Читать книгу Open: An Autobiography - Andre Agassi - Страница 9

MY FATHER’S MOTHER lives with us. She’s a nasty old lady from Tehran with a wart the size of a walnut on the edge of her nose. Sometimes you can’t hear a word she’s saying because you can’t take your eyes off that wart. But it doesn’t matter, she’s surely saying the same nasty things she said yesterday, and the day before, and probably saying them to my father. This seems to be the reason Grandma was put on earth, to harass my father. He says she nagged him when he was a boy and often beat him. When he was extra bad, she made him wear hand-me-down girl clothes to school. That’s why he learned to fight.

If she’s not pecking at my father, the old lady is squawking about the old country, sighing about the folks she left behind. My mother says Grandma is homesick. The first time I hear this word I ask myself, How can you be sick about not being home? Home is where the dragon lives. Home is the place where, when you go there, you have to play tennis.

If Grandma wants to go back home, I’m all for it. I’m only eight, but I’ll drive her to the airport myself, because she causes more tension in a house that doesn’t need one bit more. She makes my father miserable, she bosses me and my siblings around, and she engages in a strange competition with my mother. My mother tells me that when I was a baby, she walked into the kitchen and found Grandma breastfeeding me. Things have been awkward between the two women ever since.

Of course, there is one good thing about Grandma living with us. She tells stories about my father, about his childhood, and this sometimes gets my father reminiscing, causes him to open up. If not for Grandma we wouldn’t know much about my father’s past, which was sad and lonely and helps explain his odd behavior and boiling rage. Sort of.

Oh, Grandma says with a sigh, we were poor. You can’t imagine how poor. And hungry, she says, rubbing her belly. We had no food—also, no running water, no electricity. And not a stick of furniture.

Where did you sleep?

We slept on the dirt floor! All of us in one tiny room! In an old apartment house built around a filthy courtyard. In one corner of the courtyard was a hole—that was the toilet for all the tenants.

My father chimes in.

Things got better after the war, he says. Overnight, the streets were filled with British and American soldiers. I liked them.

Why did you like the soldiers?

They gave me candy and shoes.

They also gave him English. The first word my father learned from the GIs was victory. That’s all they talked about, he says. Wictory.

Whoa, were they big, he adds. And strong. I followed them everywhere, watching them, studying them, and one day I followed them to the place where they spent all their free time—a park in the woods with two clay tennis courts.

There were no fences around the courts, so the ball would go bouncing away every few seconds. My father would run after the ball and bring it back to the soldiers, like a puppy dog, until finally they made him their unofficial ball boy. Then they made him the official court custodian.

My father says: Every day I swept and watered and combed the courts with a heavy roller. I painted the lines white. What a job that was! I had to use chalk water.

How much did they pay you?

Pay? Nothing! They gave me a tennis racket. It was a piece of junk. An old wooden thing strung with steel wire. But I loved it. I spent hours with that racket, hitting a tennis ball against a brick wall, alone.

Why alone?

No one else in Iran played tennis.

The only sport that could offer my father a steady supply of opponents was boxing. His toughness was tested first in one street fight after another, and then as a teenager he strode into a gym and set to work learning formal boxing techniques. A natural, the trainers called him. Quick with his hands, light on his feet—and he had a grudge against the world. His rage, so hard for us to deal with, was an asset in the squared circle. He won a spot on the Iranian Olympic team, boxing in the bantamweight division, and went to the 1948 Games in London. Four years later he went to the Games in Helsinki. He didn’t do well at either.

The judges, he grumbles. They were crooked. The whole thing was fixed, rigged. The world was very biased against Iran.

But my son, he adds—maybe they will make tennis an Olympic sport once again, and my son will win a gold medal, and that will make up for it.

A little extra pressure to go with my everyday pressure.

