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A friend tells me that the four surfaces in tennis are like the four seasons. Each asks something different of you. Each bestows different gifts and exacts different costs. Each radic-ally alters your outlook, remakes you on a molecular level. After three rounds of the Italian Open, in May 1988, I’m no longer Andre Agassi. And I’m no longer in the tournament.

I go to the 1988 French Open expecting more of the same. Walking into the locker room at Roland Garros, I see all the clay experts leaning against the walls, leering. Dirt rats, Nick calls them. They’ve been here for months, practicing, waiting for the rest of us to finish hard courts and fly into their clay lair.

Disorienting as the new surface is, Paris itself is more of a shock to the system. The city has all the same logistical problems of New York and London, the large crowds and cultural anomalies, but with an added language barrier. Also, the presence of dogs in restaurants unsettles me. The first time I walk into a café, on the Champs-Élysées, a dog raises its leg and unleashes a stream of pee against the table next to mine.

Roland Garros provides no escape from the strangeness. It’s the only place I’ve ever played that reeks of cigars and pipes. While I’m serving, at a critical point in a match, a finger of pipe smoke curls under my nose. I want to find the person smoking that pipe and admonish him, and yet I don’t want to find that person, because I can’t imagine what sort of gnarled hob-bit is sitting at an outdoor tennis match puffing on a pipe.

Despite my unease, I manage to beat my first three opponents. I even beat the great clay master Guillermo Pérez-Roldán in the quarterfinal. In the semis I run into Mats Wilander. He’s ranked number three in the world, but to my mind he’s the player of the moment. When one of his matches is on TV, I stop whatever I’m doing and watch. He’s on his way to an astounding year. He’s already won the Australian Open and is the favorite to win this tournament. I manage to take him to a fifth set, then lose 6–0, cramping badly.

I remind Nick that I’m skipping Wimbledon. I say, Why switch to grass and expend all that energy? Let’s take a month off, rest, get ready for the hard courts of summer.

He’s more than happy not to go to London. He doesn’t like Wimbledon any more than I do.

Besides, he wants to hurry back to the U.S. and find me a better trainer.

NICK HIRES A CHILEAN STRONGMAN named Pat who never asks me to do anything he’s not willing to do himself, which I respect. But Pat also has a habit of spitting on me when he talks, and leaning over me while I’m lifting weights, drizzling sweat on my face. I feel as if I should show up for Pat’s workout sessions in a plastic poncho.

The mainstay of Pat’s training regimen is a brutal daily run up and down a hill outside Vegas. The hill is remote and sunbaked, and gets hotter as you near the top, as if it’s an active volcano. It’s also an hour from my father’s house, which seems unnecessarily far. Nothing like driving to Reno for a run. Pat insists, however, that this hill is the answer to all my physical problems. When we get to the base and pile out of the car, he starts running straight up, and orders me to follow. Within minutes I’m holding my side, sweat rolling off me. By the time we reach the summit I can’t breathe. According to Pat, this is good. This is healthy.

A battered truck appears one day as Pat and I crest the hill. An ancient Native American man climbs out. He comes toward us with a pole. If he wants to kill me, I won’t be able to fend him off, because I can’t lift my arms. And I won’t be able to run away, because I can’t draw breath.

The man asks, What are you doing here?

We’re training. What are you doing here?

Catching me some rattlesnakes.

Rattlesnakes! There are rattlesnakes out here?

There’s training out here?

When I stop laughing the Indian says, more or less, that I must have been born with a horseshoe up my ass, because this is Rattlesnake Fucking Hill. He catches twelve rattlers every day on this hill, and he expects to catch twelve more this morning. It’s a flat-out miracle that I haven’t stepped on one, big and plump and ready to strike.

I look at Pat, and feel an urge to spit on him.

IN JULY I GO to Argentina as one of the youngest men ever to play for the U.S. Davis Cup team. I play well against Martín Jaite, from Argentina, and the crowd gives me its grudging respect. I’m leading two sets to none, ahead 4–0 in the third, waiting for Jaite’s serve. I’m hunched against the cold, because it’s the dead of winter in Argentina. The temperature must be thirty degrees. Jaite hits a let serve, then hits a bending unreturnable serve that I reach up and catch with my hand. A riot breaks out. The crowd thinks I’m trying to show up their countryman, disrespecting him. They boo me for several minutes.

The next day’s newspapers kill me. Rather than defend myself, I react with truculence. I say I’ve always wanted to do something like that. The truth is, I was just cold and not thinking.

I was being stupid, not cocky. My reputation takes a major hit.

THE CROWD AT STRATTON MOUNTAIN welcomes me days later, however, like a prodigal. I play to please them. I play to thank them for banishing the memory of Argentina.

Something about these people, these emerald mountains, this Vermont air—I win the tournament. I wake soon after to discover that I’m number four in the world. But I’m too spent to celebrate. Between Pat and Davis Cup and the grind of the tour, I’m sleeping twelve hours a night.

I fly to New York in the late summer to play a minor tournament in New Jersey, a tune-up for the 1988 U.S. Open. I reach the final and face Tarango. I beat him soundly, a delicious victory, because I can still close my eyes and see Tarango cheating me when I was eight. My first loss. I’ll never forget. Each time I hit a winner I think, Fuck you, Jeff. Fuck. You.

At the U.S. Open I reach the quarters. I’m due to face Jimmy Connors. Before the match I approach him meekly in the locker room and remind him that we once met. In Las Vegas? I was four? You were playing at Caesars Palace? We hit some balls together?

Nope, he says.

Oh. Well. Actually, we met again, several times, when I was seven. I used to deliver rackets to you? My father strung your rackets whenever you came to town, and I’d bring them to you at your favorite restaurant on the Strip?

Nope, he says again, then lies back on a bench and pulls a long white towel over his legs and closes his eyes.

Dismissed.

This gibes with everything I’ve heard about Connors from other players. Asshole, they say. Rude, condescending, egomaniac prick. But I thought he’d treat me differently, I thought he’d show me some love, given our longtime connection.

Just for that, I tell Perry, I’m beating this guy in three easy sets—and he’s going to win no more than nine games.

The crowd is pulling for Connors. It’s the opposite of Stratton. Here, I’m cast as the bad guy. I’m the impertinent upstart who dares to oppose the elder statesman. The crowd wants Connors to defy the odds, and Father Time, and I’m standing in the way of that dream scenario. Each time they cheer I think: Do they realize what this guy is like in the locker room? Do they know what his peers say about him? Do they have any concept of how he responds to a friendly hello?

I’m cruising, winning easily, when a man in the upper bleachers calls out, C’mon, Jimmy, he’s a punk—you’re a legend! The words hang in midair for a moment, bigger and louder than the Goodyear Blimp overhead, and then twenty thousand fans guffaw. Connors cracks a sly smile, nods, and hits a ball as a souvenir to the man who yelled.