Open: An Autobiography

That makes sense. Could you help me? Maybe give me some tips?

Well, look, what are your goals?

I tell him about my recent loss to Alberto Mancini, from Argentina. He out-physicalled me, pushed me around like an old-time bully at the beach kicking sand in my face. I had the match won, I had my foot on the man’s neck, but I couldn’t finish him off. I was serving for the match, and Mancini broke me, then won the tiebreak, then broke me three times in the fifth set. I had nothing left. I need to get strong so that I never let that happen again. Losing is one thing; being outgunned is another. I can’t bear that feeling anymore.

Gil listens, not moving, not interrupting, soaking it all in.

That fuzzy ball takes some fuzzy bounces, I tell him, and I can’t control it all the time. But one thing I think maybe I can control is my body. At least, I could, maybe, if I had the right information.

Gil fills his fifty-six-inch chest with air and then breathes out slowly. He says, What’s your schedule?

I’ll be gone the next five weeks. Summer hard courts. But when I get back, I’d really consider it an honor if we could work together.

All right, Gil says. We’ll figure something out. Good luck on your road trip. I’ll see you when you get back.

AT THE 1989 U.S. OPEN I play Connors again in the quarters. It’s the first five-set win of my career, after five straight losses. Somehow it only earns me a new wave of criticism: I should have finished Connors off in three. Someone claims to have heard me yelling to Philly in my box: I’m going to take him five sets and give him some pain!

Mike Lupica, a columnist for the New York Daily News, points to my nineteen unforced errors in the third set and says I carried Connors merely to prove that I was tough enough to go the distance. If they’re not trashing me for losing on purpose, they’re ragging me for the way I win.

WHEN I WALK BACK INTO the gym, I see from Gil’s face that he’s been expecting me.

We shake hands. The start of something.

He walks me over to the weight racks and tells me that many of the exercises I’ve been doing are wrong, dead wrong, but the way I’ve been doing them is worse. I’m courting disaster. I’m going to hurt myself.

He gives me a fast primer on the mechanics of the body, the physics and hydraulics and architecture of human anatomy. To know what your body wants, he says, to understand what it needs and what it doesn’t, you need to be part engineer, part mathematician, part artist, part mystic.

I don’t fare well in lectures, but if all lectures were like Gil’s, I’d still be in school. I soak up every fact, every insight, confident that I’ll never forget a single word.

It’s amazing, Gil says, how many fallacies there are about the human body, how little we know about our own bodies. For instance: guys do incline benches for their upper pecs. It’s not an efficient use of time, he says. I haven’t done an incline in thirty years. Is it possible that my chest would be bigger if I did inclines?

No, sir.

The step-ups you’re doing, the exercises where you hold a heavy weight on your back as you walk upstairs? You’re asking for a catastrophic injury. You’re lucky you haven’t already ruined your knee.

How so?

It’s all about angles, Andre. At one angle, you’re engaging your quad. Fine, great. At another angle, you’re engaging your knee, putting loads of pressure on that knee. Engage that knee too many times - it’ll break off the engagement.

The best exercises, he says, exploit gravity. He tells me how to use gravity and resistance to break down a muscle, so it will come back stronger. He shows me how to do a proper, safe bicep curl. He walks me over to a dry-erase board and diagrams my muscles, arms, joints, tendons. He talks about a bow and arrow, shows me the pressure points along a bow as it’s pulled taut, then uses this model to explain my back, why it hurts after matches and workouts.

I tell him about my spine, my spondylolisthesis, the vertebra that’s out of sync. He jots a note, says he’ll look up the condition in the medical books and learn all about it for me.

Bottom line, he says, if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to have a short career. Big-time back problems, knee problems. Plus, keep doing curls the way I saw you doing them, you’re going to have elbow problems.

While spelling it all out, Gil sometimes literally spells it out. He likes to emphasize a point by spelling the key word. He likes to break words down for me, crack them open, reveal the knowledge inside, like the meat inside a nut. Calorie, for instance. He says it comes from the Latin calor, which is a measure of heat. People think calories are bad, Gil says, but calories are just measures of heat, and we need heat. With food, you feed your body’s natural furnace. How can that be bad? It’s when you eat, how much you eat, the choices you make - that’s what makes all the difference.

People think eating is bad, he says, but we need to stoke our internal fire.

Yes, I think. My internal fire needs stoking.