After seeing a bit of the world, after being an Olympian, my father couldn’t return to that same single room with the dirt floor, so he snuck out of Iran. He doctored his passport and booked a flight under an assumed name to New York City, where he spent sixteen days on Ellis Island, then took a bus to Chicago, where he Americanized his name. Emmanuel became Mike Agassi. By day he worked as an elevator operator at one of the city’s grand hotels. By night he boxed.

His coach in Chicago was Tony Zale, the fearless middleweight champ, often called the Man of Steel. Famous for his part in one of the sport’s bloodiest rivalries, a three-bout saga with Rocky Graziano, Zale lauded my father, told him he had tons of raw talent, but pleaded with him to hit harder. Hit harder, Zale would scream at my father as he peppered the speed bag. Hit harder. Every punch you throw, throw it from the floor up.

With Zale in his corner my father won the Chicago Golden Gloves, then earned a prime-time fight at Madison Square Garden. His big break. But on fight night my father’s opponent fell ill. The promoters scrambled, trying to find a substitute. They found one, all right—a much better boxer, and a welterweight. My father agreed to the fight, but moments before the opening bell he got the shakes. He ducked into a bathroom, crawled out the window above the toilet, then took the train back to Chicago.

Sneaking out of Iran, sneaking out of the Garden—my father is an escape artist, I think. But there’s no escaping him.

My father says that when he boxed, he always wanted to take a guy’s best punch. He tells me one day on the tennis court: When you know that you just took the other guy’s best punch, and you’re still standing, and the other guy knows it, you will rip the heart right out of him. In tennis, he says, same rule. Attack the other man’s strength. If the man is a server, take away his serve. If he’s a power player, overpower him. If he has a big forehand, takes pride in his forehand, go after his forehand until he hates his forehand.

My father has a special name for this contrarian strategy. He calls it putting a blister on the other guy’s brain. With this strategy, this brutal philosophy, he stamps me for life. He turns me into a boxer with a tennis racket. More, since most tennis players pride themselves on their serve, my father turns me into a counterpuncher—a returner.

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE my father gets homesick too. He especially misses his oldest brother, Isar. Someday, he vows, your uncle Isar will sneak out of Iran, like I did.

But first Isar needs to sneak out his money. Iran is falling apart, my father explains. Revolution is brewing. The government is teetering. That’s why they’re watching everyone, making sure people don’t drain their bank accounts and flee. Uncle Isar, therefore, is slowly, secretly converting his cash to jewels, which he then hides in packages he sends us in Vegas. It feels like Christmas every time a brown-wrapped box from Uncle Isar arrives. We sit on the living-room floor and cut the string and tear the paper and shriek when we find, hidden under a tin of cookies or inside a fruitcake, diamonds and emeralds and rubies. Uncle Isar’s packages arrive every few weeks, and then one day comes a much larger package. Uncle Isar. Himself. On the doorstep, smiling down.

You must be Andre.

Yes.

I’m your uncle.

He reaches out and touches my cheek.

He’s the mirror image of my father, but his personality is the exact opposite. My father is shrill and stern and filled with rage. Uncle Isar is soft-spoken and patient and funny. He’s also a genius—he was an engineer back in Iran—so he helps me every night with my homework. Such a relief from my father’s tutoring sessions. My father’s way of teaching is to tell you once, then tell you a second time, then shout at you and call you an idiot for not getting it the first time. Uncle Isar tells you, then smiles and waits. If you don’t understand, no problem. He tells you again, more softly. He has all the time in the world.

I stare at Uncle Isar as he strolls through the rooms and hallways of our house. I follow him the way my father followed the British and American soldiers. As I grow familiar with Uncle Isar, as I get to know him better, I like to hang from his shoulders and swing from his arms. He likes it too. He likes to roughhouse, to be tackled and tickled by his nephews and nieces. Every night I hide behind the front door and jump out when Uncle Isar comes home, because it makes him laugh. His booming laughter is the opposite of the sounds that come from the dragon.

