Andre Agassi et al.

I usually would not read a sport’s biography. The best sportspeople tend to be the least interesting people, since they’re usually uneducated and so focused on winning that a certain humanity is lost in this fervent pursuit. Listening to an interview with Tiger Woods, Pete Sampras, David Beckham, Chris Evert or many other people who have excelled at their sport is about as interesting as analyzing the movement of a sea cucumber. Filled with clichés and bad grammar, at the end of these ordeals you sometimes wish you had a regime like the North Korean one so you could simply ban interviews with most athletes.

But I was given this book called ‘Open’ the autobiography of Andre Agassi. Having a passion for tennis, I was immediately hooked as Agassi described his last tournament and how his body was wracked by pain but he still managed to win a couple of matches. What I hoped for was an insight into the tennis world, how it works, the personalities that I have followed over the years. What was John McEnroe like? Was Serena Williams really as awful as she sounds? Who were Agassi’s heroes and tennis role models?

Instead I was subject to something that mostly consisted of Andre Agassi so far up his own behind that, so self absorbed, so prone to view the world in terms of heroes and villains, frankly someone you hope never have to chat with at a party.

He claims to hate tennis. This is mostly due to his tyrannical father who is described as heartless, calculating and spiteful. In the book there is not one positive thing said about him. It seems improbable the son could harbor any love at all for this fiend. Tennis is murder for young Andre, a relentless pursuit mostly fueled by his ranting father and Agassi trying to satisfy him. He knew of course that he was better than nearly everyone, indeed for most of his losses Agassi never credits his opponents and blames something that he lacked that day. In other words if he’d been mentally and physically intact, then he could demolish anyone.

I admit another reason that spurred me to read the book was a commonality between Agassi and me, though obviously not in terms of tennis ability, but our destiny in being among the bald tribe. This consternating process for Agassi results in his loss of the French Open final because the night before his hair weave fell apart. He develops eternal hatred for Thomas Muster because he patted his head (and fragile fake hair) after beating him. Finally he faces the truth and shaves off all his hair in an almost ritualistic ceremony with his new wife Brooke Shields. I would have loved to be a fly in the wall for that one.

Of course part of the reason we read books by famous people is to titillate our pathetically prurient minds with information about other celebrities. Agassi was married to Brooke Shields for a few years. According to his descriptions of her general interests in life, like George Bush, she serves as an indictment to the Ivy League universities.

She could muster no interest for his tennis, and he found her acting milieu frivolous and uninteresting. He walked off the set of Friends where Brooke was making a guest appearance (and who repeatedly told him that Friends was the most popular sitcom in the world) because he was disgusted at what his wife had to do. I have to say I agree with Andre on that one. Shields plays a stalker and part of this entails putting the entire the hands and parts of the arms of her victim in her mouth. Who thought that one up?

He also became friends with Barbara Streisand and the two of them get on with each other like a ball on fire. He loves her music and that of the likes of Celine Dionne, artists who when a song of theirs comes on the radio, you curse and immediately switch the channel. His constant referral to Barry Manilow and even citing lines of songs as if it was deep poetry, causes one to grimace a bit. But if you’re looking to get behind the stories of those people who appear in Hello magazine, don’t bother to read this book.

There is also precious little about the world around which Agassi traveled extensively for nearly twenty years. Actually, there is nothing. Andre did manage to go to the Louvre once, but in his next visit to Paris, he holed up in his hotel room and ordered McDonalds and Burger King for food, only going to his matches and then seeking refuge in the hotel so as not to have to confront people whose language he couldn’t understand. Agassi’s curiosity about global culture is impressively shallow.

Of course it was primarily for the tennis that the book interested me. I can’t say Agassi has the most generous comments for some of his piers nor the system that made him millions of dollars. Pete Sampras always came across as a lugubrious yet glib troglodyte despite the glorious tennis he played. Agassi adds to this by saying he’s cheap as shit, giving a parking valet a one dollar tip.

“I mean that guy has earned over 40 mil.”

