Free Open by Andre Agassi Page B

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 dragon, 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