One day Uncle Isar goes to the store for a few things. I count the minutes. At last, the front gate clanks open, then clanks shut, meaning I have exactly twelve seconds until Uncle Isar walks through the front door. It always takes people twelve seconds to go from the gate to the door. I crouch, count to twelve, and as the door opens I leap out.

Boo!

It’s not Uncle Isar. It’s my father. Startled, he yells, steps back, then shoots out his fist. Even though he only puts a fraction of his weight into it, my father’s left hook hits my jaw flush and sends me flying. One second I’m excited, joyful, the next I’m sprawled on the ground.

My father stands over me, scowling. What the fuck is the matter with you? Go to your room.

I run to my room and throw myself on my bed. I lie there, shaking, I don’t know how long. An hour? Three? Eventually the door opens and I hear my father.

Grab your racket. Get on the court.

Time to face the dragon.

I hit for half an hour, my head throbbing, my eyes tearing.

Hit harder, my father says. Goddamn it, hit harder. Not in the fucking net!

I turn and face my father. The next ball from the dragon I hit as hard as I can, but high over the fence. I aim for the hawks and I don’t bother pretending it’s an accident. My father stares. He takes one menacing step toward me. He’s going to hit me over the fence. But then he stops, calls me a bad name, and warns me to stay out of his sight.

I run into the house and find my mother lying on her bed, reading a romance novel, her dogs at her feet. She loves animals, and our house is like Dr. Dolittle’s waiting room. Dogs, birds, cats, lizards, and one mangy rat named Lady Butt. I grab one of the dogs and hurl it across the room, ignoring its insulted yelp, and bury my head in my mother’s arm.

Why is Pops so mean?

What happened?

I tell her.

She strokes my hair and says my father doesn’t know any better. Pa has his own ways, she says. Strange ways. We have to remember that Pa wants what’s best for us, right?

Part of me feels grateful for my mother’s endless calm. Part of me, however, a part I don’t like to acknowledge, feels betrayed by it. Calm sometimes means weak. She never steps in. She never fights back. She never throws herself between us kids and my father. She should tell him to back off, ease up, that tennis isn’t life.

But it’s not in her nature. My father disturbs the peace, my mother keeps it. Every morning she goes to the office—she works for the State of Nevada—in her sensible pantsuit, and every night she comes home at six, bone tired, not uttering one word of complaint. With her last speck of energy she cooks dinner. Then she lies down with her pets and a book, or her favorite: a jigsaw puzzle.

Only every great once in a while does she lose her temper, and when she does, it’s epic. One time my father made a remark about the house being unclean. My mother walked to the cupboard, took out two boxes of cereal, and waved them around her head like flags, spraying Corn Flakes and Cheerios everywhere. She yelled: You want the house clean? Clean it yourself!

Moments later, she was calmly working on a jigsaw puzzle.

She particularly loves Norman Rockwell puzzles. There is always some half-assembled scene of idyllic family life spread across the kitchen table. I can’t imagine the pleasure my mother takes in jigsaw puzzles. All that fractured disorder, all that chaos—how can that be relaxing? It makes me think my mother and I are complete opposites. And yet, anything soft in me, any love or compassion I have for people, must come from her.

Lying against her, letting her continue to stroke my hair, I think there is so much about her that I can’t understand, and it all seems to flow from her choice of a husband. I ask how she ever ended up with a guy like my father in the first place. She gives a short, weary laugh.

It was a long time ago, she says. Back in Chicago. A friend of a friend told your father: You should meet Betty Dudley, she’s just your type. And vice versa. So your father phoned me one night at the Girls Club where I was renting a furnished room. We talked a long, long time, and your father seemed sweet.

Sweet?

I know, I know. But he did. So I agreed to meet him. He showed up the next day in a spiffy new Volkswagen. He drove me around town, no place in particular, just round and round, telling me his story. Then we stopped to get something to eat and I told him my story.