This tight wadness is in contrast of course to Andre’s generosity, who gives the guy a ten dollar tip. He berates Michael Chang for invoking Jesus after every win, well done on that one, but gives Chang absolutely no credit for the numerous times he lost to him. Similar professional disrespect, by basically ignoring him even though they had multiple contact in their youth, was Jim Courier. He resents the fact that after getting his ass whipped by Courier, in the locker room after the match Courier put on running shoes and started jogging in place to show his exertion on the court was insignificant. Talk about rubbing it in!

He hates Becker and the image we get of Jimmy Connors, one of the idols of my youth, is as the embodiment of an asshole. It’s probably true though. John McEnroe comes out smelling okay and Agassi seems to like Aussies and Eastern Europeans.

The problem is the paucity of information on this world. We learn almost nothing about what the people are really like, only how they affected Agassi, the classic path of analysis taken by those unable to see past their own nose. And our most base curiosity, what it’s like to have so much money, is barely addressed. He acts like it’s normal to buy a case of some wine that costs $500 a bottle or rent out an island all to himself. What does that feel like, I wondered? But in vain.

In place of this, we are treated to the thrilling existential subjects that are written about extensively in self-help books. He talks about this psychobabble bullshit for many hours with members of his team, some of whom have a special deistic link (represented partly by having to listen to this crap). It is this team that protects and harbors Andre, and his physical trainer/bodyguard seems a direct descendent of Buddha or Gandhi but who could kick people’s asses. He eventually finds true love in Steffi Graf, about whom we learn little except that she’s ‘the greatest person I’ve ever known.’

I should be more generous, I suppose. After all, here is this kid who grew up in Las Vegas of all weird places, had a crazy Armenian father, dropped out in eighth grade and has done nothing but play tennis all his life. And let’s give him credit, he has set up a charter school and seems genuinely interested in boosting the fortunes of those less fortunate. It’s probably a lot more than Pete Sampras or Jim Courier or even Jesus lover Michael Chang is doing.

What I’m angry about is the fact that I was sucked in and wasted precious hours that could otherwise have been employed in my usual pursuit of erudition. I ploughed through nearly 400 pages of self-analysis by someone who is, quite frankly, boring as hell. I got aced on this one.

Swimming places

I now have three venues as I train for my mammoth swim across All-Saints Bay in twelve months time.

I think it will be down to two, however. In one of the pools, the water had an absolutely disgusting taste the last time I swum. One of my swimming colleagues had been asked by the man who takes care of the pool, and who wanted to go home early, to put some cleaning ‘products’ in once we concluded our session. Some of this powder fell on his foot and burnt a hole in it. So I am reluctant to go back.

Another venue I have written about before, though now I have a new trainer. He seems a perfectly nice guy though I’m not sure I trust men who shave their legs. It’s something men of the younger generations seem to do a lot of and like Twitter, its appeal is incomprehensible to older folks like me.

The pool is part of the club for the workers of the state oil company, and next to the pool are tables where people play cards or drink beer. Occasionally there is conflict between the rights of the swimmers (not club members but paying a monthly fee) and club members. The club members have a right to one of the lanes but seem to have trouble staying in it.

The other day, there was a raucous on some tables off to the side. Round the tables plentifully filled with empty beer bottles were about six women and two men, arguing furiously with one of the club’s employees. It was the kind of arguing that could lead to violence, which of course attracted the attention of us swimmers waiting for our training session. A very chatty woman came up and explained the background of the situation.

“My daughter’s swimming class had just started and these women were on the other side of the pool. One of them took off her top and started waving it around in the air. The others followed suit and I was outraged and went and complained to the management. I mean, there are other pools around here I could use and if this happens again, I’m taking my daughter away.”

She was one of those people who seek out people to hear her lengthy speeches and I was one of them.

“I mean, it’s fine if you’re with your husband or boyfriend and want to fool around like that.” I assumed she wanted to show me that she was not a prude, a label best avoided where sensuality and sexuality are celebrated. Another woman came up and continued the conversation, saying how kids nowadays have total exposure to sex from an early age.

