BOOK GIVES INSIGHT ON REAL KEVORKIAN
The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin)
July 14, 2006 Friday
ALL EDITION
By Mary Bergin The Capital Times
The chapter is titled “Legacy,” and it begins this way: “Jack Kevorkian
is used to fighting losing battles. The one he’s fighting now may be
his last.”
How sad and ironic that he seems to be struggling alone.
The 78-year-old physician, long known as “Doctor Death” because of his
willingness to help dozens of terminally ill people end their lives,
is slowly fading from life and public sight. He is in a Michigan
prison and has multiple ailments, including hepatitis C, contracted
decades ago while being his own guinea pig during research.
To hear friend Neal Nicol tell it, there also is a disintegration
of spirit because of inadequate reading materials, no access to the
Internet and no musical outlet (Kevorkian is a longtime piano and
flute player).
“They pretty much shot him right down, and it appears to be working,”
says Nicol in a phone interview. He describes Kevorkian, whom he last
saw in May, as “pretty frail.”
Nicol and Harry Wylie, another longtime Kevorkian friend, have written
“Between the Dying and the Dead: Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s Life and the
Battle to Legalize Euthanasia.”
It is Kevorkian’s only authorized biography, one that attempts “to
correct the incomplete portrait … known by most Americans.” Maybe
that sounds like the makings of a whitewash job, but the book is
about the doctor’s flaws and missteps as well as his lesser-known
charms and tender side of character.
This son of Armenian refugees (who escaped genocide) wrote music
and limericks, made a cheap film about Handel’s “Messiah,” learned
to speak seven languages, produced a jazz CD (“A Very Still Life”)
that earned a Grammy nomination in 1997.
It has been hard for him to be humble, and hard for him to lie. He
has never understood how a legislator could favor capital punishment
but be against euthanasia.
Many more people have asked Kevorkian for help to die than the
estimated 130 whom he has assisted.
“He is outspoken, brash, egotistical and intensely committed to the
causes in which he believes,” the book states. “He is also a shy,
eccentric man who lived a monastic, ethical life, buying his clothes
from the Salvation Army and subsisting on the plainest of food,
particularly white bread.”
The writing style is engaging, the subject matter is fascinating, and
there is no soft pedaling of details. These include the intricacies
of cadaver blood transfusion research, and exactly how ALS patient
Thomas Youk’s life ended in 1998 (the case that led to Kevorkian’s
present incarceration).
Kevorkian is painted as a gifted child who taunted teachers out of
boredom, yet not smart enough to know when/why/how his unconventional
ideas would backfire.
Had he been more savvy about how to introduce sensitive topics,
or latched onto others who were, perhaps the doctor would have been
granted the Nobel Prize that he once imagined for himself.
“We all have regrets,” Nicol says, “and I think his biggest was
thinking that he could force the establishment into allowing terminal
patients to pass, pain free, at home with their loved ones.”
Living wills and palliative care exist today because of Kevorkian, the
authors contend. His actions and philosophy have sparked right-to-die
and patient rights dialogue.
Nicol’s biggest regret, regarding his friend, is that Kevorkian fired
marquee trial lawyer Geoffrey Fieger and chose to defend himself after
Thomas Youk died. That decision worked to Kevorkian’s advantage no
more than the videotaping of his final meeting with the patient.
The doctor sent the tape to “60 Minutes” with hopes the airing would
force a change in laws. He expected a murder charge, but not the
categorization as a macabre fanatic who sought publicity.
Physician-assisted suicide remains illegal in 44 states (Wisconsin
included). It is legal in Oregon and has been decriminalized in Ohio.
If he could write an addendum to the book, Nicol would talk about
“how misguided trust in the justice system cost Jack seven years of
his life, when we are not sure how many he has left” and “how sad I
am that this crusader sacrificed so much to help so many.”
Film rights to “Between the Dying and the Dead” have been purchased
by Hollywood’s Bee Holder Productions.
“In the most recent of his rare letters, he has told his friends
that he is ready to die,” the book states. “He is faced with … a
terrifying future filled with misery” in prison and “there is no one
who can alleviate his suffering.”
Kevorkian will be eligible for parole in 2007. “Since he is not
suffering pain — at least physically, I doubt he would want (his
life) to end,” Nicol says. “Should they deny his parole, however,
that may change.”
Between the Dying and the Dead By Neal Nicol and Harry Wylie UW Press
Terrace Books 273 pages, $27.95 E-mail: [email protected]

Interns see vital role for newspapers
Portland Press Herald (Maine)
July 16, 2006 Sunday
FINAL Edition
by Jeannine Guttman Editor
For most people, summer is the season of vacation, travel and
leisure. Unless, of course, you are a college student studying
journalism.
In that case, summer is not a time to slow down and relax, but a time
to accelerate the pace and grow. It is the time of the internship,
where students work in professional newsrooms. They learn the deman-
ding rigors of daily journalism, practiced on deadline, under the
scrutiny of crusty editors and demanding readers.
This summer, we are hosting two students in our paid summer minority
internship program. Both are working as news reporters and I’m sure
you’ve seen their bylines over the past few weeks. Today I’d like to
tell you a bit about them.
Karoun Demirjian, 25, is pursuing a master’s degree in international
relations at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
in Medford, Mass. She has also had internships at The Christian
Science Monitor and National Public Radio. Her ethnic heritage is
Arab and Armenian.
Cristina Bautista, 20, is a junior with a double major in
mass communications and political science at the University of
California at Berkeley. She is an editor at the university’s Daily
Californian newspaper and has worked with a campus Latina scholarship
organization. She’s fluent in Spanish.
Bautista started working here June 5; Demirjian began a week later.
“Each year, we receive dozens of applications for our internship
program,” said Eric Blom, acting features editor and coordinator
of our summer internship program. “College students from around the
country send in examples of their best work and ask for a chance to
spend the summer in Maine, learning the journalism craft.
“Many have sparkling resumes, with lots of experience at college
newspapers, previous internships and great life experiences, not to
mention their academic achievements. So, it’s a real challenge to
select two participants.”
Still, he said, the work of our two interns “really stood out from
the others.”
Both have enthusiasm and a sense of mission, he said.
“They’ve been interviewing people, traveling to different locations and
writing stories – exactly the kind of experience, under professional
guidance and editing, that they need to succeed in a field that
is vital to the democracy in which we live. They’re also getting
experience at living in Maine, a corner of the country that has a
culture all its own.”
The newspaper’s summer mi- nority internship program began in 1999.
“Including this year’s group, we’ve hosted 15 college students,”
said. Blom. “We get as much from their being here as I hope that we
offer them.”
I interviewed the two women last week, curious about their career
interest in newspapers.
“I enjoy writing for newspapers, more so than other forms of media,”
Demirjian said. “There’s room to explore a story at greater depth.”
Despite that attraction, Demirjian knows the media world is a very
challenging place right now. Newspaper circulations are down, Web
hits are up and news is a commodity. At the same time, the global
landscape is changing, economies are shifting, terrorism is a force
and political and public policy issues are intertwined. Which makes
some folks believe that the need for independent public service
journalism has never been greater in our democracy.
And yet, this is not a career for the faint of heart.
“It weighs on my parents more than me,” Demirjian said. “They say I
should be rational and go to law school. But I don’t see newspapers
as fizzling up and dying in the next 10 years or so. Newspapers that
have survived this first wave of panic are pretty good at understanding
multi-media, at knowing how to use their Web sites to engage readers.
“There’s something that’s not complete enough about the local TV news
at 5:30 p.m. that will leave a demand for local newspapers.”
Bautista’s perception is that fellow journalism students are a bit
rattled by the unsettled media world they want to enter. “People are
scared, I think. In our major, they are very concerned because we
have a passion to want to do journalism and to continue it.
“It’s hard but it’s something that we’re all committed to because
journalism is a public service, I feel. And it’s a service that needs
to be upheld and continued.”
So far, their internships have been rewarding experiences, they said.
