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You’re crazy, she says.

I laugh.

That was unbelievable, she says. You
went places
out there.

I did, baby. I went places.

I lie on the floor next to the bed, try to fall asleep, but I can’t stop replaying the match.

I hear her voice in the darkness somewhere above me, like an angel.

How do you feel?

It was a pretty cool way to spend an evening.

I
N THE SEMIS
I’m due to play Robby Ginepri, a touted kid from Georgia. CBS wants mine to be the late match. I go to the tournament director on my knees. I tell him, If I’m lucky enough to get through this match, I’ll have to come back tomorrow. Please don’t make a thirty-five-year-old man get home later than his twenty-two-year-old opponent in the final.

He reschedules my match, makes it the early semi.

After two five-setters in a row, no one gives me a chance against Ginepri. He’s fast, solid off both sides, playing the best tennis of his life—and young. And even before dealing with Ginepri, I know the first thing I’ll have to do is chisel through a wall of my own fatigue. The last three sets against Blake are the best tennis I’ve ever played, and the most draining. I tell myself to come out against Ginepri and manufacture adrenaline, pretend I’m down two sets, try to relocate that mindless state I found against Blake.

It works. Feigning urgency, I win the first set. Now my goal is to conserve energy for tomorrow’s final. I begin to play safe tennis, thinking about my next opponent, and of course that lets Ginepri swing freely, take chances. He wins the second set.

I banish from my mind all thought of the final. I give Ginepri my full attention. He’s gassed after expending so much energy to tie the match, and I win the third.

But he wins the fourth.

I need to start the fifth with fury. I also need to acknowledge that I can’t win every point. I can’t run after everything, can’t lunge for each dink and drop. I can’t go full-speed against a kid who’s still teething. He wants to be out here all night, but I have forty-five minutes of energy left, forty-five minutes of a functioning body. Or maybe just thirty-five.

I win the set. It’s not possible, but I’m in the final of the U.S. Open at thirty-five years old. Darren, Gil, and Stefanie scoop me off the locker-room floor and go into triage mode. Darren grabs my rackets and runs
them to Roman, the stringer. Gil hands me my Gil Water. Stefanie helps me to the car. We race back to the Four Seasons to watch Federer and Hewitt fight for the privilege of playing the old cripple from Vegas.

It’s the most relaxed you can be before a final, watching the other semi. You tell yourself: Whatever I’m feeling at this moment, it’s better than what those guys are feeling. Then Federer wins, of course. I lean back on the couch and he’s all I’m thinking about, and I know somewhere out there I’m all he’s thinking about. Between now and tomorrow afternoon I need to do everything a little better than he does it, including sleep.

But I have children. I used to sleep until eleven thirty in the morning on the day of a match. Now I can’t sleep later than seven thirty. Stefanie keeps the children quiet, but something in my body knows they’re up, they want to see their father. More, their father wants to see them.

After breakfast I kiss them goodbye. Driving to the stadium with Gil, I’m quiet. I know I have no chance. I’m ancient, I’ve played three five-setters in a row. Let’s be real. My only hope is if it goes three or four sets. If it’s a fast match, where conditioning doesn’t come into play, I might get lucky.

Federer comes onto the court looking like Cary Grant. I almost wonder if he’s going to play in an ascot and a smoking jacket. He’s permanently smooth, I’m constantly rattled, even when serving at 40–15. He’s also dangerous from so many different parts of the court, there’s nowhere to hide. I don’t do well when there’s nowhere to hide. Federer wins the first set. I go into frantic mode, do anything I can to knock him off balance. I get up a break in the second. I break again and win the set.

I think to myself: Mr. Grant
might
just have a problem today.

In the third set, I break him and go up 4–2. I’m serving with a breeze at my back, and Federer is shanking balls. I’m about to go up 5–2, and for a fleeting moment, he and I both think something remarkable is about to happen here. We lock eyes. We share a moment. Then, at 30–love, I hit a kick serve to his backhand, he takes a swing, shanks it. The ball sounds sick as it leaves his racket, like one of my deliberate misfires as a kid. But this sick, ugly misfire somehow wobbles over the net and lands in. Winner. He breaks me, and we’re back on serve.