“At the school where my daughter studies, they were given a sex talk where amongst other things premature ejaculation was discussed.”

“How old is your daughter?” I asked, the only words I spoke throughout the conversation.

“She’s eight,” the woman responded, “and unlikely to know about premature ejaculation or in fact any type of ejaculation.”

Brazilian’s openness about sex is quite amazing. I’d never uttered a word to these women and there we were talking about erectile malfunction.

Later I heard another version from the principal trainer, not the guy who shaves his body.
I have never warmed to this guy, mostly due to his incessant self-promotion. The other day he tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Take a look at these medals I won at the competition last week.” I didn’t really know what to say as offering congratulations, when solicited in this way, makes me uncomfortable.

Anyway, he thought the whole event had been just great.

“There I was, swimming my laps, when I look over and there are a couple of naked women, not bad either.”

He was telling this to his training group. Women here assume men are dogs and the women in the group shook there heads and had the expression of ‘boys will be boys’ on their faces.

“When they got out, which I found a shame, one of the guys stayed in the pool and wouldn’t move from a spot where he was disrupting my class. So I moved the class to the other side of the pool and got on with it.”

Brazilian tolerance is one of the country’s great strengths and weaknesses. It makes people much less judgmental and takes into account humans many flaws. None of this ‘perfectability of man’ nonsense.

But it also means that assholes get away with a lot more without public censure. In this case, one guy decided to inconvenience about twenty others who nonetheless declined to confront him.

This is one of the most exciting things that occurred there, since swimming back and forth in a pool is not particularly exciting. Actually, it’s right up there with reading the manual for a vacuum cleaner or watching the shopping channel.

I now swim for an hour and a half, completing anywhere between 3500 to 4000 meters. The crossing is 11,000 meters, so there is some way to go. Unless you are doing it with other people, reaching this target everyday can seem daunting and weakening to the spirit.

You play all kinds of mind games to reach the distance goal. This is helped by the trainer. For instance, he will say ‘do two hundred, then one hundred and fifty, then one hundred, then fifty. And repeat this sequence two times.’

If you analyze this, that’s a thousand meters right there but it seems easier if you divide it up like this. One also becomes an expert in percentages and fractions. Because of the pool length, multiples of 25 are now etched in my brain. So after one length of a sequence like the one described above, I know I’ve completed one tenth of the assignment. Three hundred meters is six lengths and psychologically much easier than 400 meters which is eight lengths.

But it’s the feeling at the end that makes it all worth it. Someone once explained to me about how endorphins work but I can’t remember now, except that it makes you feel good, like taking drugs (what they don’t tell you in the anti-drug propaganda).

So that’s why people become addicted to exercise. You seem to be almost floating, aware of your muscles in a good sense and also under the illusion (in my case) that you are more attractive. You could get to this state by snorting cocaine, I suppose, but swimming 4000 meters is a lot healthier and doesn’t make you such an asshole. People on coke think they’re endlessly interesting when they’re not and they don’t stop fucking sniffling and gnashing their teeth together.

My other swimming venue is a beach known as the K Street Beach. It is protected and so is always swimmable whereas open-sea beaches can have currents that will be the end of you.

It is in a neighborhood that has received numerous accolades in music and poetry by some of Brazil’s most revered public figures. Vinicius de Moraes wrote the words to Brazil’s most famous song, The Girl from Ipanema, and he also wrote a poem about the neighborhood, called Itapoa, in which my beach is located. He speaks of the cool breeze, the coconut trees and how he misses them so much when he is away.

Vinicius de Morais is an iconic figure in Brazilian cultural history. A diplomat fluent in three languages, he belonged to a semi-fascist political party, which always seems odd for an artist since fascists are not known for their tolerance of other’s opinions. But he seemed to be able to keep his arm down from the Hitler salute long enough to write some great poetry from which he derived his auspicious reputation.

Another revered artist, Dorival Caimy, many of whose descendents also chose music as a career option, was a native of Itapoa and sung its praises.