“It’s been a lot of fun,” said Bautista. “It’s a very nice way to
spend my summer; completely different from California and I really
like that. . . . Going into small towns in Maine, it’s been a very
positive change. People here want to have their name in the paper;
they want to speak to you; they’ll call you back . . .
“I miss the nightlife, though,” she said. “That life usually starts
for me at 9 p.m. and night dies here at about 9 p.m.”
Demirjian said she appreciates the ability to do reporting that
originates with her and is not picked up from another medium.
“At a newspaper, reporters do real reporting,” she said. “That’s why
I decided to leave the world of radio or television and do this.”
Bautista said she enjoys the process of reporting and writing. “I
like being able to talk to people, and being some sort of mini-expert
for a day. You accumulate a lot of knowledge; I like the process
of reporting.
“I did a story about the hay shortage and I didn’t even know what hay
was, to be honest, be- fore I did that story. I may never use that
knowledge in San Francisco or Berkeley, but I enjoy the process of
reporting. In terms of writing, I feel much more confident expressing
myself through prose versus verbally. I like the general style of
journalism – it is consistent, neat, concise.”
Demirjian had another view: “I think that if I had to choose to
express myself through the rest of time, it would be verbally over
writing. Even when I read, I hear sentences and I hear rhythms
of words and things like that. To me, journalism is about making
something comprehensible. And that’s the thing I like about journalism.
“My first story here was about the environment, then groundfishing
and now refugees.” As a journalist, she has an obligation to report
accurately and completely, she said. It’s a lot of re- sponsibility.
“Making things understandable, accessible to everybody,” that’s what
good journalists and newspapers do, she said.
I asked them about the popularity of blogs, especially with their
generation. How can that be explained?
A lot of people their age don’t trust newspapers, they said, and
see newspapers as an extension of the government. “We only talk to
government officials, that’s why,” Bautista said. “So people go into
blogs to get information and hear other points of view. But most
people supplement blogs with newspapers.”
The authors of some blogs were rebuffed by mainstream press, said
Demirjian. “You can’t get on the editorial pages, but you can start a
blog,” she said. “You can get your voice heard that way. The opinion
pages of most newspapers are already established with their sets of
writers and you can’t get into that. So blogs are an alternative.”
No matter how the media evolve, readers have an obligation to stay
informed, especially as members of this democracy, they said.
“I think people should really be active readers,” Bautista said.
“Read the Press Herald, read other things as well, be informed,
understand current events. Once you stop doing that, things get
really lost. And there are a lot of people who don’t have any
connection. Being uninformed is being disenfranchised, I feel.”
Readers need to know about their community, Demirjian said. But
community is many things. “Your community is the front page of the
newspaper, too. It’s Maine, but it’s also Somalia and Beirut. It’s
broad.”

Novelist May Be Jailed for a Character’s Remarks
The New York Sun
July 13, 2006 Thursday
By SHALIN PUNN, Special to the Sun
Turkey’s government is making a second attempt to prosecute one of
its leading authors after she allegedly “insulted Turkishness” with
a comment made by a character in her latest novel, “The Bastards
of Istanbul.”
Elif Shafak will appear in the country’s seventh high criminal court
on charges of violating Article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code,
which prohibits the denigration of any aspect of Turkish culture. Ms.
Shafak’s translator, Asli Biscan, and her publisher, Semi Sokemen,
also face charges.
In June, similar charges against Ms. Shafak were dismissed after
a public prosecutor argued that the book is a work of fiction and
therefore does not represent the views of the author. But the decision
was overruled by the high court after complaints from a group of
right-wing lawyers, the Unity of Jurists.
Ms. Shafak and her publishers have said they are not sure which comment
in the book is “anti-Turkish.” In an e-mail message to her agent in
America, Marly Rusoff, the author suggested possible paragraphs that
are being “particularly targeted by the ultranationalists.”(The book’s
American publisher, Viking, forwarded the email to The New York Sun.)
* “I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost
all their relatives to the hands of Turkish butchers in
1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the
genocide because I was raised by some Turk named
Mustapha! What kind of joke is that?”
“What happened to the millions of Armenians? Assimilated! Massacred!
Orphaned! Deported! And then forgotten!”
“Do you think they are going to say: oh yeah, we are sorry we massacred
and deported you guys, and then contentedly denied it all?”
The passages refer to the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the
Turkish government in 1915.The massacre is recognized as the first
genocide of the 20th century, but in the last few decades the Turkish
government has attempted to deny it ever took place. In May 2005,
the Turkish justice minister, Cemil Cicek, labeled Turkish historians
who have said the genocide occurred as “traitors.”
Ms. Shafak is not the first author to be prosecuted by the Turkish
government for talking about the genocide. In January, author Orhan
Pamuk was found not guilty of similar charges for comments he made
to the press.
An artistic rights organization, PEN American Center, has defended
Ms. Shafak and other authors. “It is very discouraging that she is
being prosecuted again by the conservative members of the judiciary,”
the director of PEN’s Freedom to Write program, Larry Siems, said.
“Writers shouldn’t be held responsible for what their characters say
and do.”
Mr. Siems added that underlying these sorts of trials is a political
battle within the country over Turkey’s bid to join the European
Union. “The ultranationalist faction is pressing for prosecution as
a way of embarrassing Turkey in its bid to join the E.U.,” he said.
“Cases like Shafak’s and Pamuk’s, involving internationally renowned
authors, point to the fact that they are looking to get international
headlines.”
The date for Ms. Shafak’s trial has not been set, but if convicted
the author could be sentenced to up to three years in prison. No one
has ever been convicted under Article 301, but Mr. Siems said Ms.
Shafak faces a “long and trying” battle.
“The Bastard of Istanbul” confronts the genocide alongside the issue
of feminism. It tells the story of an Istanbul-based family and an
exiled Armenian family who discover that they share a secret that
links them back to the 1915 genocide.
The novel, originally written in English, was a best seller on its
release in Turkey in March. Viking is set to release the book in
America in early 2007.

Letters to the Editor of the Boston Herald
July 12, 2006 Wednesday
ALL EDITIONS
Remember Armenians
To insinuate that the Armenians who want the memorial on the Rose
Kennedy Greenway are but another well-heeled interest group reflects
your disregard of history (“New Dig board must take reins,” July
10). No one has issue with the Faneuil Hall memorial in honor of the
6 million Jews who perished at the hands of the Germans. Yet Hitler
stated, “Who remembers the Armenians?” prior to issuing the mandate.
It is the intention of the survivors of the Armenian genocide and
their families to teach the world what can happen when one forgets.
The Armenian genocide was the first of the 20th century, and has been
repeated in Cambodia, Sudan and elsewhere. If such groups affected
memorials, then so much the richer we would all become.
Kasper M. Goshgarian, Quincy
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Letters to Editor
Fresno Bee (California)
July 11, 2006 Tuesday
FINAL EDITION
Honest language
“We have ambassadors who can’t use a word, just a word,” said
Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota at the confirmation hearing
of Richard Hoagland, who is to replace the dismissed ambassador to
Armenia, John Evans.
On June 10, 2005, Yale-educated Ambassador Evans was selected to
receive a prestigious award for ” constructive dissent” for calling
the 1915 massacres of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks a “genocide.”
Disgracefully, under the pressures of the Turkish government, not
only the award was withdrawn, but Mr. Evans’ tenure as ambassador to
Armenia was cut short.
It is unbelievable that highly educated scholars and historians serving
in the U.S. government are forbidden to use the word “genocide”
because of our administration’s Turkish-dictated agenda. Where is
the pillar of democracy — free speech?
I hope, I yearn for an intelligent leadership in our United States
that will have the moral fabric to be honest and be a true defender
of justice.
Nazik Kotcholosian Messerlian
Fresno

Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World
Library Journal Reviews
July 15, 2006
by Nadine Cohen-Baker
Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the
World 2 vols. Springer 2005. 1242p. ed. by Melvin Ember & others.
index. ISBN 0-306-48321-1 . $475. REF
Diasporas and emigration lie at the heart of many vital world issues
past and present and therefore figure heavily in high school and
undergraduate research. While there are other reference works on the
topic, this two-volume work is unique in that it provides a worldwide,
comparative perspective on forced and voluntary mass migrations and
the refugee cultures they engender. Thirty-one diasporas, both well
known (e.g., Jewish, African, Palestinian, Armenian) and lesser known
(e.g., Chilean, British, Tuareg), are covered in Volume 1, as well
as 28 relevant topics (e.g., arts in diasporas, diaspora politics
and identity, and types of diaspora).
