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R
AIN HAS BEEN FALLING OFF AND ON ALL DAY
.

Stefanie peers at the sky and says, What do you think?

Come on, I say—let’s try. I’m willing if you are.

Willing. She frowns. She’s always willing, but she can’t speak for her calf, which has been giving her problems since she retired. Especially lately. She looks down. Darned calf. She has a charity match in Tokyo next week. She’s playing to raise money for a kindergarten she’s opened in Eritrea, and even though it’s only an exhibition she wants to do well. She feels the old pressure to do well. Also, she can’t help but wonder how much game she has left.

I wonder the same thing about myself. It’s been a year since I walked off the court for the last time at the U.S. Open. It’s autumn, 2007.

So we’ve been planning all week to get out there, hit with each other, but now the day has come and it’s the one rainy day all year in Vegas.

We can’t build a fire in the rain.

Stefanie looks again at the overcast sky. Then at the clock. Busy day, she says. She has to pick up Jaden at school. We only have this small window.

I
F THE RAIN DOESN’T LET UP
, if we don’t hit, I might go down to my school, because that’s where I go whenever I have time. I can’t believe how it’s grown: a 26,000-square-foot education complex with 500 students and a waiting list of eight hundred.

The $40 million campus features everything the kids could want. A high-tech TV production studio. A computer room with dozens of PCs along the walls and a big, white, fluffy couch. A topflight exercise room with machines as fancy as those at the most exclusive clubs in Vegas. There’s a weight room, a lecture hall, and bathrooms as modern and clean
as the ones in the city’s finest hotels. Best of all, the place is still freshly painted and pristine, just as sparkling as it was on opening day. Students, parents, the neighborhood, everyone respects the school because everyone owns it. The area hasn’t completely rebounded since we arrived. While I was giving a tour recently, someone was shot across the street. And yet in eight years not one window has been broken, not one wall has been sprayed with graffiti.

Everywhere you look are little touches, subtle details that signify this school is different, this place is about excellence, through and through. On the front window is etched one large word, our unofficial school motto: BELIEVE. Every classroom is flooded with soft natural daylight. Indirect, southern, bounced from skylights to high-tech reflectors, it’s a diffuse glow that’s ideal for reading and concentrating. Teachers never need to flick a light switch, which saves energy and money, but also spares students the headaches and general gloom caused by standard flu-orescents, which I remember all too well.

Our grounds are designed like a college campus, with intimate quads and welcoming common areas. The walls are stone—muted purple and pale salmon quartzite from local quarries—and the walkways are lined with delicate plum trees, leading to one beautiful holly oak, a symbolic Tree of Hope, which we planted even before the groundbreaking. First things first, our architects figured, so they planted the Tree of Hope, then asked construction workers to keep the tree watered and lighted while they built the school around it.

The land on which the school sits is narrow, only eight acres, but the lack of space actually suited the architects’ overall scheme. They wanted the flow of the campus to symbolize a short, serpentine journey. Like life. Wherever students stand, they can turn one way and see a glimpse of where they’ve been, or turn the other and see a hint of where they’re headed. Kindergarteners and elementary schoolers can gaze at the tall high school buildings, waiting for them—though they can’t hear the voices of the older kids. We don’t want to scare them. High schoolers can glance back at the primary classrooms from which they set out—though they can’t hear the high-pitched screaming on the playground. We don’t want to disturb them.

The architects, local guys named Mike Del Gatto and Rob Gurdison, threw themselves into this project. They spent months researching the history of the neighborhood, examining charter schools throughout the nation, experimenting with ideas. Then they stayed up night after night, brainstorming around a ping-pong table in Mike’s basement. They built
the first cardboard-plywood model of the school on that ping-pong table, unaware of any coincidence or irony.

It was their idea to have the buildings teach, to tell stories. We told them the stories we wanted told. In the middle school we wanted enormous photos of Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and, of course, Mandela, with their inspirational words painted on raised glass beneath their portraits. Since most of our students are African American, we asked Mike and Rob to embed bricks of marbled glass in one wall, depicting the Big Dipper, and to the right one single brick of glass, representing the North Star. The Big Dipper and the North Star were beacons for runaway slaves, pointing them to freedom.

My small contribution to the aesthetics of the school: in the common area of the high school building I wanted a gleaming black Steinway. When I delivered the piano, all the students gathered around and I shocked them by playing Lean on Me. What delighted me most was that the students didn’t know who I was. And when their teachers told them, they weren’t all that impressed.

I dreamed of a school with the fewest possible dry routines, a place that fostered serendipity. A place where serendipity was the norm. And it’s happened. On any given day something cool is likely to happen at Agassi Prep. President Bill Clinton might drop by and take a turn teaching history. Shaquille O’Neal might be the substitute in physical education. You might bump into Lance Armstrong walking the halls, or Muhammad Ali wearing a visitor badge, shadow-boxing a freshman. You might look up at any moment and see Janet Jackson or Elton John standing in the door of a classroom, or members of Earth, Wind & Fire auditing. More serendipity: When we dedicate the gymnasium, the NBA All-Star Game will be taking place in Vegas. We’ll invite the rookie and sophomore All-Stars to play their traditional pickup game on our floor—the first game ever played at Agassi Prep. The kids will love that.

Our educators are the best, plain and simple. The goal in hiring them was to find sharp, passionate, inspired men and women who were willing to lay it on the line, to get personally involved. We ask one thing of every teacher: to believe that every student can learn. It sounds like a painfully obvious concept, self-evident, but nowadays it’s not.

