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I try to tell Gil about my psyche. I start at the beginning, the central truth.

He laughs. You don’t actually hate tennis, he says.

I do, Gil, I really do.

He gets a look on his face, and I wonder if he’s thinking he might have quit his job at UN-LV too soon.

If that’s true, he says, why play?

I’m not suited for anything else. I don’t know how to do anything else. Tennis is the only thing I’m qualified for. Also, my father would have a fit if I did anything different.

Gil scratches his ear. This is a new one on him. He’s known hundreds of athletes, but he’s never known one who hated athletics. He doesn’t know what to say. I reassure him that there’s nothing to be said. I don’t understand it myself. I can only tell him how it is.

I also tell Gil about the Image Is Everything debacle. I feel, somehow, that he needs to know, so he’ll understand what he’s got himself into. The whole thing still makes me angry, but now the anger has seeped down deep. Hard to talk about, hard to reach. It feels like a spoonful of acid in the pit of my stomach. Hearing about it, Gil feels angry too, but he has less trouble accessing his anger. He wants to act on it, right now. He wants to punch out an advertising exec or two. He says: Some slap-dick on Madison Avenue puts together a silly ad campaign, and gets you to say a line into a camera, and it means something about you?

Millions of people think so. And say so. And write so.

They took advantage of you, he says. Plain and simple. Not your fault. You didn’t know what you were saying, you didn’t know how it would be taken and twisted and misinterpreted.

Our talks carry beyond the weight room. We go out for dinner. We go out for breakfast.

We’re on the phone six times a day. I call Gil late one night and we talk for hours. As the conversation winds down he says, Do you want to come over tomorrow and get in a workout?

I’d love to, but I’m in Tokyo.

We’ve been talking for three hours and you’re in Tokyo? I thought you were across town. I feel guilty, man. I’ve been keeping you all this—.

He stops himself. He says, You know what? I don’t feel guilty. Nah. I feel honored. You needed to talk to me, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in Tokyo or Timbuktu. I get it. All right, man, I get it.

From the start, Gil keeps a careful record of my workouts. He buys a brown ledger and marks down every rep, every set, every exercise—every day. He records my weight, my diet, my pulse, my travel. In the margins he draws diagrams and even pictures. He says he wants to chart my progress, compile a database he can refer to in the coming years. He’s making a study of me, so he can rebuild me from the ground up. He’s like Michelangelo appraising a block of marble, but he’s not put off by my flaws. He’s like da Vinci getting it all down in his notebooks. I see in Gil’s notebooks, in the care he takes with them, in the way he never skips a day, that I inspire him, and this inspires me.

It goes without saying that Gil will travel with me to many tournaments. He needs to watch my conditioning in matches, monitor my food, make sure I’m always hydrated. (But not just hydrated. Gil has a special concoction of water, carbs, salt, and electrolytes that I need to drink the night before every match.) His training doesn’t end on the road. If anything, it becomes more important on the road.

Our first trip together, we agree, will be February 1990, to Scottsdale. I tell Gil we’ll need to be there a couple of nights before the tournament starts, for the hit-and-giggle.

Hit-and-what?

It’s an exhibition with some celebrities to raise money for charity, to make corporate sponsors feel good, to entertain the fans.

Sounds fun.

What’s more, I tell him, we’re going to drive over in my new Corvette. I can’t wait to show him how fast it goes.

But when I pull up to Gil’s house I realize that I might not have thought this all the way through. The car is very small, and Gil is very big. The car is so small that it makes Gil look twice as big. He contorts himself to fit into the passenger side, and even then he needs to tilt sideways, and even then his head touches the roof. The Corvette looks as if, at any moment, it might burst apart.

Seeing Gil squished and uncomfortable, I’m motivated to go very fast. Of course I don’t need extra motivation in the Corvette. The car is supersonic. We crank the music and fly out of Vegas, across Hoover Dam, down toward the craggy Joshua tree forests of northwest Arizona. We decide to stop for lunch outside Kingman. The prospect of food, combined with the speed of the Corvette, and the loud music, and the presence of Gil, makes me mash the gas.

We hit Mach 1. I see Gil make a face and twirl a finger. I look in the rearview mirror—a highway patrol car inches from my back fender.

The patrolman quickly gives me a speeding ticket.

Not my first, I tell Gil, who shakes his head.

In Kingman we stop at Carl’s Jr. and eat an enormous lunch. We both love to eat, and we both have a secret weakness for fast food, so we fall off the nutrition wagon, ordering French fries, then ordering seconds, refilling our sodas. When I squeeze Gil back into the Corvette I realize we’re well behind schedule. We need to make up time. I floor it and zoom back onto U.S. 95. Two hundred miles to Scottsdale. Two hours of driving.

Twenty minutes later, Gil makes the same twirling gesture.

A different patrolman this time. He takes my license and registration and asks, Have you received a speeding ticket recently?

I look at Gil. He frowns.

Well, if you consider an hour ago recent, then yes, Officer, I have.

Wait right here.

He walks back to his car. One minute later, he returns.

The judge wants you back in Kingman.

Kingman? What?

Come with me, sir.

Come with—what about the car?

Your friend can drive it.

But, but, can’t I just follow you?

Sir, you are going to listen to everything I say and do everything I say and that’s why you’re not going back to Kingman in handcuffs. You will sit in the back of my car and your friend will follow us. Now. Step out.

I’m in the back of a police car, Gil following in a Corvette that fits him like a whalebone cor-set. We’re in the middle of nowhere and I’m hearing the crazy-ass plinking banjos from Deliverance. It takes forty-five minutes to reach Kingman Municipal Court. I follow the patrolman in-to a side door and find myself before the small, elderly judge, who wears a cowboy hat and a belt buckle the size of a pie tin.

The banjos are getting louder.

I look around for a certificate on the wall, something to prove that this is in fact a courthouse and he’s a real judge. All I see are heads of dead animals.

The judge begins by rattling off a series of random questions.

You’re playing in Scottsdale?

Yes, sir.

You’ve played that tournament before?

Uh—yes, sir.

What kind of draw do you have?

Pardon?

Who do you play in the first round?

The judge, it turns out, is a tennis fan. Also, he’s followed my career closely. He thinks I should’ve beaten Courier at the French Open. He has a slew of opinions about Connors, Lendl, Chang, the state of the game, the scarcity of great American players. After sharing his opinions with me, liberally, for twenty-five minutes, he asks, Would you mind signing something for my kids?

No problem, sir. Your honor.

I sign everything he puts before me, then await sentencing.

All right, the judge says. I sentence you to go give ’em hell down in Scottsdale.

Sorry? I don’t under—. I mean, your honor, I drove back here, thirty-some miles, sure I was going to be sent to jail, or at least fined.