Volume 2 provides sociocultural descriptions of 58 diaspora
communities. Entries are authored by a team of international
academics and researchers and compiled and edited under the auspices
of Yale’s Human Relations Area Files, the preeminent international
research organization in the field of cultural anthropology. Given
the massive scope of the topic, this work is admirably wide-ranging
and inclusive. Diasporas that do not appear in section titles can
almost invariably be found in the index. Bottom Line One can always
quibble over the amount of attention given to specific topics (e.g.,
pogroms are only fleetingly mentioned in the chapter on the European
Jewish diaspora, and the term does not rate an entry in the glossary,
yet “horticulture” does), but this does not detract from the overall
quality of the work. While the majority of entries are written for the
general reader, a few of the topical entries may be a bit heavy going
for high school students. Nevertheless, this is highly recommended
for high school, college, and public libraries.- Nadine Cohen-Baker,
Univ. of Georgia, Athens

Coming Into Focus; It took startling transformations — from callow
prodigy to thoughtful champion, from punk to philanthropist, from
conflicted son to devoted father — for Andre Agassi to finally see
the big picture, and he’s still searching for answers
Sports Illustrated
July 17, 2006
by GARY SMITH
You knew the end was near. You knew the screen would soon go black
and leave you in the dark, wondering what the hell you’d just seen.
One Andre, two Andres, three Andres, four. Five Andres, six Andres,
seven Andres, more. Has any athlete ever changed as much as Andre
Agassi?
Sure, you’d watched Tiger Woods change his swing, Michael Jordan
change his sport. But who changes himself? Metamorphosis is the rarest
achievement in sports.
Why would a man bother to change when he’s got the American dream by
the throat? Maybe it’s just too damn risky; what if it puts out the
fire that forged his steel?
You traveled to a lake in Texas 20 years ago to find George Foreman,
fished with him for bass and for the story of how he went from
sullen menace to grinning Buddha. But even George’s transformation
got an asterisk, because it came during his 10-year hibernation from
his sport.
All those years you kept watching the Andre show, rebel becoming
humanitarian, showman becoming machine, style becoming essence. But
something about all those images of him–there were just too many,
too different, too quick–made you keep waiting. To trust the change.
To be sure.
Finally, 10 months before his announcement that he would retire after
the 2006 U.S. Open, you realized that the time to find out how Andre
Agassi went all the way from there to here was nearly gone.
So you started moving closer.
Somebody at last year’s U.S. Open would surely know. “He’s changed as
much as anyone I’ve ever seen,” said Jim Courier, a four-time Grand
Slam singles champion who’d known Andre since they were teenagers.
“It’s almost like an atonement,” said Patrick McEnroe, the U.S. Davis
Cup captain.
“He decided to be a grown-up,” said commentator Mary Carillo. “He
didn’t have to do that. He had all the money and fame. He didn’t have
to become a great champion, either. But he did both. Now you really
feel there’s a soul in that guy.”
When you asked them how and why that occurred, they said, Well, he
married a good woman, he had kids, he grew up. But plenty of athletes
do those things. Those answers were like all those images of Andre:
They made you think you knew what happened to the man when you didn’t
have a clue.
So you went closer.
You were 50 feet away, watching him talk to the media after winning
easily in the first round at the 2005 U.S. Open. Years ago, after
a victory, he said, I’m as happy as a fag in a submarine. Years ago
he growled at an audience in his home state, Nevada, for cheering an
opponent’s shot. Now, asked why he’d felt nervous in a first-rounder
at age 35, he said, Because everyone here took a day out of their
lives to come watch me play. Did he feel badly for his opponent as
he destroyed him? No, he said, you don’t cheat anybody out of their
experience, whatever it is. I promise you, it’s all part of what makes
you who you are down the road. And if a match is getting blown out
one way or the other, you’ve got to learn from it and you’ve got to
understand it for what it is. I’ve been on the other side of that.
I wouldn’t want to cheat anybody out of that experience.
You smelled it there, a whiff of what you were seeking.
So you went closer.
You were 10 feet away. Andre was showing Robin Williams and members of
Earth, Wind & Fire the academy that he built in the middle of the most
destitute neighborhood in Las Vegas. It’s a charter school, mostly poor
black kids. He was explaining why learning levels here had made leaps
so striking that the academy’s middle school was the only one among
328 public schools in its county that’s received an “exemplary” rating.
He took us to the room where Cirque du Soleil performers taught the
kids acrobatics. Past the art class where a French painter who trained
with Picasso taught them the use of color and space. He led us into
a kindergarten class where, like a five-year-old himself, he burst
forward so eagerly to tell everyone about the academy’s innovations
that he knocked over half of an edifice of blocks that the class had
built, then dropped to his knees in such haste and remorse to rebuild
it that he knocked over the rest.
You followed him down the gleaming hallways, thinking, Man, he got it,
he really got the big picture, and wondering what the world would be
like if a couple of superstars in each city did this. But his annual
fund-raising gala for the school was scheduled for that weekend,
and he was too busy to sit and explain how he got here.
So you waited nearly two months … and went closer.
You sat two feet away. Flying in a private jet last December with
Andre and his wife, Steffi Graf, on their way to play an exhibition
arranged by a company that they endorse, Genworth Financial, in order
to raise money for its youth charity work and Andre’s charter school.
It was only the second time that he and Steffi had gone anywhere
together without the kids, and they were stuck with you. And still he
did something that, during 30 years in this work, you’d never seen.
In a country in which celebrity means never having to ask a question,
he asked a zillion of them. Almost as many as you asked him. With
eyes unlike any you’d seen in an athlete: aglow.
But something was unsettling him. He kept wanting to know what
aspect of his life you wanted to write about–to whittle down the
big picture–and you kept explaining that it was the whole shebang
you were after, how and why he traveled all the way from who he was
to who he is.
It was all over that full moon of a face: hmmmm. But he knew his tennis
life was about to end, and part of him yearned for perspective. So
he invited you to his house for a steak dinner, but not just any
steak dinner. If it’s not the best steak you’ve ever eaten, he said,
then I’ve failed.
Of course you said yes … and went closer.
You were studying that steak. It was four inches thick, prime dry-aged
loin, express-mailed from California in an ice pack, marinated by
your host for 16 hours and now searing over charcoal and water-soaked
wood chips on a backyard grill, all of which he’d painstakingly
researched. The flame was caramelizing a coating of port wine,
kosher salt, sugar and a palette of seasonings that he wouldn’t reveal
because it was the fruit of six years’ seeking–launched when Steffi,
eager to meet his friends, innocently uttered the words, Let’s have
a barbecue–and because if he told you, then his steak soon might
find itself in a tie with yours as the best you’ve ever eaten. You
were sipping a peach-raspberry margarita that was the product of the
same exhaustive quest. And it was true. They were both the best.
You watched him, during brief breaks from his cooking, play with
his four-year-old son, Jaden, with the intensity of a man living
his second childhood–no, his first. Andre was three when his father
began tugging open the bedroom curtains in the morning, tugging on
his toes, tugging off his blanket, tugging him onto the tennis court
before he ate breakfast so he could become what his dad already was
telling other people he would be: the No. 1 tennis player in the world.
You were sitting in front of a fire after dinner, looking around a
house without a single trophy, plaque or tennis picture, without a
nanny, maid or cook, asking him how he came to see the big picture,
how he got it … and he started shaking his head no, saying that he
hadn’t got it, that he still couldn’t see the big picture. I can’t
see anything objectively or in context, he said. I wish I could. It
drives me crazy. It causes a lot of problems. Show me a drop of water,
and I’m fine. I’ll learn everything about it. But don’t show me the
ocean. Don’t show me the whole forest. Every time I try to see the
big picture, I’m finished, I’m lost….