In the tiebreak, he goes to a place that I don’t recognize. He finds a gear that other players simply don’t have. He wins 7–1.

Now the shit is rolling downhill and doesn’t stop. My quads are screaming. My back is closing the store for the night. My decisions become poor. I’m reminded how slight the margin can be on a tennis
court, how narrow the space between greatness and mediocrity, fame and anonymity, happiness and despair. We were playing a tight match. We were dead even. Now, due to a tiebreak that made my jaw drop with admiration, the rout is on.

Walking to the net, I’m certain that I’ve lost to the better man, the Everest of the next generation. I pity the young players who will have to contend with him. I feel for the man who is fated to play Agassi to his Sampras. Though I don’t mention Pete by name, I have him uppermost in my mind when I tell reporters: It’s real simple. Most people have weaknesses. Federer has none.

I
PULL OUT OF THE
2006 A
USTRALIAN
O
PEN
, then pull out of the entire clay season. I hate to do it, but I need to save myself for the 2006 Wimbledon, which I quietly, privately decide will be my last. I’m saving myself for Wimbledon. I never thought I’d say such a thing. I never dreamed a proper, respectful goodbye to Wimbledon would feel so important.

But Wimbledon has become hallowed ground for me. It’s where my wife shined. It’s where I first suspected that I could win, and where I proved it to myself and the world. Wimbledon is where I learned to bow, to bend my knee, to do something I didn’t want to do, wear what I didn’t want to wear, and survive. Also, no matter how I feel about tennis, the game is my home. I hated home as a boy, and then I left, and I soon found myself homesick. In the final hours of my career I’m continually chastened by that memory.

I tell Darren this will be my last Wimbledon, and the coming U.S. Open will be my last tournament ever. We make the announcement just as Wimbledon gets under way. Immediately after, I’m startled by how differently my peers look at me. They no longer treat me as a rival, a threat. I’m retired. I’m irrelevant. A wall is let down.

Reporters ask, Why now? Why did you choose to retire now? I tell them I didn’t. I simply can’t play anymore. That’s the finish line I’ve been seeking, the finish line with the inexorable pull. Can’t play, as opposed to won’t play. Unwittingly, I’ve been seeking that moment when I’d have no choice.

Bud Collins, the venerable tennis commentator and historian, the coauthor of Laver’s autobiography, sums up my career by saying I’ve gone from punk to paragon. I cringe. To my thinking, Bud sacrificed the truth on the altar of alliteration. I was never a punk, any more than I’m now a paragon.

Also, several sportswriters muse about my transformation, and that word rankles. I think it misses the mark. Transformation is change from one thing to another, but I started as nothing. I didn’t transform, I formed. When I broke into tennis, I was like most kids: I didn’t know who I was, and I rebelled at being told by older people. I think older people make this mistake all the time with younger people, treating them as finished products when in fact they’re in process. It’s like judging a match before it’s over, and I’ve come from behind too often, and had too many opponents come roaring back against me, to think that’s a good idea.

What people see now, for better or worse, is my first formation, my first incarnation. I didn’t alter my image, I discovered it. I didn’t change my mind. I opened it. J.P. helps me work through this idea, to explain it to myself. He says people have been fooled by my changing looks, my clothes and hair, into thinking that I know who I am. People see my self-exploration as self-expression. He says that, for a man with so many fleeting identities, it’s shocking, and symbolic, that my initials are A.K.A.

Sadly, in the early summer of 2006, despite the best efforts of J.P. and others, I can’t yet explain this to reporters. Even if I could, the press room at the All England Club isn’t the place.

I can’t explain it to Stefanie either, but I don’t need to. She knows all. In the days and hours leading up to Wimbledon, she stares into my eyes and pats my cheek. She talks to me about my career. She talks about hers. She tells me about her last Wimbledon. She didn’t know it would be her last. She says it’s better this way, to know, to go out on my own terms.

Wearing a necklace made for me by Jaden—a chain of block letters that spells out
Daddy Rocks—
I face Boris Pashanski, from Serbia, in the first round. As I step on the court, the applause is loud and long. On the first serve, I can’t see the court, because my eyes are filled with tears. Despite feeling as if I’m playing in a suit of armor, with a back that will not loosen, I persist, endure. I win.

