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Brooke seems to be in heaven, and part of me understands. The house is surrounded by rolling hills and ancient trees, the leaves have turned nine different kinds of orange, and she loves David. They have a special bond, a secret language of inside jokes and comic banter. Now and then they slip into their characters from the show, doing a scene, then laughing themselves hoarse. Then they quickly explain what they’ve just done and said, trying to bring me up to speed, so I don’t feel left out. But it’s always too little, too late. I’m the third wheel, and I know it.

At night the temperature drops. The cool air has a piney, earthy scent that makes me sad. I stand on the back porch, looking at the stars, wondering what’s wrong with me, why this setting has no power to charm me. I think about that moment, so many years ago, when Philly and I decided I was going to quit. When that call came for me to play here, in North Carolina. The rest is history. Over and over, I ask myself—what if?

I decide that I need to work. Work, as always, is the answer. After all, Stuttgart is only days off. It would be nice to win. I phone Brad, and he
locates a tennis court an hour or so away. He also scrounges up a sparring partner, a young amateur who’d love nothing more than to hit with me each morning. I drive through the morning mist, toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, and meet the amateur. I thank him for taking the time, but he says the pleasure is all his. It will be my honor, Mr. Agassi. I feel virtuous—I’m getting my work done, even here in this remote outpost—and then we start hitting. At the higher altitude, the ball flies every which way, defying gravity. It’s like playing in outer space. Hardly worth the effort.

Then the young pro blows out his shoulder.

I spend the next two days of our Southern sojourn scarfing paella and brooding. When I grow so bored that I think I might bang my head against a pine tree, I walk out to the golf course and try to birdie the hole off the porch.

At last it’s time for me to leave. I kiss Brooke goodbye, kiss Granny Strickland goodbye, and notice that both kisses have the same amount of passion. I fly to Miami to connect with a direct flight to Stuttgart. Walking up to the gate, who should I see but Pete. As always, Pete. He looks as if he’s done nothing for the last month but practice, and when he wasn’t practicing, he was lying on a cot in a bare cell, thinking about beating me. He’s rested, focused, wholly undistracted. I’ve always thought the differences between Pete and me were overblown by sportswriters. It seemed too convenient, too important for fans, and Nike, and the game, that Pete and I be polar opposites, the Yankees and Red Sox of tennis. The game’s best server versus its best returner. The diffident Californian versus the brash Las Vegan. It all seemed like horseshit. Or, to use Pete’s favorite word, nonsense. But at this moment, making small talk at the gate, the gap between us appears genuinely, frighteningly wide, like the gap between good and bad. I’ve often told Brad that tennis plays too big a part in Pete’s life, and not a big enough part in mine, but Pete seems to have the proportions about right. Tennis is his job, and he does it with brio and dedication, while all my talk of maintaining a life outside tennis seems like just that—talk. Just a pretty way of rationalizing all my distractions. For the first time since I’ve known him—including the times he’s beaten my brains out—I envy Pete’s dullness. I wish I could emulate his spectacular lack of inspiration, and his peculiar lack of
need
for inspiration.

I
LOSE TO
M
ARTIN
in the first round of Stuttgart. Driving away from the stadium, Brad is in a mood I’ve never seen. He looks at me with
astonishment, and sadness, and a Rafter-like pity. As we pull up to the hotel, he asks me up to his room.

He rummages in the minibar and extracts two bottles of beer. He doesn’t glance at the labels. He doesn’t care that they’re German. When Brad drinks German beer without noticing or complaining, something is up.

He’s wearing jeans and a black turtleneck. He looks somber, severe—and older. I’ve aged him.

Andre, we’ve got a big decision to make, and we’re going to make it before we leave this room tonight.

What’s up, Brad?

We ain’t continuing like this. You’re better than this. At least, you used to be better. You either need to quit—or start over. But you can’t go on embarrassing yourself like this.

What—?

Let me finish. You have game left. At least I think you do. You can still win. Good things can still happen. But you need a full overhaul. You need to go back to the beginning. You need to pull out of everything and regroup. I’m talking square one.

When Brad talks about pulling out of tournaments, I know it’s serious.