Wow. The seer was telling you he couldn’t see. The seeker was telling
you that the only way to see the forest was to go even closer,
inside it, and take it tree by tree. Then he remembered this game,
introduced by his first wife, back in an earlier life….
You’re about to enter a forest, says the beautiful woman. What does
it look like? It’s dense, says Andre. It’s deep. There’s no trail. No
one has been here before. I have to find my own way.
You come upon a key, she says. What does it look like? What do you
do with it?
It’s rusty, he says. It’s one of those big, old-fashioned keys.
Normally I’d be curious, but in this case I feel no reason to find
what it opens because it’s obviously been used many times and what
it opens has already been explored.
Following her prompts, he comes upon a cup in the forest … then a
bear … a wall … and a body of water, describing each one and his
reaction as he sees it in his mind’s eye. It intrigues him, this game
called A Walk in the Woods. But what does it mean?
His depiction of the forest as difficult and dense, Brooke Shields
explains, reveals how he sees life. That rings true. The key symbolizes
education, and since Andre is an eighth-grade dropout who learns
through experience rather than books, his reaction to the key makes
sense as well.
His eyes kindle. The game conjures the path-blazing life he wants
to lead, self-discovery around every corner. Whenever it comes to a
pause, he grows so uneasy that he’s willing to take wrong turns and
even go backward.
Like marrying the beautiful woman.
Like leaving her in such haste that night: Jan. 26, 1999.
He has just arrived in Los Angeles after a 13-hour flight from
Australia, taken her to dinner and confirmed what he knows in his
bones: It’s over. It’s nearing midnight, he hasn’t slept in a day
and a half, but he grabs some clothes, a bag of coffee beans and his
margarita blender, heaves everything into the backseat of his big,
white ’76 El Dorado, Lilly, and heads hell-bent for his hometown,
Las Vegas.
What do words mean? What’s COMMITMENT? What’s REAL? Tears stream down
his cheeks as he rips at himself. The traffic, as he climbs the San
Bernardino Mountains, slows to a crawl.
The cars around him begin to peel off in search of motels. But he needs
motion. When he proposed to Brooke 2 1/2 years earlier, he thought,
I’m asking her to marry me, and I could just as easily be breaking up
with her. But he’s a glutton for experience, for what lies beyond the
next bend, and so, like tonight, he ignored the omens and shoved on.
O.K. So he’s wrong again. Snow has shut the mountain pass. He turns
Lilly around and begins creeping back, pulling off and being turned
down at one crowded motel after another. It all begins to feel
like a dream … or like his life. He’s nearing 30, marriage shot,
another Grand Slam title opportunity in Australia frittered away,
his forward-then-backward career appearing ready to perish far short
of the glory that his teenage fame and forehand promised.
A 12th motel sends him away. Now he’s driven an hour and a half the
wrong way, toward the life he just left. Wind batters his car. His
mind swims with fatigue. Brooke’s Walk in the Woods? It’s just a Sunday
stroll in the park compared with A Journey Through Andre’s Forest.
He rises from a strange bed in a cheap motel somewhere between L.A.
and the San Bernardino Mountains. What does he see in the mirror?
Eyes, wide as a child’s, that he used to frame with eyeliner and
mascara. Lips that pray before each meal and curse chair umpires. The
face of a man who yearns to change, to find something rock-solid and
reliable in himself that won’t change.
He climbs back into his car. Which way now? His art goes to hell
when he pursues love. His love goes to hell when he pursues his
art. It’s raining. He’s crying. He heads back toward Vegas, toward
an empty house.
His coach, Brad Gilbert, shows up a few weeks later. Andre tells him
that his marriage is over. The television’s on. As Andre clicks from
one channel to the next, a vision fills the screen. The holy grail.
Tall. Willowy. Killer legs. Kind eyes. But private eyes. Resolute.
Steffi Graf’s serving in the semifinals at Indian Wells, Calif.
“You need to meet her,” says Brad.
Andre’s eyes lift, full of futile hope. “I already tried that,”
he sighs. “A long time ago….”
It’s 1992. He’s 22. He comes upon a field of grass. What does it
look like? Faded green, bordered by white lime, surrounded by vintage
wooden seats. Intimate.
Sacred. That’s what everyone else calls Centre Court at Wimbledon. To
Andre it’s stuffy, a place he avoided for three years. His
fluorescent clothes, black hightops and denim shorts were forbidden
by traditionalists there, the rebel complained, and besides, he needed
the rest.
But this year he needs the grass. Somehow he has become his sport’s
richest and most famous player without doing one little thing:
winning when it really mattered. It’s his sixth year on the tour. He
has never won a Grand Slam singles title. Credibility. That’s what
the sacred meadow offers.
And maybe her.
>>From the time he first laid eyes on Steffi, his soul knew. She is
what he isn’t. She has what he needs. At the French Open a few weeks
earlier, he finally took a deep breath, gathered all his courage …
and asked his manager to ask her manager if they could meet.
“Meet her?” said Steffi’s manager. “In regard to what?”
“Just to talk,” said Andre’s manager. “You know, he’s not some wild
rebel like they make him out to be. He’s really a good, clean kid,
very religious, in fact, born again.”
Steffi’s manager told Steffi that Andre wanted to talk to her about
religion. Steffi told her manager to tell Andre’s manager to tell
Andre, No, thanks.
Her reply, reaching him just before Wimbledon begins, jolts him. They
can’t even talk? He’s that unworthy?
He has one shot left. The male and female singles winners traditionally
dance together at the Champions Ball at the end of the tournament. If
they both win….
Steffi mauls everyone for the 11th of her 22 majors. Thump-thump….
One day later Andre survives 37 Goran Ivanisevic aces to win the men’s
championship in five sets–his first Slam title! He sags to his knees,
drops to his back and sobs. Thump-thump, thump-thump…. On to the
ball! His stomach tightens. He doesn’t know how to dance. He can’t
wait to dance.
He arrives and stares. Swept-back hair, short white dress, plunging
neckline…. That’s Steffi Graf? A Wimbledon member sidles up to him.
When, asks Andre, is the dance?
Sorry, old chum, he’s told, that’s been scrapped.
The rebel blinks. What about tradition?
He can’t squeak out a word to Steffi when the photographers put them
elbow to elbow and pop flashes in his eyes. He flies home to Vegas,
throws a party, gets drunk, gets sick, takes off his clothes and ends
up on his lawn, staring at the stars, as naked as….
The day he was born. He opens his eyes. What does he see? Fuzzy.
Green. A ball. Dangling from a string attached to a racket hanging
from the ceiling over his crib. Above it a man, moving the string,
trying to compel the newborn’s eyes to follow the ball.
Another ball. A balloon half filled with water, flying from the
man’s hand toward Andre’s high chair a year later. The racket
taped to Andre’s hand–a Ping-Pong paddle split in half to make it
lighter–smacks the balloon across the kitchen. Fifteen-love, says
the man.
Then another ball. A bladder extracted from a volleyball so it’s
light enough for a baby to whack with a sawed-off tennis racket,
chase it in his walker, then whack it again and again.
Those eyes. They’re what convince the man, at a Ping-Pong tournament
one day, that his two-year-old will be rare. Every head in the
audience shifts back and forth to follow the action, except Andre’s.
His eyes alone flash, affixed to that ball.
As soon as the boy can walk, his father–a short, stocky Iranian with
a thick accent and thinning hair–takes him to the Tropicana Hotel’s
two tennis courts, which the immigrant grooms in exchange for their
use. Emmanuel Agassi swooned for the sport as a 13-year-old in Tehran,
coming upon it one day on a dirt court behind the American Mission
Church. Sure, said the American and British soldiers who played there,
the little street fighter could play if he would be their ball boy
and groundskeeper. The game and the big Americans entranced him,
transported him far away from the one-room home, too cramped even
for a table, where he, his parents and four siblings ate on a dirt
floor and shared, along with 35 others crammed into the compound,
one hole in the ground–their toilet.
