Free Open by Andre Agassi

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 stomachpains. 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.
    M Y 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, whichmakes 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