Here’s what you’d need to do, he says. You’d need to train like you haven’t trained in years. Hard core. You’d need to get your body right, get your mind right, then start at the bottom. I’m talking challengers, against guys who never dreamed they’d get a chance to meet you, let alone play you.

He stops. He takes a long sip of beer. I say nothing. We’ve come to the crossroads, this is it, and it feels as if we’ve been headed here for months. Years. I stare out the window at the Stuttgart traffic. I hate tennis more than ever—but I hate myself more. I tell myself, So what if you hate tennis? Who cares? All those people out there, all those millions who hate what they do for a living, they do it anyway. Maybe doing what you hate, doing it well and cheerfully, is the point. So you hate tennis. Hate it all you want. You still need to respect it—and yourself.

I say, OK, Brad, I’m not ready for it to be over. I’m all in. Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.

C
HANGE
.

Time to change, Andre. You can’t go on like this. Change, change, change—I say this word to myself several times a day, every day, while buttering my morning toast, while brushing my teeth, less as a warning than as a soothing chant. Far from depressing me, or shaming me, the idea that I must change completely, from top to bottom, brings me back to center. For once I don’t hear that nagging self-doubt that follows every personal resolution. I won’t fail this time, I can’t, because it’s change now or change never. The idea of stagnating, of remaining
this Andre
for the rest of my life, that’s what I find truly depressing and shameful.

And yet. Our best intentions are often thwarted by external forces—forces that we ourselves set in motion long ago. Decisions, especially bad ones, create their own kind of momentum, and momentum can be a bitch to stop, as every athlete knows. Even when we vow to change, even when we sorrow and atone for our mistakes, the momentum of our past keeps carrying us down the wrong road. Momentum rules the world. Momentum says: Hold on, not so fast, I’m still running things here. As a friend likes to say, quoting an old Greek poem: The minds of the everlasting gods are not changed suddenly.

Weeks after Stuttgart, walking through LaGuardia Airport, I get a phone call. It’s a man with a gruff voice, a voice of judgment and condemnation. A voice of Authority. He says he’s a doctor working with the ATP. (I think what those letters stand for: Association of Tennis Professionals.) There is doom in his voice, as if he’s going to tell me I’m dying. And then that’s exactly what he tells me.

It was his job to test my urine sample from a recent tournament. It’s my duty, he says, to inform you that you’ve failed the standard ATP drug
test. The urine sample you submitted has been found to contain trace amounts of crystal methylene.

I fall onto a chair in the baggage claim area. I’m carrying a backpack, which I slip off my shoulder and drop to the ground.

Mr. Agassi?

Yes. I’m here. So. What now?

Well, there is a process. You’ll need to write a letter to the ATP, admitting your guilt or declaring your innocence.

Uh huh.

Did you know there was a likelihood that this drug was in your system?

Yes. Yes, I knew.

In that case, you’ll need to explain in your letter how the drug got there.

And then?

Your letter will be reviewed by a panel.

And then?

If you knowingly ingested the drug—if you, as it were, plead guilty—you’ll be disciplined, of course.

How?

He reminds me that tennis has three classes of drug violation. Performance-enhancing drugs, of course, would constitute a Class 1, he says, which would carry suspension for two years. However, he adds, crystal methylene is a clear case of Class 2. Recreational drugs.

I think: Recreation.
Re-creation
.

I say: Meaning?

Three months’ suspension.

What do I do once I’ve written this letter?

I have an address for you. Have you got something to write on?

I fish in my backpack for my notebook. He gives me the street, city, zip code, and I scribble it all down, in a daze, with no intention of actually writing the letter.

The doctor says a few more things, which I don’t hear, and then I thank him and hang up. I stumble out of the airport and hail a cab. Driving into Manhattan, staring out the smudged window, I tell the back of the cabdriver’s head: So much for change.

I go straight to Brooke’s brownstone. Luckily, she’s in Los Angeles. I’d never be able to hide my emotions from her. I’d have to tell her everything, and I couldn’t handle that right now. I fall onto the bed and immediately
pass out. When I wake an hour later, I realize it was just a nightmare. What a relief.

It takes several minutes to accept that, no, the phone call was real. The doctor was real. The meth, all too real.

