Open: An Autobiography

He’s yelling. Mr. Agassi! Nick Bollettieri here! Right, right. Yes, well, listen to me. I’m going to tell you something very important. Your boy has more talent than anybody I’ve ever seen come through this academy. That’s right. Ever. And I’m going to take him to the top.

What the hell is he talking about? I’m only here for three months. I’m leaving here in sixty-four days. Is Nick saying he wants me to stay here? Live here - forever? Surely my father won’t go for that.

Nick says: That’s right. No, that’s no issue. I’m going to make it so you won’t pay a penny.

Andre can stay, free of charge. I’m tearing up your check.

My heart sinks. I know my father can’t resist anything free. My fate is sealed.

Nick hangs up and spins toward me in his chair. He doesn’t explain. He doesn’t console.

He doesn’t ask if this is what I want. He doesn’t say a thing besides: Go back out to the courts.

The warden has tacked several years to my sentence, and there’s nothing to be done but pick up my hammer and return to the rock pile.

EVERY DAY AT THE BOLLETTIERI ACADEMY starts with the stench. The surrounding hills are home to several orange-processing plants, which give off a toxic smell of burned orange peels. It’s the first thing that hits me when I open my eyes, a reminder that this is real, I’m not back in Vegas, I’m not in my deuce-court bed, dreaming. I’ve never cared much for orange juice, but after the Bollettieri Academy I’ll never be able to look at a gallon of Minute Maid again.

As the sun clears the marshes, burning off the morning mist, I hurry to beat the other boys into the shower, because only the first boys get hot water. Actually, it’s not a shower, just a tiny nozzle that shoots a narrow jet of painful needles, which hardly gets you wet, let alone clean. Then we all rush to breakfast, served in a cafeteria so chaotic, it’s like a mental hospital where the nurses forgot to hand out the meds. But you’d better get there early or it might be worse. The butter will be filled with everyone else’s crumbs, the bread will be gone, the plastic eggs will be ice.

Straight from breakfast we board a bus for school, Bradenton Academy, twenty-six minutes away. I divide my time between two academies, both prisons, but Bradenton Academy makes me more claustrophobic, because it makes less sense. At the Bollettieri Academy, at least I’m learning something about tennis. At Bradenton Academy, the only thing I learn is that I’m stupid.

Bradenton Academy has warped floors, dirty carpets, and a color scheme that’s fourteen shades of gray. There isn’t one window in the building, so the light is fluorescent and the air is stale, filled with a medley of foul odors, chiefly vomit, toilet, and fear. It’s almost worse than the scorched-orange smell back at the Bollettieri Academy.

Other kids, non-tennis kids from town, don’t seem to mind. Some actually thrive at Bradenton Academy, maybe because their life schedules are manageable. They don’t balance school with careers as semipro athletes. They don’t contend with waves of homesickness that rise and fall like nausea. They spend seven hours a day in class, then go home to eat dinner and watch TV with their families. Those of us who commute from the Bollettieri Academy, however, spend four and a half hours in class, then board the bus for the long slog back to our full-time jobs, hitting balls until after dusk, at which time we collapse in heaps on our wooden bunks, to grab a half hour of rest before returning to the original state of nature that is the rec center. Then we nod over our textbooks for a few futile hours before free hour and lights out. We’re always behind on schoolwork and falling ever further behind. The system is rigged, guaranteed to produce bad students as quickly and efficiently as it produces good tennis players.

I don’t like anything that’s rigged, so I don’t give much effort. I don’t study. I don’t do homework. I don’t pay attention. And I don’t give a damn. In every class I sit quietly at my desk, staring at my feet, wishing I were somewhere else, while the teacher drones on about Shakespeare or Bunker Hill or the Pythagorean theorem.

The teachers don’t care that I’ve tuned them out, because I’m one of Nick’s Boys, and they don’t want to cross Nick. Bradenton Academy exists because the Bollettieri Academy keeps sending it a bus full of paying customers every semester. The teachers know that their jobs depend on Nick, so they can’t flunk us, and we cherish our special status. We feel a lordly sense of entitlement, never realizing that the thing to which we’re most entitled is the thing we’re not getting - an education.