"The days of Rudy and the Big Macs passed in a blur. Suddenly my father had his back-yard tennis court, which meant I had my prison. I’d helped feed the chain gang that built my cell. I’d helped measure and paint the white lines that would confine me. Why did I do it? I had no choice. The reason I do everything.
No one ever asked me if I wanted to play tennis, let alone make it my life. In fact, my mother thought I was born to be a preacher. She tells me, however, that my father decided long before I was born that I would be a professional tennis player. When I was one year old,she adds, I proved my father right. Watching a ping-pong game, I moved only my eyes, never my head. My father called to my mother.
Look, he said. See how he moves only his eyes? A natural.She tells me that when I was still in the crib, my father hung a mobile of tennis balls above my head and encouraged me to slap at them with a ping-pong paddle he’d taped to my hand.
When I was three he gave me a sawed-off racket and told me to hit whatever I wanted. I spe-cialized in salt shakers. I liked serving them through glass windows. I aced the dog. My father never got mad. He got mad about many things, but never about hitting something hard with racket."
~
Breaks my heart to read this. All my life I've hated parents who are like this. Hated my dad too, for a period of time for forcing this kinda shit.
What is it about a child with skill that says to these anal parents that I need to push them into submission and force them to do something, to achieve something? Like why? Fuck. Whatever he says about his childhood is just horrifying. It's not easy being a kid and having that fear of failure and an authoritarian asshat towering over you, trying to control your life. Ugh.
A 36yo man who hated tennis. Fuck. My deepest love to you, it could not have been easy to deal with this shit.
~
Violent by nature, my father is forever preparing for battle. He shadowboxes constantly.He keeps an ax handle in his car. He leaves the house with a handful of salt and pepper in each pocket, in case he’s in a street fight and needs to blind someone. Of course some of his most vicious battles are with himself. He has chronic stiffness in his neck, and he’s perpetu-ally loosening the neck bones by angrily twisting and yanking his head. When this doesn’twork he shakes himself like a dog, whipping his head from side to side until the neck makes a sound like popcorn popping. When even this doesn’t work, he resorts to the heavy punching bag that hangs from a harness outside our house. My father stands on a chair, removes the punching bag, and places his neck in the harness. He then kicks away the chair and drops afoot through the air, his momentum abruptly halted by the harness. The first time I saw him do this, I was walking through the rooms of the house. I looked up and there was my father, kick-ing the chair, hanging by his neck, his shoes three feet off the ground. I had no doubt he’dkilled himself. I ran to him, hysterical.
Seeing the stricken look on my face, he barked: What the fuck is the matter with you?
Another time my father reaches across me and points his handgun at another driver. He holds the gun level with my nose. I stare straight ahead. I don’t move. I don’t know what the other driver has done wrong, only that it’s the automotive equivalent of hitting into the net. I feel my father’s finger tensing on the trigger. Then I hear the other driver speed away, fol-lowed by a sound I rarely hear—my father laughing. He’s busting a gut. I tell myself that I’ll re-member this moment—my father laughing, holding a gun under my nose—if I live to be one hundred.
~
Bruh.
~
Men like these are complete horseshit. I would hate to be around this kinda guy and I would never be. Fuck that.
~
If Grandma wants to go back home, I’m all for it. I’m only eight, but I’ll drive her to the air-port 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.
~
🤢🤢🤢
Oh my god what all garbage happened in agassi s house oh my god aaaaaaaa. I wish I would unread this it is horrible aaaaaaaaa
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
~
He’s adamant, and desperate, because that was the plan for Rita, Philly, and Tami, but things never worked out. Rita rebelled. Tami stopped getting better. Philly didn’t have the killer instinct. My father says this about Philly all the time. He says it to me, to Mom, even to Philly—right to his face. Philly just shrugs, which seems to prove that Philly doesn’t have the killer instinct.
But my father says far worse things to Philly.
You’re a born loser, he says.
You’re right, Philly says in a sorrowful tone. I am a born loser. I was born to be a loser.
You are! You feel sorry for your opponent! You don’t care about being the best!
Philly doesn’t bother to deny it. He plays well, he has talent, but he just isn’t a perfection-ist, and perfection isn’t the goal in our house, it’s the law. If you’re not perfect, you’re a loser.
A born loser.
My father decided that Philly was a born loser when Philly was about my age, playing nationals. Philly didn’t just lose; he didn’t argue when his opponents cheated him, which made my father turn bright red and scream curses in Assyrian from the bleachers.
I worry that I got Philly’s good luck, that I stole it from him somehow, because if I was born with a horseshoe up my ass, Philly was born with a black cloud over his head. When Philly was twelve he broke his wrist while riding his bike, broke it in three places, and that was the beginning of a long stretch of unbroken gloom. My father was so furious with Philly that he made Philly keep playing tournaments,broken wrist and all, which worsened Philly’s wrist, made the problem chronic, and ruined his game forever.
~
This is just abuse man...fuck. I can't tolerate reading this tbh. :(
~
Afterward, we sit up drinking sodas and talking. Perry agrees that my father’s scarier than anything Hollywood can offer, but he says his father is twice as scary. His father, he says, is an ogre, a tyrant, and a narcissist—the first time I’ve heard this word.
Perry says, Narcissist means he thinks only about himself. It also means his son is his personal property. He has a vision of how his son’s life is going to be, and he couldn’t care less about his son’s vision of that future.
Sounds familiar.
Perry and I agree that life would be a million times better if our fathers were like other kids’ fathers. But I hear an added note of pain in Perry’s voice, because he says his father doesn’t love him. I’ve never questioned my father’s love. I just wish it were softer, with more listening and less rage. In fact, I sometimes wish my father loved me less. Maybe then he’d back off,
let me make my own choices. I tell Perry that having no choice, having no say about what I do or who I am, makes me crazy. That’s why I put more thought, obsessive thought, into the few choices I do have—what I wear, what I eat, who I call my friends.
~
Lol... Narcissists. I didn't even know Agassi had a friend whose dad could be called one. But this is an accurate description. Them ruining everyone's lives around them, nary a care for anyone else.
~
The man hands me a check, and as I walk out of his office I feel as if I’m starting down a long, long road, one that seems to lead into a dark, ominous forest.
It’s April 29, 1986. My sixteenth birthday.
~
The deep dark forest lol. A crossover that warms my heart.
Checkmate.
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Love always feels like home. This is who I am, who I want to be and who I will continue to be. Like all three of them in parts. The one who wants to feel love and care and belonging, and the one who, when she loves you... Will make sure you belong too. Always. ♥️
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