In the second round I beat Andreas Seppi, from Italy, in straight sets. I’m playing well, which gives me hope going into my third-round match, against Nadal. He’s a brute, a freak, a force of nature, as strong and balletic a player as I’ve ever seen. But I feel—the delusional effects of winning—that I might be able to make inroads. I like my chances. I lose the first set,
7–6
, but take hope from how close it was.

Then he annihilates me. The match takes seventy minutes. My window of opportunity is fifty-five. That’s when I start to feel my back. Late in the match, with Nadal serving, I can no longer stand still. I need to move around, stomp my foot, get the blood flowing. The stiffness is so
severe, the pain so great, returning is the last thing on my mind. I’m thinking only of remaining vertical.

After, in a moment dripping with irony, Wimbledon officials break with tradition to hold an on-court interview with Nadal and me. They never hold on-court interviews. I tell Gil: Sooner or later, I knew I’d get Wimbledon to break with tradition.

Gil isn’t laughing. He never laughs while a fight is still going on.

It’s almost over, I tell him.

I go to Washington, D.C., and play an Italian qualifier named Andrea Stoppini. He beats me as if I’m the qualifier, and I feel ashamed. I thought I needed a tune-up for the U.S. Open, but this tune-up has left me shaken. I tell reporters that I’m struggling with the end more than I expected. I tell them that the best way I can explain it is this: Many of you, I’m sure, don’t like your jobs. But imagine if someone told you right now that your story about me would be your last. After this, you’ll never be able to write another word for as long as you live. How would you feel?

E
VERYONE TRAVELS TO
N
EW
Y
ORK
. The whole team. Stefanie, the children, my parents, Perry, Gil, Darren, Philly. We invade the Four Seasons and colonize Campagnola. The children smile to hear the applause as we walk in. To my ear, the applause sounds different this time. It has a different timbre. It has a subtext. They know this isn’t about me, it’s about all of us finishing something special together.

Frankie seats us at the corner table. He makes a big fuss over Stefanie and the children. I watch him serve Jaden all my favorite foods, and I watch Jaden enjoy them. I watch Jaz enjoy the food too, though she insists that each entrée remain separate. They mustn’t touch. A variation of the blueberry muffin imperative. I watch Stefanie watching the kids, smiling, and I think of the four of us, four distinct personalities. Four different surfaces. And yet a matching set. Complete. On the eve of my final tournament, I enjoy that sense we all seek, that knowledge we get only a few times in life, that the themes of our life are connected, the seeds of our ending were there in the beginning, and vice versa.

In the first round I play Andrei Pavel, from Romania. My back seizes up midway through the match, but despite standing stick straight I manage to tough out a win. I ask Darren to arrange a cortisone shot for the next day. Even with the shot, I don’t know if I’ll be able to play my next match.

I certainly won’t be able to win. Not against Marcos Baghdatis. He’s
ranked number eight in the world. He’s a big strong kid from Cyprus, in the midst of a great year. He’s reached the final of the Australian Open and the semis of Wimbledon.

And then somehow I beat him. Afterward I’m barely able to stagger up the tunnel and into the locker room before my back gives out. Darren and Gil lift me like a bag of laundry onto the training table, while Baghdatis’s people hoist him onto the table beside me. He’s cramping badly. Stefanie appears, kisses me. Gil forces me to drink something. A trainer says the doctors are on the way. He turns on the TV above the table and everyone clears out, leaving just me and Baghdatis, both of us writhing and groaning in pain.

The TV shows highlights from our match. SportsCenter.

In my peripheral vision I detect slight movement. I turn to see Baghdatis extending his hand. His face says, We
did
that. I reach out, take his hand, and we remain this way, holding hands, as the TV flickers with scenes of our savage battle.

We relive the match, and then I relive my life.

Finally the doctors arrive. It takes them and the trainers half an hour to get Baghdatis and me on our feet. Baghdatis leaves the locker room first, gingerly, leaning against his coach. Then Gil and Darren lead me out to the parking lot, enticing me forward a few more steps with the thought of a cheeseburger and a martini at P. J. Clarke’s. It’s two in the morning.

Christ, Darren says, as we emerge into the parking lot. The car is all the way over there, mate.