He fought his way out with his fists, all the way to the 1948 and ’52
Olympics as a boxer for Iran, but when he arrived in the U.S. at age
22 with a couple of bucks, a couple of words of English and a new first
name–Mike–he didn’t choose his Olympic sport, the immigrants’ sport,
as his ticket into the big tent. He chose tennis. All his life he had
been an outsider, a Christian Armenian in a Muslim Persian city. In
his new land he was going to walk his yet-to-be-born children right
up to the elite and hit ’em where they lived, where they played–in
their country clubs.
He settled in Vegas and set to work. His eldest child, Rita, had
the gift, but she hit puberty and hit the road, middle finger raised
to her old man’s relentless tennis regimen as she ran off with, of
all people, tennis legend Pancho Gonzalez. His next child, Phillip,
didn’t quite have the foot speed or audacity that it took to play with
the pros. His third, Tami, bumped her ceiling playing at Texas A&M.
That left Andre. Last child. Last chance.
Meet the future Number 1 tennis player in the world! Mike crows as
he takes his four-year-old around the casino showroom where he serves
as a host.
He builds a tennis court in his backyard. Andre enters a tunnel. As
long as he remains inside it and never comes up to see the big
picture–how vast the world is, how rife with challengers, how
monstrous the odds stacked against him–he can go about the task of
fulfilling his father’s vision.
Dad plucks him from school a half hour early to get him on the court
before Mike leaves for his night job at the casino. Weekends and
summer days, Mike wakes up on a few hours’ sleep and herds Andre
onto the court where the 32 garbage cans await–each filled with 300
balls–along with the 11 machines that Dad has custom-welded to spit
balls with different spins from different angles, one every two to
three seconds … for the first of Andre’s three-a-day workouts.
Thousands of balls struck each day, 365 days a year, including
Christmas and the day after a surgeon reattaches the piece of finger
sliced off by a kid’s blade when the 10-year-old Andre goes ice
skating, which, dammit, he never should’ve done. Day off to heal? Kid
can rip a forehand with a cast on his left hand. Don’t pull the
racket that far back, son–shorter the backswing, bigger the pop,
like a boxer’s straight right. C’mon, step inside the baseline,
hit the ball early, crush it–lower, deeper, closer, farther, more
topspin, more–go for broke on every shot!
Now Andre’s hands are as fast as those phenomenal eyes, so swift that
20 years later he will enter a cage with a pitching machine set to
throw 90-mph fastballs and hit them with a bat while running toward
the machine. But what about the fire that he’ll need to dominate the
world, the desperation that drove Mike to the Olympics and America?
There are four bedrooms and two bathrooms in his house, plumbing,
electricity–and no Muslim bullies in sight. Well, then, Mike will
be the bully. Mike will be the fire. Mike will snarl at Andre when
his game goes sour during junior tournaments in Utah, Nevada and
California. Mike will bring a hammer to a tennis match and bang on
the railing in disgust. Mike will scream at officials and get thrown
off the grounds. Mike will drive home, obsessing over each shot no
matter how good it was because it could’ve been better. That’s when
Andre wins, which is virtually always. When he loses….
He races off the court and hides behind a tree at age nine, sobbing
in anticipation of the fire, after he drops the deciding tiebreaker
in the final of the 12-and-under nationals. Runner-up trophies get
left on the table at awards ceremonies or heaved in the trash.
What’s a kid to do? Appeal to Mom? She’s a peach, but tennis issues
she leaves to her husband. Confront Dad? Sure, Andre is scared to,
but it’s more complicated than that. He loves his dad. Dad goes to war
if anyone tries to take advantage of his son, gives Andre all his soul
and heart, and his heart is as big as all Persia. In the middle of the
night, if a friend has lost his job, Mike will go shopping and leave a
heap of groceries on the friend’s front step. He’ll tip five bucks on
a 50-cent cup of coffee, give people cars, nurse injured birds back to
health, hard-boil eggs for them to sit on, end up with a half-dozen
pigeons living in his house. But Andre can’t, for the life of him,
figure out why a game means so much to this man, why it feels as if
it’s his responsibility to keep his father and his father’s home happy.
Puberty lurks. Mike grows anxious. He knows there’s no player in Vegas
good enough to compel his kid to keep improving. He knows, after
his experience with his first daughter, that fathers and teenagers
and tennis courts with 32 bins of balls are Vesuvius waiting to
happen. Something has to give. Someone has to go.
The boy halts and looks around. He’s 13. He’s alone in the depths
of the forest. He comes upon a training ground, an academy for young
warriors.
What does it look like? What does he do?
Twenty-two acres. Forty-two tennis courts. One hundred eighty
teenagers, but only the select. A leathery ex-paratrooper in charge.
Twenty-five hundred miles from home. Andre’s heartsick. He had agreed
to come. He felt he had no choice.
It’s only for eight weeks, he tells himself. That’s all his dad can
afford, two months’ tuition on the half scholarship that Andre’s been
offered to attend the Bollettieri Academy in Bradenton, Fla. Tennis
boot camp. That’s what it was called in the 60 Minutes segment that
introduced his father to it. Fifty-six days. Andre can last that long.
It rains one day, two weeks after his arrival. Andre’s summoned to
the indoor court to play in front of Nick Bollettieri for the first
time. Ten minutes is all it takes. Nick calls Andre to his office
and calls Mike in Vegas.
“Take your check back,” says Nick. “He’s here for free.”
That’s it. Gone, his friends. Gone, his mother’s touch. Gone, his
bedroom, his childhood and any normal teenage life. It’s tennis,
conditioning and school from 6 a.m. to lights-out, then dreams of
dog eat dog.
Nick anoints Andre top dog. He has never seen a kid hit the ball
so clean and early and hard. He has never seen such eyes. “I became
hypnotized with those eyes,” recalls Bollettieri. “I felt the depth.
But there was also a question in those eyes: What am I doing here? I
think Andre was frightened.”
Terrified. But he’s the coolest, most charismatic kid in camp; he can’t
tell anyone he’s lost. He turns his fear and loneliness inside out,
into hard, hip anger aimed at–no, not at the one who sent him here,
not his father. At Nick. Rebellion by proxy.
Andre breaks curfews, drinks Jack Daniels, berates opponents,
smashes balls at their teeth, smashes rackets, trashes linesmen. He
gets a Mohawk haircut, grows it out, dyes it red, dyes it orange,
draws crosses on his face with eyeliner, grows an inch-long pinkie
fingernail, paints it red, paints it black … and takes the court
at a televised Florida tournament in pink lipstick and ripped denim
jeans. He’ll do what his father–whose aversion to homosexuality is
rooted in lurid tales he had heard as a boy in Tehran–wants him to do:
play world-class tennis. But in a way that’ll make his father wince.
Only a few see beneath the bluff, see Andre’s loneliness on
Thanksgiving Day when nearly all the other kids can afford to fly
home. He finds suckers to play for 40 bucks a match, sells clothes
given to him by sports-apparel companies and buys an airline ticket
home, unbeknownst to his parents. Just to stay at the home of his best
friend, Perry Rogers, to sit in class with him, mingle in the halls,
talk about the big dance–just to smell a normal life. Then fly back.
He can’t bring himself to say, “Please, Dad, let me come home, for
good.” He knows the game would pass him by, knows how much his dad has
sacrificed, knows he can’t turn his back on the immigrant’s American
dream. What he doesn’t know frightens him more: What becomes of Andre
without tennis? Dammit, how did this happen? He resents tennis. He’d
never chosen it. How dare it wash him up so far from home?
Then, after Andre’s been at the academy a year, it gets scarier. He
goes numb. Dead inside. Indifferent. Nick explodes, tells him to pack
up, it’s over. Andre stares at him and says what he can’t say to his
dad: “What difference does it make, Nick? Have you ever stopped for
one second to feel what it feels like for a kid to leave his home,
travel across the country and do this?”
Something in the boy’s deadness makes the ex-paratrooper pause …
then soften. “What would it take to make it better?” Nick asks.
“Leaving here,” says Andre, “and turning pro.”