My mother told my father about growing up in Danville, Illinois, 170 miles from Chicago, the same small town where Gene Hackman and Donald O’Connor and Dick Van Dyke grew up. She told him about being a twin. She told him about her father, a crotchety English teacher, a stickler for proper English. My father, with his broken English, must have cringed. More likely, he didn’t hear. I imagine my father not capable of listening to my mother on their first date. He would have been too 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.

Over their first ten years of marriage, my parents had three kids. Then, in 1969, my mother went to the hospital with ominous stomach pains. 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.

MY 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, which makes 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 carefully counted and stacked, then stashed in the family safe. It’s nerve-wracking, never knowing how much Pops is going to be able to tuck in the safe.

My father loves money, makes no apologies for loving it, and he says there’s good money to be made in tennis. Clearly this is one big part of his love for tennis. It’s the shortest route he can see to the American dream. He takes me to the Alan King Tennis Classic and we watch a beautiful woman dressed as Cleopatra being carried onto center court by four half-naked musclemen in togas, followed by a man dressed as Caesar, pushing a wheelbarrow full of silver dollars. First prize for the winner of the tournament. My father stares at that silvery haze sparkling in the Vegas sun and looks drunk. He wants that. He wants me to have that.

Soon after that fateful day, when I’m almost nine years old, he finagles me a job as a ball boy for the Alan King tournament. But I don’t give a damn about silver dollars—I want a mini Cleopatra. Her name is Wendi. She’s one of the ball girls, about my age, a vision in her blue uniform. I love her instantly, with all my heart and part of my spleen. I lie awake at night, picturing her on the ceiling.

During matches, as Wendi and I dart past each other along the net, I shoot her a smile, try to get her to give me a smile in return. Between matches I buy her Cokes and sit with her, trying to impress her with my knowledge of tennis.

The Alan King tournament attracts big-time players, and my father cajoles most of them into hitting a few balls with me. Some are more willing than others. Borg acts as if there is nowhere else he’d rather be. Connors clearly wants to say no, but can’t, because my father is his stringer. Ilie Nastase tries to say no, but my father pretends to be deaf. A champion of Wimbledon and the French Open, ranked number one in the world, Nastase has other places he’d rather be, but he quickly discovers that refusing my father is next to impossible. The man is relentless.

As Nastase and I hit, Wendi watches from the net post. I’m nervous, Nastase is visibly bored—until he spots Wendi.

Hey, he says. Is this your girlfriend, Snoopy? Is this pretty thing over here your sweetheart?

I stop. I glare at Nastase. I want to punch this big, stupid Romanian in the nose, even though he’s got two feet and 100 pounds on me. Bad enough that he calls me Snoopy, but then he dares to mention Wendi in such a disrespectful way. A crowd has gathered, two hundred people at least. Nastase begins playing to the crowd, calling me Snoopy again and again, teasing me about Wendi. And I thought my father was relentless.

At the very least, I wish I had the courage to say: Mr. Nastase, you’re embarrassing me, please stop. But all I can do is keep hitting harder. Hit harder. Then Nastase makes yet another wisecrack about Wendi, and that’s it, I can’t take any more. I drop my racket and walk off the court. Up yours, Nastase.

My father stares, openmouthed. He’s not angry, he’s not embarrassed—he’s incapable of embarrassment, and he recognizes his own genes when he sees them in action. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him prouder.

BESIDES THE OCCASIONAL EXHIBITION with a top-ranked player, my public matches are mostly hustle jobs. I have a slick routine to lure in the suckers. First, I pick a highly visible court, where I play by myself, knocking the ball all over the place. Second, when some cocky teenager or drunken guest strolls by I invite them to play. Third, I let them beat me, soundly. Finally, in my most pitiful voice I ask if they’d like to play for a dollar. Maybe five? Before they know what’s happening, I’m serving for match point and twenty bucks, enough to keep Wendi in Cokes for a month.