This was some time ago since Itapoã, as it has expanded, has slipped from paradisiacal to run down and rather seedy. Whereas it used to be a small fishing village with all the quaint imagery that conjures up, urban expansion has now connected it with the rest of the city and it has become massive. Where white sand dunes once existed, small red brick houses spread across hills like one of those science fiction octopus-type monster’s with many legs. If I were a politician, I would paint all the houses in the slums since it does wonders for the atmosphere. Exposed brick lacks any aesthetic value at all.

Itapoa is also full of dodgy looking foreigners, mostly Italians, who attract a horde of prostitutes and the swirl of bawdiness that follows such a crowd. I’d met this one Italian, a very nice guy who ran (eventually into the ground) one of these establishments called ‘barracas’ serving seafood and cold beer next to the shore.

His problem was a vicious addiction to cocaine. He’d once been entangled with the cops in some super dangerous neighborhood where he’d get his stash and been forced to swallow the stuff in a condom. It became lodged in his intestine and he had to contract some doctor willing to perform a risky clandestine operation, so you wonder about this doctor’s capacity or scruples.

Anyway, it worked and he had a big party with the stuff that had been festering in his stomach for three months. Another Italian was cut into pieces and thrown in a garbage vat by a drug dealer he ran afoul of. . Shit happens in Itapoa.

Why, you may wonder, would I want to choose such a scabrous sounding place to swim?
For one, I have a regular person to watch my car, likely to be the object of scavenger thieves otherwise. She recently had a baby from her husband who occasionally emerges looking flushed from drink or high from weed.

Last Monday I swam in the morning and the husband was nowhere to be found when I parked my car. After finishing and drying off, he emerged and clutching the cross around his neck asked if I had any money for his breakfast.

“I didn’t work yesterday, instead got heavily drunk and today I feel like shit,” he offered as a justification for needing breakfast money.” The day before had been a Sunday, not a smart day to take off since about 100 times more cars come than on week days. He seems to contribute little to the family enterprise. Male indolence in poorer communities is sometimes stunning. But I paid my poverty tax anyway, even though any crook who’d chosen to meddle with my car could have.

His partner, though, is very pleasant with a dreamy look in her eyes. She has undoubtedly seen much in her life, where poverty can square the aging rate of people. Her clothes are raggedy, her teeth have begun to fall out, yet she doesn’t seem bitter. Her life is not bad, she seems to have decided, on the edge of a tropical beach lined with coconut trees, where she has found a spot and a way to survive.

For another reason, the beach is beautiful. A protected cove, home to a fine looking fleet of fishing boats, the water is usually clear so you get the added bonus of seeing schools of colorful fish while you swim. There are coral reefs, none that are going to rival the Great Barrier Reef, but still pleasant to scan around.

Swimming in the ocean is an exhilarating if sometimes harrowing experience. A constant source of worry are these awful jelly fish whose tentacles can wrap around you and inflict considerable discomfort, well no actually, it is fucking painful. It is not pleasant to be quite a distance from shore and having to deal with the stings of these beasts. I’ve been meaning to look up whether they serve any ecological purpose at all. If not, I hope they become a cure in Chinese medicine or a delicacy in Japanese cuisine. This seems to ensure quick extinction or massive reduction in numbers.

So training has begun. You lucky people who have the good will to read my stuff, will likely hear more about it in the near future. I know; it will be a hard wait.

Prisons and Brazil

I just finished reading a rather disturbing book by a German guy who in his youth had been caught trying to smuggle a kilogram of cocaine from Brazil and served four years in prison as a result. I think a couple of screenings Midnight Express and a reading of this book will convince Pedro that selling drugs is just not an intelligent career option. The inevitability in prison of getting constantly abused, humiliated, and engaged in sodomy, willingly, makes it something you want to avoid. Especially among damn foreigners.

Not for the German guy, though, who declares everything, including himself, to be wholly positive. It’s a typical tourist story of some rather innocent Western kid who comes to Rio, immediately falls victim to its many carnal attractions which include cocaine and plentiful women. This is facilitated, the author informs us, by his good looks and let’s us know that girls for him were easy in Germany as well; he’s not one of those ugly foreign geezers able to get woman only because they were foreign. Modesty is not something that comes through with this guy although he’d list modesty as one of his many attributes.