He staggers out of a stadium in Washington, D.C. He’s 17. He can’t
bear this. He’s just found God in a flurry of prayer meetings and
been born again. So why, if he’s found the way, does he keep losing
it in the third set? Why does he always feel that God is so angry at
him? Why does he keep having that dream in which he’s a child walking
down the hall toward his bedroom door when his path is cut off by a
terrifying creature?
He stops and looks around. He’s in the woods. He reels through Rock
Creek Park, just outside the tennis center, then comes upon a pack of
homeless men. He opens his bag and hands them all his rackets. He’s
quitting tennis, done with this gypsy life in a crummy rental car.
It’s time to find Andre.
He returns to his hotel and informs his brother, Phil, who travels
with him. “So what are you going to do?” asks Phil.
Well, he does have that high school diploma, the one he scored with
help from his mother by doing four years’ worth of correspondence
courses after he dropped out. That qualifies him to … uh … hey,
couldn’t he give tennis lessons for $50 a pop?
The phone rings. A player has just backed out of an exhibition in
Winston-Salem, N.C. It’s $2,500 if Andre just shows up. That’s 50
tennis lessons, he calculates. He’s back in the crummy rental car,
barreling down the path that isn’t his.
Suddenly it opens wide. All that losing has shredded all those
expectations for the long-haired hotshot out of Nick’s academy.
Suddenly he’s got something to prove to himself instead of something
to live up to: He’s got purpose. He wins six tournaments in 1988 and
rockets, at age 18, to No. 3 in the world. He still guns for white
lines and glory on every shot, but he’s just two steps from becoming
what his father told everyone he’d be before he could tie his shoes,
when….
The question drops like a snake from a tree.
Are you playing tennis for you … or for someone else’s image of
you? Number 1 in the world–did you sign up for that?
His thoughts, during matches, start darting here and there, a flock
of startled birds. He falls behind, overwhelmed by the mind flutter,
and does the one thing that would cut Dad’s heart deepest: goes numb,
caves in, folds, accepts losing. Big strokes, small heart, the lads
in the locker room start saying.
Then the oddest thing of all occurs. He comes upon the pot of gold.
Millions in endorsement dollars and appearance fees. No need to show
up for Wimbledon or the Australian Open. No need to lay off that Coke,
burger and fries 45 minutes before taking the court. Just keep the
hair long, the threads flashy, the bandanna flapping, the earring
glinting, the jaw unshaven, the emotions bared. Just be the rock ‘n’
roll racket-rippin’ rebel, the sassy foil for staid Pete Sampras.
Just let Madison Avenue use that rebellion against a father that’s
never actually occurred, by a champion who’s never actually won a
major championship, by a rock ‘n’ roller who actually listens to
Barry Manilow–to tap into a desire that every consumer has felt to
tell his father or boss to go to hell.
So now he’s living someone else’s image of someone else’s image of
him. He gets the Lamborghini, the Ferrari, the Vector, the Corvette,
the three Porsches, the JetStar airplane, the 727. He gets the
Lamborghini girlfriend, Brooke. Nothing holds his interest. He sells
the cars, sheds the airplanes, shears off all the hair. Blows off
tennis, then feels lost without it. Sends himself on missions–brewing
the world’s best cup of coffee, procuring the planet’s finest hair
clippers, pouring the ultimate margarita–narrowing the world to one
thing, tunneling to its bottom, then moving to the next. A second dream
crowds his sleep: the dream of his tongue rubbing relentlessly against
his teeth, pushing until one tumbles out. Even teeth don’t last.
Canon asks him to say three words. He thinks they pertain to a
camera–literally–not to a philosophy or to anything to do with him.
He still has tunnel eyes, can’t see the big picture: that Madison
Avenue’s calculation will come off as his calculation. Three words
tied in a nice neat noose, just what everyone suspected of the Slamless
Wonder: Image is everything.
Maybe some of the calculation is his. But the cynics don’t see
the multimillionaire sitting for hours on a weight bench in the
ramshackle garage of Gil Reyes–the trainer who has turned his life
into a study of body and spirit–wringing truth from the wise old soul
as if his life depends on it. They don’t see the rebel flying home
from tournaments, driving straight from the airport to the home of a
songwriting minister named John Parenti and driving circles around the
glitter of Vegas all night, questioning, trying to find a gentler God,
a comprehensible father, a reliable Andre.
One day Perry, his oldest friend and new manager, suggests that Andre
enter the thorniest place: psychotherapy. Because nothing has ever
been resolved between Andre and his father. Andre’s first phone call
after he finally wins that first Slam at Wimbledon? Dad. Dad’s first
words? Should’ve won in four sets.
But everything he has comes from his father. Who knows where therapy
might take Andre or what it might demand that he do? Besides, he
explains to Perry, it feels like a shortcut. I’m bound and determined
to eat experience, he says. If you give me an option to cut a corner,
I take more than I should. But if I make it hard, if I face it at its
worst, then I stay focused and driven and it only gets better from
there. I need to be in the thick of process. So I can’t let myself
have shortcuts.
Rather than dwell on what Dad took from him, he decides to help
someone else with what Dad gave him. To turn millions of endorsement
dollars into a 25,000-square-foot building, a Boys & Girls Club where
thousands of children might find their own gifts.
Rather than stir old pain, he creates new pain. He digs at his
cuticles and picks at his lips till they bleed when his strokes aren’t
perfect. He starts setting the fires that his dad’s not there to set,
lighting wads of paper on hotel balconies after he loses, and on a
restaurant table in Toronto, where an infuriated waiter extinguishes
the flames. He puts lit matches in his mouth, making his jaw glow
like a jack-o’-lantern. Sure, that burns his palate and fingers
sometimes. That’s O.K. That’s better than numb.
No, the forest isn’t thick enough, he needs to dig under it, creating
the tunnel that his father’s not there to dig. He cocoons himself in
process, obsesses over what tension his rackets are strung at, tweaks
them each day according to temperature, humidity, wind. Fixates on
his forehand or backhand even when they’re fine, three days of drama
involving everyone in his camp until, yes, he’s figured it out, moved
his hand an eighth of an inch…. No. Wait. It’s the balls. Too much
fuzz. They don’t feel right. No. It must be the court. Damn, it’s so
exhausting, no wonder he’s always on the verge of dropping the shovel
and walking away. Because it’s always so near, that urge. One slight
shift in perspective, one glance out of the tunnel….
Like that October day in 1995, up 6–4 against MaliVai Washington
in Essen, Germany, when the sole of his sneaker flaps off and Andre
has to borrow a shoe from a friend while someone races to his hotel
room for a backup pair–but too late. He’s already floating up,
glimpsing the big picture, seeing himself down there playing tennis
in a stranger’s shoe, living a stranger’s life, and it’s adios, Andre,
6-1, 6-1 in the next two sets, and for most of the next two years.
He decides to marry the beautiful woman because marriage forces a
man–doesn’t it?–to be what Andre aches to be: the rock. But Brooke’s
an actress, a model: Image is her job. At night she wants to go to
parties and premieres at which movie and TV people gather, to make
the new friends she needs to succeed. Andre loathes that life, longs
for something real. He becomes, he says, a dry, empty husk of myself.
Maybe that’s why he risks a transformation that other athletes never
do: because he, unlike them, isn’t sure he wants to be an athlete.
Somewhere in the wilderness, as lost as he’s ever been, he gets an
idea. O.K., maybe it’s not his. Maybe it’s his unconscious’s idea:
To go backward, as near as possible to where he entered the forest,
and shatter everyone’s image of him. To regress to No. 9 in the world,
then No. 29 … 74 … 102 … 141. It feels so awful back there. It
feels so hopeless. It feels so … perfect. At last he can choose
his life and start over.
At age 27, in his 11th year as a pro, Andre Agassi signs up for tennis.
He begins in the satellite tournaments with the nobodies and
never-weres. Number 122….
He reenters therapy. He’s finally going to see the big picture,
finally going to confront–well, no, he’s not. He’ll go for a year
and a half, on and off, and skirt what happened in his childhood,
but damn, he’s trying. Number 87….