My name, my career, everything is now on the line, at a craps table where no one wins. Whatever I’ve achieved, whatever I’ve worked for, might soon mean nothing. Part of my discomfort with tennis has always been a nagging sense that it’s meaningless. Now I’m about to learn the true meaning of meaninglessness.

Serves me right.

I lie awake until dawn, wondering what to do, whom to tell. I try to imagine how it will feel to be publicly shamed, not for my clothes or game, not for some marketing slogan someone hung on me, but for my utter stupidity, mine alone. I’ll be an outcast. I’ll be a cautionary tale.

Still, though I’m in pain, during the next few days I don’t panic. Not yet, not quite. I can’t, because other more harrowing problems crowd in from all sides. People around me, people I love, are hurting.

Doctors need to operate a second time on little Kacey’s neck. The first operation was clearly botched. I arrange for her to fly to Los Angeles, to have the best care, but during her post-surgery recuperation period she’s immobilized again, lying on her back in a hospital bed, and she’s suffering terribly. Unable to move her head, she says her scalp and skin burn. Also, her room is unspeakably hot, and she’s like her father: she can’t take heat. I kiss her cheek and tell her, Don’t worry. We’ll fix it.

I look at Gil. He’s shrinking before my eyes.

I run to the nearest appliance store and buy the biggest, baddest air-conditioning unit they have. Gil and I install it in Kacey’s window. When I turn the knob up to Max Cool and press Power, Gil and I clap hands and Kacey smiles as the cold air pushes the bangs from her pretty round face.

Next I run to a toy store, the swimming section, and buy one of those tiny inner tubes for toddlers. I slide the inner tube under Kacey, positioning her head in the center, then blow it up until it gently and gradually lifts her head without altering the angle of her neck. A look of pure relief, and gratitude, and joy, washes over her face, and in this look, in this courageous little girl, I find the thing I’ve been seeking, the philosopher’s stone that unites all the experiences, good and bad, of the last few years. Her suffering, her resilient smile in the face of that suffering, my part in easing her suffering—this,
this
is the reason for everything. How many
times must I be shown? This is why we’re here. To fight through the pain and, when possible, to relieve the pain of others. So simple. So hard to see.

I turn to Gil and he sees it all, and his cheeks are glistening with tears.

Later, while Kacey sleeps, while Gil pretends not to sleep in a corner, I sit in a hard-backed chair at her bedside, a legal pad in my lap, and write a letter to the ATP. It’s a letter filled with lies interwoven with bits of truth.

I acknowledge that the drugs were in my system—but I assert that I never knowingly took them. I say Slim, whom I’ve since fired, is a known drug user, and that he often spikes his sodas with meth—which is true. Then I come to the central lie of the letter. I say that I recently drank accidentally from one of Slim’s spiked sodas, unwittingly ingesting his drugs. I say that I felt poisoned, but thought the drugs would leave my system quickly. Apparently they did not.

I ask for understanding, and leniency, and hastily sign it: Sincerely.

I sit with the letter on my lap, watching Kacey’s face. I feel ashamed, of course. I’ve always been a truthful person. When I lie, it’s almost always unknowingly, or to myself. But imagining the look on Kacey’s face as she learns that Uncle Andre is a drug user, banned three months from tennis, and then multiplying that look by a few million faces, I don’t know what else to do but lie.

I promise myself that at least this lie is the end of it. I’ll send the letter, but I won’t do anything more. I’ll let my lawyers handle the rest. I won’t go before any panel and lie to anyone’s face. I’ll never lie about this publicly. From here on, I’ll leave it in the hands of fate and men in suits. If they can settle it privately, quietly, fine. If not, I’ll live with what comes.

Gil wakes. I fold the letter and step with him into the hallway.

Under the fluorescent lights, he looks drawn, pale. He looks—I can’t believe it
—weak
. I’d forgotten: it’s in hospital hallways that we know what life is about. I put my arms around him and tell him I love him and that we’ll get through this.

He nods, thanks me, mumbles something incoherent. We stand in silence for the longest time. In his eyes I can see his thoughts circling the abyss. Then he tries to distract himself. He needs to talk about something, anything, other than the fear and worry. He asks how it’s going with me.