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I cloister myself in Gil’s gym and train with fury. I tell him about the goal, and he draws up a battle plan. First, he designs a course of study. He sets about collecting a master list of phone numbers and addresses for the world’s most acclaimed sports doctors and nutrition-ists, and reaches out to all of them, turns them into his private consultants. He huddles with experts at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. He flies coast to coast, interviewing the best and brightest, famed researchers on health and wellness, recording every word they tell him in his da Vinci notebooks. He reads everything, from muscle magazines to obscure medical studies and dry reports. He subscribes to the New England Journal of Medicine. In no time he makes himself a portable university, with one professor and one subject.

The student body: me.

Then he determines my physical limit, and pushes me right up to it. He soon has me bench-pressing almost twice my weight, five to seven sets of more than three hundred pounds. He has me lifting fifty-pound dumbbells in excruciating sets of three-ways: back-to-back-to-back flexes that burn three different muscles in my shoulders. Then we work on biceps and triceps. We burn my muscles to ashes. I like when Gil talks about burning muscles, setting them afire. I like being able to put my pyromania to constructive use.

Next we concentrate on my midsection, beginning with a special machine Gil designed and built. As with all his machines, he chopped it, cut it, re-welded it. (The blueprints in his da Vinci notebooks are stunning.) It’s the only machine of its kind in the world, he says, because it allows me to work my abs without engaging my fragile back. We’re going to stack heavy on your abs, he says, work them until they’re on fire, and then we’re going to do Russian Twists: you’ll hold a forty-five-pound iron plate, a big wheel, and rotate left, right, left, right. That will burn down your sides and obliques.

Last, we move to Gil’s homemade lat machine. Unlike every lat machine in every gym the world over, Gil’s doesn’t compromise my back or neck. The bar I pull to work my lats is slightly in front of me. I’m never awkwardly positioned.

While I’m lifting, Gil also feeds me constantly, every twenty minutes. He wants me taking in four parts carbs to one part protein, and he times my intake to the nanosecond. When you eat, he says, and how you eat, that’s the thing. Every time I turn around he’s shoving a bowl of high-protein oatmeal at me, or a bacon sandwich, or a bagel with peanut butter and honey.

Finally, my upper body and gut pleading for mercy, we go outside and run up and down the hill behind Gil’s house. Gil Hill. Quick bursts of power and speed, up and down, up and down, I run until my mind begs me to stop, and then I run some more, ignoring my mind.

Easing into my car at dusk, I often don’t know that I’ll be able to drive home. Sometimes I don’t try. If I don’t have the strength to turn the key in the ignition, I go back inside and curl up on one of Gil’s benches and fall asleep.

After my mini boot camp with Gil, I look as if I’ve traded in my old body, upgraded to the newest model. Still, there’s room for improvement. I could be better about what I eat outside the gym. Gil, however, doesn’t crack the whip about my lapses. He certainly doesn’t like the way I eat when I’m not with him—Taco Bell, Burger King—but he says I need comfort food now and then. My psyche, he says, is more fragile than my back, and he doesn’t want to overstress it. Besides, a man needs one or two vices.

Gil is a paradox, and we both know it. He can lecture me about nutrition while watching me sip a milkshake. He doesn’t slap the milkshake from my hand. On the contrary, he might even take a sip. I like people with contradictions, of course. I also like that Gil’s not a taskmaster. I’ve had enough taskmasters to last me a lifetime. Gil understands me, coddles me, and occasionally—just occasionally—indulges my taste for junk, maybe because he shares it.

At Indian Wells, I face Pete again. If I can beat him I’ll be within an inch of the top spot. I’m in peak condition, but we play a sloppy match, filled with unforced errors. Each of us is distracted. Pete is still distressed about his coach. I’m worried about my father, who’s having open-heart surgery in a few days. This time, Pete manages to rise above his turmoil, while I let mine consume me. I lose in three sets.

I race to the UCLA Medical Center and find my father strapped to machines with long tubes. They remind me of the ball machine of my youth. You can’t beat the dragon. My mother hugs me. He watched you play yesterday, she says. He watched you lose to Pete.

I’m sorry, Pops.

He’s on his back, drugged, helpless. His eyelids flutter open. He sees me and gestures with his hand. Come closer.

I lean in. He can’t speak. He has a tube in his mouth and down his throat. He mumbles something.

I don’t understand, Pops.

More gestures. I don’t know what he’s trying to tell me. Now he’s getting angry. If he had the strength he’d get out of this bed and knock me out.

He motions for a pad and pen.

Tell me later, Pops.

No, no. He shakes his head. He must tell me now.

The nurses hand him a pad and pen. He scrawls a few words, then makes a brushing gesture. Like an artist, gently brushing. At last I understand.

Backhand, he’s trying to say. Hit to Pete’s backhand. You should have hit more to Pete’s backhand.

Vork your wolleys. Hit harder.

I stand and feel an overpowering urge to forgive, because I realize that my father can’t help himself, that he never could help himself, any more than he could understand himself.

My father is what he is, and always will be, and though he can’t help himself, though he can’t tell the difference between loving me and loving tennis, it’s love all the same. Few of us are granted the grace to know ourselves, and until we do, maybe the best we can do is be consistent. My father is nothing if not consistent.

I put my father’s hand at his side, force him to stop gesturing, tell him that I understand.

Yes, yes, to the backhand. I’ll hit to Pete’s backhand next week in Key Biscayne. And I’ll beat his ass. Don’t worry, Pops. I’ll beat him. Now rest.

He nods. His hand still flapping against his side, he closes his eyes and falls asleep.

The next week I beat Pete in the final of Key Biscayne.

After the match we fly together to New York, where we’re due to catch a flight to Europe for the Davis Cup. But first, upon landing, I drag Pete to the Eugene O’Neill Theater to see Brooke as Rizzo in Grease. It’s the first time Pete has seen a Broadway show, I think, but it’s my fiftieth time seeing Grease. I can recite every word of We Go Together, a trick I’ve performed, deadpan, to much laughter on the Late Show with David Letterman.

I like Broadway. I find the ethos of the theater familiar. The work of a Broadway actor is physical, strenuous, demanding, and the nightly pressure is intense. The best Broadway actors remind me of athletes. If they don’t give their best, they know it, and if they don’t know it, the crowd lets them know it. All this is lost on Pete, however. From the opening number he’s yawning, fidgeting, checking his watch. He doesn’t like the theater, and he doesn’t get actors, since he’s never pretended anything in his life. In the quasi-darkness of the footlights, I smile at his discomfort. Somehow, forcing him to sit through Grease feels more satisfying than beating him in Key Biscayne. We go together, like rama lama lama …

IN THE MORNING we catch the Concorde to Paris, then a private plane to Palermo. I’m barely settled into my hotel room when the phone rings.