After his first visit in a bacchanal role, he decided that bringing back a kilogram of coke was doable and even advisable. He’d left home at 15, worked as a cook (an excellent one, he kindly informs us), had severed contact with his family and was independent and strong. And pretty fucking stupid.

The first scene is him getting strip searched and he spares us no details of having his orifices perforated by policemen intent on humiliating him. The narrative traced back how he had come to this point, his forays into the favela facilitated by his excellent Portuguese, and the friendships he made here. It was clear that he was no ordinary tourist, and had immersed himself into the real Brazil which in his mind consisted of men who dealt drugs and woman who did them and sold their bodies to get more.

On his second and fatal visit to Brazil, he teamed up with a transvestite and seemed to have no problem with the sexual ambiguity involved in that. He bought a brick of cocaine for eight thousand dollars off a guy known as the ‘boliviano’. He packed it into the epaulettes of his jacket and was caught.

I visited a prison in DC once with some lawyers from Hungary. The woman accompanying us from some civil organization was rather chunky and as soon as we entered the main building, from the cells above came the chants which included such welcomes as ‘come on fat bitch, I want to fuck you right now.’ It was a rather awkward moment for our group, here to see first hand American prisons. But God, what a grim place to be in an environment where hope was actively stamped out.

Prisons in Brazil are ten times worse than that and are smoldering cauldrons of pent up violence that constantly flairs. One hundred and eleven inmates were killed in the Carandiru prison riots in 1992 and death is a constant in these overburdened hellholes that house people society not only doesn’t care about, but actively disdains.

You don’t want to be a paedophile or rapist and be sent to a Brazilian jail. Not only will you surely die, you will have a shitty time getting to that point. Literally, at least according to our esteemed author, these poor bastards are tied up next to the toilet and you can imagine what they are made to do. In a macho society, rapists are considered losers because they’re incapable of getting a woman in a conventional sense and have to resort to violence.

He spent his first eighteen months in an institution where he couldn’t go outside. He was inside a massive warehouse, the cells divided by twenty meter walls that had an opening above them. The inmates would go between the cells on this wall where if you fell you’d be dead. Our author was in a cell with other foreigners, including three Nigerians, best of mates it seemed initially, who smoked crack for three days straight and then when there was nothing left tried to kill each other.

Because of his affability and now native Portuguese, the author gets on with everybody and is accepted by everybody. It seems he can’t help being cool. There is a transvestite wing in the jail, that does a good business but Monica, ‘a stunning woman’ (well sort of) falls for our hero and doesn’t charge him.

He becomes friendly with some Czech guy who’s a big time dealer and the two of them try, by way of payment to the main gang leader in the prison, to escape. This proves a dud business because the gang leader split the money with the guards and gave away the details of the plot.

He is moved to another prison with a football field where he shines and proves to Brazilians that he can play. He becomes the hero of the prison in the organized game against the local police team. He starts a Portuguese class with a man who later becomes his protégé and mentor in some religion called Rational Christianity. He quickly becomes top of the class, predictably in a sense.

He sees some appalling manifestations of savagery in the jails both between inmates themselves and they and the institution: death by beating, shooting, stabbing, strangling, machine guns mowing down inmates who’d just decapitated one of the guards, the beloved prison cat being horribly killed, brutal collective beatings by the police. His best friend commits suicide, and he loses seven teeth over the period. It was certainly no holiday in the sun.

The problem is you know just the kind of guy the author is and can’t garner any affection for him. He blows his fucking trumpet the whole time, it’s like he’s read all those books about how you should love yourself and overdosed. It’s amazing some editor or the translator didn’t say, ‘look, dude, you kind of sound like an asshole, you don’t have to remind the reader for the ninth time how well you speak Portuguese.’

But he has a book published and these observations may just be sour grapes from one without such a distinction. I hope never to go through what he has; experiences you can get a book out of even if you write like shit. Such is life.