Philly taught me how to do it. He gives tennis lessons and often hustles his students, plays them for the price of the lesson, then double or 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 disrespected my father, and my father can’t knock him out. He needs me to do it. So this match will be about more than money. It will be about respect and manhood and honor—against the greatest football player of all time. I’d rather play in the final of Wimbledon. Against Nastase. With Wendi as the ballgirl.

Slowly I become aware that Mr. Brown is watching me. Staring. He walks over and introduces himself, shakes my hand. His hand is one big callus. He asks how long I’ve been playing, how many matches I’ve won, how many I’ve lost.

I never lose, I say quietly.

His eyes narrow.

Mr. Fong pulls Mr. Brown aside and says: Don’t do this, Jim.

Guy’s asking for it, Mr. Brown whispers. Fool and his money.

You don’t understand, Mr. Fong says. You are going to lose, Jim.

What the hell are you--? He’s a kid.

That’s not just any kid.

You must be crazy.

Look, Jim, I like having you come here. You’re a friend, and it’s good for business to have you at my club. But when you lose ten grand to this kid, you’ll be sore, and you might stop coming around.

Mr. Brown turns to look me up and down, as if he must have missed something the first time. He walks back toward me and starts firing questions.

How much do you play?

Every day.

No--how long do you play at one time? An hour? Couple of hours?

I see what he’s doing. He wants to know how fast I get tired. He’s trying to size me up, game-planning for me.

My father’s back. He’s got a fistful of hundreds. He waves it in the air. Suddenly Mr. Brown has had a change of heart.

Here’s what we’ll do, Mr. Brown tells my father. We’ll play two sets, then decide how much to bet on the third.

Whatever you say.

We play on Court 7, just inside the door. A crowd has gathered, and they cheer themselves hoarse as I win the first set, 6-3. Mr. Brown shakes his head. He talks to himself. He bangs his racket on the ground. He’s not happy, which makes two of us. Not only am I thinking, in direct violation of my father’s cardinal rule, but my mind is spinning. I feel as if I might have to stop playing at any moment, because I need to throw up.

Still, I win the second set, 6-3.

Now Mr. Brown is furious. He drops to one knee, laces his sneakers.

My father approaches him.

So? Ten grand?

Naw, Mr. Brown says. Why don’t we just bet $500.

Whatever you say.

My body relaxes. My mind grows quiet. I want to dance along the baseline, knowing I won’t have to play for $10,000. I can swing freely now, without thinking about consequences. Without thinking at all.

Mr. Brown, meanwhile, is thinking more, playing a less relaxed game. He’s suddenly junking, drop-shotting, lofting lobs, angling the ball at the corners, trying backspin and sidespin and all sorts of trickery. He’s also trying to run me, back and forth, wear me out. But I’m so relieved not to be playing for the entire contents of my father’s safe that I can’t be worn out, and I can’t miss. I beat Mr. Brown 6-2.

Sweat running down his face, he pulls a wad from his pocket and counts out five crisp hundreds. He hands them to my father, then turns to me.

Great game, son.

He shakes my hand. His calluses feel rougher—thanks to me.

He asks what my goals are, my dreams. I start to answer, but my father jumps in.

He’s going to be number one in the world.

I wouldn’t bet against him, Mr. Brown says.

NOT LONG AFTER BEATING MR. BROWN, I play a practice match against my father at Caesars. I’m up 5-2, serving for the match. I’ve never beaten my father, and he looks as if he’s about to lose much more than $10,000.

Suddenly he walks off the court. Get your stuff, he says. Let’s go.

He won’t finish. He’d rather sneak away than lose to his son. Deep down, I know it’s the last time we’ll ever play.

Packing my bag, zipping the cover on my racket, I feel a thrill greater than anything I felt after beating Mr. Brown. This is the sweetest win of my life, and it will be hard to top. I’ll take this win over a wheelbarrow full of silver dollars—and Uncle Isar’s jewels thrown on top--because this is the win that made my father finally sneak away from me.