Extract from Open by André Agassi

Extract from Open by André Agassi
Original full-length version published by HarperCollinsPublishers
Condensed version © Reader’s Digest (Australia) Pty Ltd 2011

I’m seven years old, talking to myself, because I’m scared, and because I’m the only person who listens to me. I whisper: Just quit, Andre. Put down your racquet and walk off this court, right now. But I can’t. Not only would my father chase me around the house with my racquet, but something in my gut won’t let me. I hate tennis and still I keep playing, keep hitting all morning and all afternoon, because I have no choice. This gap, this contradiction between what I want to do and what I actually do, feels like the core of my life.
 

At the moment my hatred for tennis is focused on the dragon, a ball machine modified by my father. The dragon has a black heart and a horrifying voice. When it takes dead aim at me and fires a ball at 110 miles an hour, the sound it makes is a bloodcurdling roar. I flinch every time.

 

My father has set the dragon on a base several feet high so it towers above me. He wants the balls that shoot from the dragon’s mouth to land at my feet as if dropped from a plane. The trajectory makes the balls nearly impossible to return in a conventional way: I need to hit every ball on the rise. But that’s not enough for my father. Hit earlier, he yells. Hit earlier.

 

Every third ball fired by the dragon hits a ball already on the ground, causing a crazy sideways hop. I adjust at the last second, catch the ball early and hit it smartly across the net. I know there are few children in the world who could have seen that ball, let alone hit it. But I take no pride in my reflexes, and I get no credit. It’s what I’m supposed to do.

 

My father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each day, I’ll hit 17,500 balls each week, and at the end of one year I’ll have hit nearly one million balls. Numbers, he says, don’t lie. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable.

 

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. 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. Over and over he says: The net is your biggest enemy.

 

He has raised the enemy six inches higher than regulation, to make it that much harder. 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—but I don’t want to be Borg. I admire his talent, his energy, his ability to lose himself in his game, but if I ever develop those qualities, I’d rather apply them to something of my own choosing.

 

My arm feels like it’s going to fall off. I want to ask, How much longer, Pops? But I do as I’m told. I hit as hard as I can. 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. When I do something perfect, I enjoy a split second of sanity and calm.

 

At the dinner table my father will sometimes demonstrate. Drop your racquet 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.

 

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. He yells this until I hear it in my dreams.

 

My shoulder aches. I can’t hit another ball. 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 racquet, 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 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. He stomps out of the yard. 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 defenceless creatures. He can’t stand the thought of something strong preying on something weak. Of course he has no qualms about preying on me.

 

Now he stomps back onto the court and sees me staring at the hawks. He glares. What are you doing? Stop thinking. No thinking. The net is the biggest enemy, but thinking, my father believes, is the cardinal sin because thinking is the opposite of doing.

 

Our house is an overgrown shack, built in the 1970s, white stucco with peeling dark trim around its edges. The windows have bars. Surrounding the house on all sides is desert, dotted with brambles, tumbleweed and coiled rattlers. Las Vegas—the casinos, the hotels, the Strip—stands off in the distance, a glittering illusion. My father commutes 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, because it’s only here that my father could afford a house with a yard big enough for his ideal tennis court.

 

My mother tells me my father decided long before I was born that I would be a professional tennis player. When I was still in the crib, my father hung a mobile of tennis balls above my head and encouraged me to slap at them with a ping-pong bat he’d taped to my hand.

 

When I was three he gave me a sawn-off racquet and told me to hit whatever I wanted. I specialised in salt shakers. I liked serving them through glass windows. My father got mad about many things, but never about hitting something hard with a racquet.
 

When I was four he had me hitting with tennis greats who passed through town, beginning with Jimmy Connors. When we finished hitting, Connors told my father that I was sure to become very good.
 

I already know that, my father said, annoyed. Very good? He’s going to be number one in the world.
 

The better I get at tennis, the worse I get at school, which pains me. I like books, but feel overmatched by them. I like my teachers, but don’t understand much of what they say. I have a steel-trap memory, but trouble concentrating. Also, I know that my father resents every moment I spend in school; it comes at the cost of court time. Disliking school, therefore, feels like loyalty to Pops.
 

Some days, when he’s driving me and my siblings to school, my father will smile and say: I’ll make you guys a deal. Instead of taking you to school, how about I take you to Cambridge Racquet Club?

 

We know what he wants us to say, so we say it. Hooray!

 

Just don’t tell your mother, my father says.

 

Cambridge Racquet Club is a long, low-roofed dump, just east of the Strip, with ten hard courts and a seedy smell. My father makes sure that we don’t waste our time talking or laughing. Eventually he lets out a short whistle, and that means stop hitting and get in the car, now.

 

My siblings always stop before I do. Rita, the oldest, Philly, my older brother, and my sister Tami—they all play tennis well. But me, the youngest, the baby, I’m the best. That’s why my father gives me most of his attention. I’m the last best hope of the Agassi clan.

 

Sometimes I like the extra attention, sometimes I’d rather be invisible, because my father can be scary.

 

Violent by nature, my father is forever preparing for battle. He shadowboxes constantly. He keeps an axe handle in his car. He leaves the house with a handful of salt and pepper in each pocket, in case he’s in a street fight and needs to blind someone. Of course some of his most vicious battles are with himself. He has chronic stiffness in his neck and he’s perpetually loosening the neck bones by whipping his head from side to side until the neck makes a sound like popcorn popping. When this doesn’t work, he stands on a chair and places his neck in a harness. He then kicks away the chair and drops, his momentum halted by the harness. The first time I saw him do this, I looked up and there was my father, hanging by his neck, three feet off the ground. I had no doubt he’d killed himself. I ran to him, hysterical. Seeing the stricken look on my face, he barked: What the f--- is the matter with you?

 

Most of his battles, however, are against others. On a rare rainy day in Vegas, my father is driving me to pick up my mother at her office. My father gets in the left lane to make a turn. A trucker honks at my father. My father apparently forgot to signal. My father gives the trucker the finger. The trucker yells something. My father lets fly a stream of curses. The trucker stops, opens his door. My father stops, jumps out.

 

I watch through the back window. My father approaches the trucker. The trucker throws a punch. My father ducks, deflects the punch with the top of his head, then throws a blazingly fast combination, ending with an uppercut. The trucker is lying in the road. He’s dead—I’m sure of it. If he’s not, he soon will be, because he’s in the middle of the road and someone will run him over. My father gets back in the car and we peel away. I watch the trucker through the window, rain pelting his unconscious face. My father looks directly into my eyes. Don’t tell your mother, he says.

 

Such moments, and many more, come to mind whenever I think about telling my father that I don’t want to play tennis. Besides loving my father, and wanting to please him, I don’t want to upset him. I don’t dare. If he says I’m going to be number one in the world, all I can do is nod and obey. I would advise Jimmy Connors or anyone else to do the same.