Of course, because Agassi Prep has a longer day and a longer year than other schools, our staff might earn less per hour than staffs elsewhere. But they have more resources at their fingertips, and so they enjoy greater freedom to excel and make a difference in children’s lives.

We thought it important that students wear uniforms. Tennis shirt
with khaki pants, shorts, or skirt, in official school colors—burgundy and navy. We think it creates less peer pressure, and we know it saves our parents money in the long run. Every time I walk into the school I’m struck by the irony: I’m now the enforcer of a uniform policy. I look forward to the day when some Wimbledon official happens to be in Vegas and asks for a tour. I can hardly wait to see the look on his or her face when I mention my school’s strict dress code.

We have another code that might be my favorite feature of the school. The Code of Respect that begins each day. Whenever I’m down there I poke my head into a random classroom and ask the children to stand with me and recite.

I promise them that if they memorize that simple code, keep it close to their hearts, they will go very far.

Walking the halls, peering into the classrooms, I can see how the children value this place. I can hear it in their voices, discern it in their postures. From the teachers and staff I’ve heard their stories, and I know the many ways this school enriches their lives. Also, we ask them to write personal essays, which we excerpt in the program for the yearly fundraiser. Not all the essays are about trials and hardships. Far from it. But those are the ones I remember. Like the girl living alone with her frail mother, who’s been unable to work for years due to an incurable lung disease. They share a cockroach-infested apartment in a neighborhood ruled by gangs, so school is the girl’s refuge. Her grades, she says with touching pride, are outstanding,
because I rationalized that if I did well in school no one would question what was going on at home, and I wouldn’t have to tell my story. Now, at seventeen, despite being forced to watch my mother deteriorate, to have lived with The Bloods and cockroaches, to work to support my family, I am college bound
.

Another senior writes about her painful relationship with her father, who’s spent much of her childhood in jail. Recently, when he got out, she went to meet him and found him painfully thin, living with a haggard woman
in a broken motor home that reeked of sewage and crystal meth
.
Desperate not to repeat the mistakes of her parents, the girl pushes herself to succeed at Agassi Prep.
I won’t let myself down the way others have. It’s up to me to change the course of my future and I will never give up
.

Not long ago, while walking through the high school, I was flagged down by a boy. He was fifteen, shy, with soulful eyes and chubby cheeks. He asked if he could speak to me privately.

Of course, I said.

We stepped into an alcove off the main hallway.

He didn’t know where to start. I told him to start at the beginning.

My life changed a year ago, he said. My father died. He was killed. Murdered, you know.

I’m so sorry.

After that, I really lost my way. I didn’t know what I was going to do.

His eyes grew cloudy with tears.

Then I came to this school, he said. And it gave me direction. It gave me hope. It gave me
a life
. So I’ve been keeping an eye out for you, Mr. Agassi, and when you came by, I had to introduce myself and tell you—you know. Thanks.

I hugged him. I told him that it was I who needed to thank him.

I
N THE UPPER GRADES
, the focus is squarely on college. The kids are told again and again that Agassi Prep is only a stepping-stone. Don’t get comfortable, we tell them. College is the main goal. Should they happen to forget, reminders are everywhere. College banners line the walls. A main hallway is named College Street. A metal sky bridge between the two main buildings has never been used, and never will be used, until the first seniors receive their diplomas and embark for college in 2009. Walking across that bridge, the seniors will enter a secret room, sign their names in a ledger, and leave notes to the next class, and the next, and all senior classes to come. I can see myself addressing that first senior class. I’m already working with J.P. and Gil, obsessing over my speech.

My theme, I think, will be contradictions. A friend suggests I brush up on Walt Whitman.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself
.

I never knew this was an acceptable point of view. Now I steer by it. Now it’s my North Star. And that’s what I’ll tell the students. Life is a tennis match between polar opposites. Winning and losing, love and hate, open and closed. It helps to recognize that painful fact early. Then recognize the polar opposites within yourself, and if you can’t embrace them,
or reconcile them, at least accept them and move on. The only thing you cannot do is ignore them.

Visiting with a group of students at the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy

What other message could I hope to deliver? What other message could they expect from a ninth-grade dropout whose proudest accomplishment is his school?

I
T’S STOPPED RAINING
, Stefanie says.

Come on, I say. Let’s go!

She pulls on a tennis skirt. I throw on some shorts. We drive to the
public court down the street. In the little pro shop, the teenage girl behind the counter is reading a gossip magazine. She looks up, and her chewing gum almost falls out.

Hello, I say.

Hi.

Are you open?

Yeah.

Could we rent a court for an hour?

Um. Yeah.

How much does it cost?

Fourteen dollars.

OK.

I hand her the money.

She says, You can have center court.

We walk downstairs to a mini amphitheater, where a blue tennis court is surrounded by metal bleachers. We set down our bags, side by side, then stretch and groan, teasing each other about how long it’s been.

I rummage in my bag for wristbands, tape, gum.

Stefanie says, Which side do you want?

This one.

I knew it.

She hits a forehand softly. I creak like the Tin Man as I lumber toward it, then punch it back. We have a gentle, tentative rally, and suddenly Stefanie laces a backhand up the line that sounds like a freight train going by. I shoot her a look. It’s going to be like that, is it?