I saw this in March, when I followed Agassi to the La Quinta Resort & Club in Palm Springs, Calif., where he was scheduled to present the men’s trophy at the BNP Paribas Open. One morning, as he laced up his tennis shoes for some practice, Agassi looked around and said, “This is the court I beat Broderick Dyke on.” The match he was referring to took place in 1986, when he was 15. Forty years later, he could still rattle off the strategy he applied to each of his opponents. Dyke “was a guy that really did well with pace,” Agassi said, “so I treated him like a junior and moonballed him. He just self-destructed. Then I went out and played the next guy, Rill Baxter, on that court down there” — he pointed across a large bank of bougainvillea — “and he didn’t like being dictated against.” For the next match, “I actually don’t know which court — they changed the landscape — but I beat him 3 and 3, and then got a lucky first-round draw against John Austin, Tracy Austin’s brother.” He looked pleased. “Then I played Wilander, in the stadium. He was, like, 2 in the world.” Mats Wilander was actually No. 3 at the time, but he was the No. 1 seed at the tournament, and he destroyed the teenage upstart. Still, Agassi had arrived.
One source of Agassi’s intensity is his father, an ethnic Armenian born in Iran, a former Olympic boxer and, later, a showroom captain at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. Mike Agassi tried to turn all four of his children into professional tennis players, damaging his relationship with each in the process. With Andre, the youngest, he was convinced that he finally had his champion. At 9 years old, Agassi remembers in “Open,” his father arranged for him to play against the retired football player Jim Brown, then ran home to grab $10,000 in cash to bet with. (He also remembers his older brother warning him not to take the pills their father provided, which turned out to be speed.) Agassi has described his father as “violent by nature” and “forever preparing for battle,” a guy who kept salt and pepper in his pockets in case he needed to blind somebody in a fistfight. “He learned enough with the first few kids to protect me from himself,” Agassi says, “so he sent me away to tennis academy at 13” — the notorious Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Florida, “‘Lord of the Flies’ with forehands and backhands.”
From his father, Agassi inherited both a profound intolerance of losing and what he calls “that rage.” He directed the rage at tennis, “the first thing that caused my life the most amount of pain when I was a child.” A recurring refrain in “Open” is that Agassi hates tennis. He still talks about it with a kind of rueful loathing, describing it as cruel and abusive; he talks this way even in moments when he seems to be obviously enjoying tennis.
Out in Palm Springs, he spent the better part of two hours hitting balls with a couple of friends: Gimelstob and a German coach named Chris Groh, who had questions about the mechanics of Agassi’s footwork. Afterward, he showered and found a seat under an umbrella on the resort’s grounds, eating just the innards from a turkey sandwich and waiting for Gimelstob to drive him to the tournament final, which he would be watching from a luxury box with the media mogul David Ellison. He sometimes chafed at these sorts of obligations, describing himself as a performing monkey. But as he ate, he was cheered by a call from his daughter, who had left Palm Springs that morning to drive back to Las Vegas. Agassi guessed exactly where she was and how much gas she had left; a stopwatch had clearly been running in his head all day, clocking her expected progress. “She’s so infectious!” he said after hanging up. “She makes everything better.” He teared up a little bit. “I think of her more as a friend than a daughter now. It’s so cool.”
He took a sip of Diet Coke and worked his wrist back and forth. “I haven’t played tennis in a month,” he said. Then he noted, a little bashfully, that I seemed impressed while watching him hit. Sure, I said: Standing behind Andre Agassi while he gave Groh a private backhand clinic had been pretty impressive.