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I’d like to win this tournament for my wife and six-month-old son, and yet I don’t worry about losing, don’t care if I lose, because of them. Each night, within minutes of coming home from the courts, as I’m cradling Jaden and cuddling Stefanie, I can barely recall if I won or lost. Tennis fades as quickly as the daylight. I almost imagine that the calluses on my playing hand are disappearing, the inflamed nerves in my back cooling and mending. I’m a father first, a tennis player second, and this evolution happens without my being aware.

One morning Stefanie goes off to buy groceries and get in a fast workout. She dares to leave me alone with Jaden. My first time flying solo.

You two going to be OK? she asks.

Of course.

I sit Jaden on the bathroom counter, lean him against the mirror, let him play with my toothbrush while I get ready. He likes to suck on the toothbrush while watching me shave my head with the electric shearers.

I ask him, What do you think of your bald daddy?

He smiles.

You know, son, I was once like you: long hair flowing in every direction. You’re not fooling anyone with that comb-over.

He smiles wider, no idea what I’m saying, of course.

I measure his hair with my fingers.

Actually, you look a little ratty there, buddy. You could use a clean-up.

I put a different attachment on the shearer, the attachment for trimming. When I run the shearer across Jaden’s little head, however, it leaves a bright stripe of scalp down the middle, as white as a baseline.

Wrong attachment.

Stefanie will murder me. I need to even this boy’s hair out before she gets home. But in my frantic attempt to even out the hair, I make it shorter. Before I know what’s happened, my son is balder than I. He looks like Mini-Me.

When Stefanie comes through the door she stops in her tracks and stares, saucer-eyed.

What the—? Andre, she says, what on earth is the matter with you? I leave you alone for forty-five minutes and you shave the baby?

Then she lets fly a burst of histrionic German.

I tell her it was an accident. The wrong attachment. I beg her forgiveness.

I know, I say, it looks like I did this on purpose. I know I’m always joking about wanting to shave the world. But honest, Stefanie, this was a mistake.

I try to remind her of that old wives’ tale, that if you shave a child’s head the hair will grow back faster and thicker, but she holds up a hand and starts laughing. She’s bent over laughing. Now Jaden is laughing at Mommy laughing. Now we’re all giggling, rubbing Jaden’s head and mine, joking that the only one left is Stefanie, and she’d better sleep with one eye open.

I’m laughing too hard to speak, and days later, in the final of Key Biscayne, I beat Federer. It’s a good win. He’s as hot as anyone on tour. He came into this tournament with twenty-three wins so far this year.

It’s my fifty-first tournament victory, my seven hundredth victory overall. And yet I have no doubt I’ll remember this tournament less for beating Federer than for that one belly laugh. I wonder if the laugh had something to do with the win. It’s easier to be free and loose, to be yourself, after laughing with the ones you love. The right attachments.

I FALL INTO A NICE GROOVE with Darren in early 2002. We speak the same language, see the world in similar colors. Then he cements my trust, my unwavering confidence, by daring to fuss with my racket strings—and improving them.

I’ve always played with ProBlend, a string that’s half Kevlar, half nylon. You can reel in an eight-hundred-pound marlin with ProBlend. It never breaks, never forgives, but also never generates spin. It’s like hitting the ball with a garbage can lid. People talk about the game changing, about players growing more powerful, and rackets getting bigger, but the most dramatic change in recent years is the strings. The advent of a new elastic polyester string, which creates vicious topspin, has turned average players into greats, and greats into legends.

Still, I’ve always been reluctant to change. Now Darren urges me to try. We’re in Italy, at the Italian Open. I’ve just played Nicolas Kiefer, from Germany, in the first round. I’ve beaten him, 6–3, 6–2, and I’m telling Darren that I should have lost. I played lousy. I have no confidence on this dirt, I tell him. The clay game has passed me by.

Give the new string a go, mate.

I frown. I’m skeptical. I tried changing my racket once. It wasn’t pretty.

He puts the string on one of my rackets and says again, Just try.

In a practice session I don’t miss a ball for two hours. Then I don’t miss a ball for the rest of the tournament. I’ve never won the Italian Open before, but I win it now, because of Darren and his miracle string.

I SUDDENLY LOOK FORWARD TO the 2002 French Open. I’m excited, eager for the fight, and guardedly optimistic. I’m coming off a win, Jaden is sleeping a bit more, and I have a new weapon. In the fourth round I’m down two sets and a break to a wild card, a Frenchman named Paul-Henri Mathieu. He’s twenty, but he’s not in the shape I’m in. There’s no clock in tennis, son. I can be out here all day.

Down comes the rain. I sit in the locker room and reminisce about Brad yelling at me in 1999. I hear his tirade, word for word. When we walk back onto the court I’m smiling. I’m up 40–love, and Mathieu breaks me. I don’t care. I simply break back. In the fifth set he goes up, 3–1. Again I refuse to lose.

If it had been anyone but Agassi, Mathieu tells reporters afterward, I would have won.

Next I face Juan Carlos Ferrero, from Spain. Again it rains; this time I ask that the match be halted for the night. Ferrero is ahead, and he doesn’t want to stop. He gets surly when officials grant my request and suspend the match. The next day he takes his surliness out on me. I have a small opportunity in the third set, but he quickly closes it. He wins the set, and I can see his confidence rising off him like steam as he closes me out.

I feel peaceful walking with Darren off the court. I like the way I played. I made mistakes, my game sprang leaks, but I know we’ll work to patch them. My back is sore, but mostly from stooping to help Jaden walk. A wonderful soreness.

Weeks later we go to the 2002 Wimbledon, and my great new attitude abandons me, because my new string undoes me. On grass my newly augmented topspin makes the ball sit up like a helium balloon. In the second round I play Paradorn Srichaphan, from Thailand. He’s good, but not this good. He’s crushing everything I hit. He’s ranked number sixty-seven, and I think it’s impossible that he’ll beat me, and then he breaks me in the first set.

I try everything to get back on track. Nothing works. My ball is a cream puff, and Srichaphan devours it. I’ve never seen an opponent’s eyes grow quite so large as Srichaphan’s when he tees up my forehand. He’s swinging from his heels, and my only conscious, coherent thought is: I wish I could swing from my heels and be rewarded. How can I let everyone in this stadium know that this isn’t me, this isn’t my fault? It’s the strings. In the second set I make adjustments, fight back, play well, but Srichaphan is supremely confident.

He thinks it’s his day, and when you think it’s your day, it usually is. He hits a wild shot that magically catches a piece of the back line, then wins a tiebreak, going up two sets. In the third set I surrender peacefully.

It’s cold comfort that, the same day, Pete loses.

Darren and I spend the next two days experimenting with different combinations of strings.

I tell him I can’t continue with his new polyester, and yet he’s ruined me for the old string. If I have to go back to ProBlend, I say, I won’t play tennis anymore.