He lifts the blinds on his gym window, overlooking the house he built
for his parents. He watches his old man, with a heart that’s squeaked
through quintuple-bypass surgery, hitting balls spit from a machine
for an hour and a half on 100° days on his backyard court, and Andre
feels something that he could never quite see: that it’s bigger than
him. That it’s not personal. That this fire was set long before he was
a child and still blazes long after he’s become a man. Number 71….
He meets with Tony Robbins, the oracle of accountability, and gives
himself a crash course in dreams, so he can learn to defang the hallway
apparition and escape the endless loop of the tongue and the crumbling
teeth. Number 50….
Each morning he awakens and writes two or three goals for that day
in a notepad, then checks at night to make sure he accomplished them.
Number 31….
He becomes the best-conditioned athlete in tennis, pares all motion
between points except those that hasten the next point, to grind his
huffing opponents to dust. Number 21….
At last he fully embraces the methodical game that Brad Gilbert,
ever since replacing Bollettieri, has been pushing him to play, to
stop gambling and start letting his opponents lose points instead of
his having to win every one. Number 13….
He decides that the Boys & Girls Club and the 3,000 kids he’s helped
clothe aren’t enough. He seizes on Perry’s idea of a charter school
and commits to building the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy.
Number 6….
One more thing must be resolved: his inauthentic marriage. As he
leaves his wife that night in 1999, as he grabs the world’s best
coffee beans and shuts the refrigerator door, his eyes fall on the
picture there that Brooke cut out because she admired the graceful
legs of the woman in it. Her. The undanced dance. The holy grail.
She’s here. He can see Steffi’s balcony from the condo he rents six
weeks later on Fisher Island, Fla., where he’s staying while he plays
in the Key Biscayne tournament. What if…? Nah. She’s already said
no. She’s had the same boyfriend for seven years. But if the guy
hasn’t sealed the deal by now…. Besides, the guy’s not here!
Go down swinging, Andre tells himself. You’re not the same guy she
turned down. He goes to work. Huddles with his old pal John Parenti
and starts preparing that first phone call to Steffi as if it’s a
State of the Union address. Recruits the Fisher Island ferry operator
to report her comings and goings. Discovers her practice time, with
help from Brad, so they can accidentally schedule Andre’s practice
right after hers. Contact! They hit together for a half hour! He’s
aching to tell her what’s still a secret–that he and Brooke have
split–and the other secret bursting in his heart. But he doesn’t
want to blow it. He floats back to his room. He blows it. He orders a
bouquet of roses too big for the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton. He paces,
bleeding over every word in the note to go with it, calls Perry to
help him revise it again and again and finally sends the bouquet to
her room. He watches her balcony window, spying … dying….
At last Steffi staggers out under the megabouquet and deposits it on
her balcony. That can’t be a good sign. He waits. Forever. The phone
rings. He pounces. “I want no misunderstanding between us,” she says.
“Don’t come near me now. My boyfriend is here.”
Here? He blanches. Reconnaissance failure! He parses every word she
uttered. Don’t come near me now. He loses his first match and heads
home, his whole life rising and dipping on the kite string of that
one word: now.
Two months later, on the clay he’s never solved, he learns how much
he can rely on himself. Down two sets against Andrei Medvedev in the
final of the French Open, he wins in five sets, drops his racket and
weeps: At 29 he’s the first man since Rod Laver in 1969 to win all
four Grand Slam singles titles. Seven years after his first attempt,
he feels like a man who deserves Steffi Graf.
It’s just the start of a 27–1 run in Grand Slam matches, the best
since Jimmy Connors’s 20–0 in ’74; three majors in less than a year.
On the flight to Wimbledon a few weeks after Paris, he scissors out
a picture of a barn and a field from an airline menu, turns it into
a birthday card, rolls it up, ties it with a ribbon and gives it to
Steffi’s coach to pass on. It’s so sweet she has to call him. Boy,
is the boy ever ready. I want no misunderstandings, he says. I’m sure
you’ve heard by now about Brooke and me. I think you’re beautiful
and fascinating and I have a tremendous amount of respect for what
appear to be the pillars of your life. Can we have lunch or dinner
or coffee, take a walk, I don’t care–I just want to get to know you
better. Bull’s-eye! She green-lights him to call her after Wimbledon.
One month later, two days before she plays the final match of her
career at age 30, they go out to dinner in La Jolla, Calif., and
Steffi gets a surprise: Andre’s not at all like his image. They end
up running on the beach and start discovering that somehow they’re
completely different … and uncannily the same. That Steffi, too,
has a foundation for children, one that addresses the psychological
scars from violence all over the world. Her dad’s a fanatic for
tennis, boxing and soccer? Precisely the same as his! Her favorite
musicians are George Michael, U2 and Prince? Exactly his! When she
asks him his favorite alltime movie a few weeks later, she lets go
of the phone and screams. It’s hers, Shadowlands, the story of C.S.
Lewis’s finding his soul mate late in life and then losing her to
cancer. Steffi, too, is a seeker–she planned to travel the globe
to photograph animals until Andre began laying siege–but the big
difference between them, the saving one, is this: Once she finds an
answer, she trusts it. She leaves it alone.
She flies to Vegas to see his world. She approaches Andre’s father
for the first time. He’s on his tennis court, of course. Andre
tenses–remembering how Dad disdained his marriage to Brooke, how he
walked out on their wedding reception–still yearning to be part of
a family that’s whole.
Steffi walks right up and wraps her arms around his father, an embrace
so warm that it melts the old man … and more of the ice between
him and his son.
Here’s what happens when a man finds a lens that makes every choice
in his life clearer: Will it make my wife proud? Here’s what happens
when a boy raised to win more Grand Slam tournaments than anyone else
on earth ends up with not even half as many as the woman in his own
bed, and he’s so damn grateful for it that at night he writes on a
chalkboard in their kitchen the things he noticed and admired about
her that day. Here’s what happens when that gratitude begins swelling,
rippling outward from that bed and kitchen.
He starts having children, and they turn his churning energy outward,
and his meltdowns become rarer and rarer, and he starts playing some
of the best tennis of his life, outlasting all the peers who’d been
far more dedicated to the game. And in his children’s faces he sees
the child he didn’t get a chance to be, and the faces of all the
children who lose that chance, and he begins adding more classrooms
to his school for kids from broken homes. He lifts his own kids to
hold them so often that it aggravates a condition in his back, caused
by a vertebra that’s slipped over the one below it, and so then,
to get things right with tennis that he got wrong all those years,
he has to do it with pain shooting down his sciatic nerve.
And suddenly he’s in front of the world in the first round of the 2005
French Open with his back killing him and a far lesser player taking
him apart, but rather than quit and call off the embarrassment as
he would’ve before, he fights to the end and then explains why with
such conviction and such appreciation of the fans who’d paid to see
him that an ESPN editor includes it on SportsCenter.
It reaches the eyes of a man on his back in California recovering
from a kidney transplant, the hot television comedian George Lopez,
who feels so moved that he sends a text message that ricochets from
his TV producer to Perry to Andre. “Because,” says Lopez, “you could
tell Andre’s words came from a man who has traveled the world and found
compassion. A man who said Image is everything is now saying, Humanity
is everything.” And so, of course, Lopez accepts Andre’s invitation to
take the stage at his annual fund-raising gala last October, where he
joins Robin Williams and Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand and a slew
of other celebrities who come to Vegas to auction off their time and
perform for Andre’s cause, which raises $7.5 million in one night,
prompting Andre to bound to the microphone and round off that number,
from his and Perry’s pockets, to $10 million, so that all the kids
at his academy can walk into a brand-new high school that’ll open
this fall.
How do you move on when you’ve finally found the sweet spot? He
couldn’t say farewell to the game during the first six months of this
year, even as back pain and inactivity from a severe ankle sprain kept
driving him out of tournaments in the first round or before they even
began. It wasn’t so much the tennis he’d be losing but the cocoon of
all that process. Finally on June 24 at Wimbledon, the field of grass
he once couldn’t bother to play, he swallowed hard at 36, said enough
… and felt liberated.
