a ball long, but when I muff a ball into the net, he foams at the mouth. Errors are one thing, the net is something else. Over and over my father says: The net is your biggest enemy.
My father has raised the enemy six inches higher than regulation, to make it that much harder to avoid. If I can clear my father’s high net, he figures I’ll have no trouble clearing the net one day at Wimbledon. Never mind that I don’t want to play Wimbledon. What I want isn’t relevant. Sometimes I watch Wimbledon on TV with my father, and we both root for Björn Borg, because he’s the best, he never stops, he’s the nearest thing to the dragon—but I don’t want to be Borg. I admire his talent, his energy, his style, his ability to lose himself in his game, but if I ever develop those qualities, I’d rather apply them to something other than Wimbledon. Something of my own choosing.
Hit harder, my father yells. Hit harder. Now backhands. Backhands.
My arm feels like it’s going to fall off. I want to ask, How much longer, Pops? But I don’t ask. I do as I’m told. I hit as hard as I can, then slightly harder. On one swing I surprise myself by how hard I hit, how cleanly. Though I hate tennis, I like the feeling of hitting a ball dead perfect. It’s the only peace. When I do something perfect, I enjoy a split second of sanity and calm.
The dragon responds to perfection, however, by firing the next ball faster.
Short backswing, my father says. Short back—that’s it. Brush the ball, brush the ball.
At the dinner table my father will sometimes demonstrate. Drop your racket under the ball, he says, and brush, brush. He makes a motion like a painter, gently wafting a brush. This might be the only thing I’ve ever seen my father do gently.
Work your volleys, he yells—or tries to. An Armenian, born in Iran, my father speaks five languages, none of them well, and his English is heavily accented. He mixes his Vs and Ws, so it sounds like this: Vork your wolleys. Of all his instructions, this is his favorite. He yells this until I hear it in my dreams. Vork your wolleys, vork your wolleys.
I’ve worked so many volleys I can no longer see the court. Not one patch of green cement is visible beneath the yellow balls. I sidestep, shuffling like an old man. Finally, even my father has to admit there are too many balls. It’s counterproductive. If I can’t move we won’t make our daily quota of 2,500. He revs up the blower, the giant machine for drying the court after it rains. Of course it never rains where we live—Las Vegas, Nevada—so my father uses the blower to corral tennis balls. Just as he did with the ball machine, my father has modified a standard blower, made it into another demonic creature. It’s one of my earliest memories: five years old, getting pulled out of kindergarten, going with my father to the welding shop and watching him build this insane lawnmower-like machine that can move hundreds of tennis balls at once.
Now I watch him push the blower, watch the tennis balls scurry from him, and feel sympathy for the balls. If the dragon and the blower are living things, maybe the balls are too. Maybe they’re doing what I would if I could—running from my father. After blowing all the balls into one corner, my father takes a snow shovel and scoops the balls into a row of metal garbage cans, slop buckets with which he feeds the dragon.
He turns, sees me watching. What the hell are you looking at? Keep hitting! Keep hitting!
My shoulder aches. I can’t hit another ball.
I hit another three.
I can’t go on another minute.
I go another ten.
I get an idea. Accidentally on purpose, I hit a ball high over the fence. I manage to catch it on the wooden rim of the racket, so it sounds like a misfire. I do this when I need a break, and it crosses my mind that I must be pretty good if I can hit a ball wrong at will.
My father hears the ball hit wood and looks up. He sees the ball leave the court. He curses. But he heard the ball hit wood, so he knows it was an accident. Besides, at least I didn’t hit the net. He stomps out of the yard, out to the desert. I now have four and a half minutes to catch my breath and watch the hawks circling lazily overhead.
My father likes to shoot the hawks with his rifle. Our house is blanketed with his victims, dead birds that cover the roof as thickly as tennis balls cover the court. My father says he doesn’t like hawks because they swoop down on mice and other defenseless desert creatures. He can’t stand the thought of something strong preying on something weak. (This also holds true when he goes fishing: whatever he catches, he kisses its scaly head and throws it back.) Of course he has no qualms about preying on me, no trouble watching me gasp for air on his hook. He doesn’t see the contradiction. He doesn’t care about contradictions. He doesn’t realize that I’m the most defenseless creature in this godforsaken desert. If he did realize, I wonder, would he treat me differently?
Now he stomps back onto the court, slams the ball into a garbage can, and sees me staring at the hawks. He glares. What the fuck are you doing? Stop thinking. No fucking thinking!
The net is the biggest enemy, but thinking is the cardinal sin. Thinking, my father believes, is the source of all bad things, because thinking is the opposite of doing. When my father catches me thinking, daydreaming, on the tennis court, he reacts as if he caught me taking money from his wallet. I often think about how I can stop thinking. I wonder if my father yells at me to stop thinking because he knows I’m a thinker by nature. Or, with all his yelling, has he turned me into a thinker? Is my thinking about things other than tennis an act of defiance?
I like to think so.
OUR HOUSE IS AN OVERGROWN SHACK, built in the 1970s, white stucco with peeling dark trim around its edges. The windows have bars. The roof, under all the dead hawks, has wood shingles, many of which are loose or missing. The door has a cowbell that rings every time someone comes or goes, like the opening bell of a boxing match.
My father has painted the high cement wall around the house a bright forest green. Why? Because green is the color of a tennis court. Also, my father likes the convenience of directing someone to the house like this: Turn left, go down half a block, then look for the bright green wall.
Not that we ever have any visitors.
Surrounding the house on all sides is desert, and more desert, which to me is another word for death. Dotted with sticker bushes, tumbleweed, and coiled rattlers, the desert around our house seems to have no reason for existence, other than providing a place for people to dump things they no longer want. Mattresses, tires, other people. Vegas—the casinos, the hotels, the Strip—stands off in the distance, a glittering illusion. My father commutes to the illusion every day. He’s a captain at one of the casinos, but he refuses to live closer. We moved out here to the middle of nowhere, the heart of nothingness, because it’s only here that my father could afford a house with a yard big enough for his ideal tennis court.
It’s another early memory: driving around Vegas with my father and the real estate agent. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been scary. At house after house, even before the agent’s car came to a full stop my father would jump out and march up the front walk. The agent, close on my father’s heels, would be yakking about local schools, crime rates, interest rates, but my father wouldn’t be listening. Staring straight ahead, my father would storm into the house, through the living room, through the kitchen, into the backyard, where he’d whip out his