He insists he’s not worried about a void after tennis, once he’s done
playing several hard-court tournaments and the 2006 U.S. Open, because
he’s learned by watching how his wife moved on without a hitch. Sure,
his new life will probably have a lot to do with the academy, perhaps
trying to replicate it around the country. Sure, it’ll have even more
to do with his own kids, but not likely on a tennis court unless they
really want it. Already his father’s telling him that Jaden’s not
playing enough and that Andre needs to start dropping the boy off at
Grandpa’s house at sunrise and picking him up at sunset, to which Andre
just nods and says, “Yeah, I might do that, Dad” … and never does.
Andre: I just hope the kids find something to pour all of themselves
into because that’s where the marrow of life comes from. If it’s
tennis … wow, I’d take a deep breath. I’d have to hand it to Jaden
if he did that. He’d have to have a mighty big pair of….
Steffi: It would work out, Andre. Just trust your instincts. You’d
do it right.
Andre: Yeah … but my instinct is to NOT trust myself.
Even now. After the magic thing happened.
The fifth set. Last September against James Blake in the U.S. Open
quarterfinals. The changeover as Blake prepares to serve for the
match. The crowd rising, love thundering from the highest seats
like a waterfall, gathering volume as it rolls. Love for the battle
Andre has waged, digging out of an 0–2 grave in sets against Blake,
and for his 20 U.S. Opens, and for more than that: for his arc, for
who he has become. He’s as deep in the tunnel as he’s ever been, but
he looks up and around, and for the first time in his life he sees
and hears everything outside the tunnel. He sees his friend James
instead of the distant blur that his opponents have always been. He
sees what he’s never seen in the audience: actual faces, individual
joy. He hears not the fuzzy din that he has all of his career but
each syllable growing louder and louder: An-dre! An-dre! An-dre!
Chills run through him. He battles from behind once more and beats
Blake. It’s O.K., he says now, that Roger Federer defeated him four
days later in the final because Federer’s the best he’s ever seen,
and besides, being No. 1 never was what his journey’s about. It’s
O.K., he says, because he finally knows what it’s like to be totally
absorbed in yourself and yet feel part of everything.
He shakes his head. All that trekking, only to find out that where
you get to means nothing, and all that matters is how you look at
the forest.
I used to look at it as something overwhelming, he says, something
separate from me that I had to find my way through. Now I see myself
as part of it. When you start out on the journey you think it’s all
about taking in experiences to fulfill yourself. But it’s not. The
greatest experience is changing someone else’s experience of life.
And once you come to that realization, it becomes your foundation,
the ace in your pocket, who you are. It’s the opposite of what you
think it is. When you see the world through the lens of others,
that’s when you find yourself.
The fire’s out. The world’s best margarita blender’s empty. The man
yawns and rises. You thank him for taking you on the journey and wish
him luck on the second leg, the new path. The one where the man who
learned to see learns to trust his eyes.
BOX STORY:
SI.COM For coverage of the hard-court tennis season, leading to the
U.S. Open, go to SI.com/more.
His sister had the gift, but she hit puberty and hit the road. His
brother lacked audacity. That left Andre. LAST CHILD. Last chance.
He breaks curfews, drinks Jack Daniels, SMASHES rackets, dyes his
hair orange, draws crosses on his face with eyeliner.
Andre’s first phone call after he finally wins a SLAM TITLE, at
Wimbledon? Dad. Dad’s first words? Should’ve won in four sets.
A vision fills the TV screen–Steffi Graf serving. Tall. Killer legs.
KIND EYES. “You need to meet her,” Gilbert says.
He puts LIT MATCHES in his mouth. Sure, that burns his palate
sometimes. That’s O.K. That’s better than numb.
“He decided to be a grown-up,” said Carillo. “He didn’t have to. He
had money and fame. Now you really feel there’s A SOUL in that guy.”
Steffi, too, is a seeker, but the big difference between them, the
saving one, is this: Once she finds an answer, she TRUSTS IT.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Photograph by Steffi Graf
–Boundary_(ID_MicJthmo7+pIafATz06igA)–

Surrealism exhibit coming to U. Michigan museum
Michigan Daily via U-Wire – Univ. of Michigan
University Wire
July 10, 2006 Monday
By Andrew Klein, Michigan Daily; SOURCE: U. Michigan
ANN ARBOR, Mich.
When it comes to expressing or understanding the human unconscious —
specifically through art — it’s an understandable cliche for the
viewer/reader to deem such exercises as psychedelic, trippy or just
plain weird. Right now, at the corner of South University Avenue and
South Forest Street, there’s some weird stuff going on.
Enter George Barsamian, an Armenian-American, New York-based sculptor,
whose exhibit, “Time and Transformation,” running through September,
is the first to grace the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s
off-site gallery. UMMA’s Web site best describes Barsamian’s unique
medium as “three-dimensional animated sculpture.” Such a description
hardly prepares the viewer for Barsamian’s aesthetic.
A former bicycle mechanic, the exhibit showcases how Barsamian uses
simple, dated techniques as his foundation. The zoetrope, invented in
1834, is a rapidly spinning hollow drum with images fixed along its
inner circumference. Slits along the outside allow light to enter. As
the machine spins, the human eye “fills in” the blank spots between the
images, creating the illusion of never-ending motion. Barsamian uses
this throwback technique, along with strobe lights, and incorporates
the surreal vocabulary of the unconsciousness. The result is an
incredible series of “three-dimensional animated sculptures” that
delight the eye and stimulate the brain: Salvador Dali in motion.
Since 1983, Barsamian has dutifully kept a tape recorder near his bed
for the purpose of immediately cataloguing his dreams before they slip
back into their unconscious beginnings. His observations are at the
center of what he calls a “three-dimensional window into the world
of the subconscious where the emotions run wild and self-deception
is an oxymoron.”
It would be assumed, then, that such imagery would be highly subjective
— ideas and emotions personal to Barsamian. As a viewer, appreciating
Surrealist art (such as Dali’s iconic images) seems a crapshoot at
best. We might be able to read a metaphor or two, but in the end,
the artist’s unconscious remains incomprehensible. Barsamian, though,
is able to move beyond these limits.
In “Lather,” two hands endlessly wash themselves. The dripping lather
morphs first into a paper bag and then into an egg, with cracks
over a human face with a third eye. Shocking and playful at first,
“Lather” is not solely a snapshot of the artist’s inner mind. It’s
a satirized allegory of humanity’s obsessive need for knowledge.
“Untitled,” perhaps the exhibit’s most dynamic piece, shows a small
room with a large painting of a writer. Balled-up pieces of paper
writhe, slide and burn around the room, as the figure in the painting
tears up whatever it is he is writing and throws it through the frame
and into the room. Writers block has never been so elegantly stated.
Barsamian’s sculptures are not dedicated to either the unconscious
or visual phenomena — they are a dynamic combination of both. By
working with religious faith, the artistic conundrum as well as other
universal understandings, Barsamian’s surrealism doesn’t isolate
itself as incomprehensibly subjective. Whether the viewer attempts to
dissect his images, or simply enjoys the exhibit for its innovation,
Barsamian succeeds on all levels.
Is Barsamian pointing to a universal unconscious? Probably not. But
his sculptures transcend boundaries of media and perception. The
unconsciousness is an intangible balance of neural pathways and
faith. But Barsamian puts it into a recognizable context, one that
we all are a part of.

Speak no evil?
Los Angeles Times
Sunday, July 16, 2006
EDITORIAL
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU refer to Turkey’s 1915-1923 genocide of
Armenians, accurately, as “genocide”? In Turkey, you face a possible
three-year jail term, even if it wasn’t you using the term but a
character in your novel. In the United States, you just lose your
job as ambassador to Armenia.
The novelist is Elif Shafak, who learned last week she will go on trial
for defamation of the Turkish Republic. The former ambassador is John
M. Evans, who was recalled from Yerevan in May after referring to the
“Armenian genocide” in a speech before a group of Armenian Americans
in February 2005. As one State Department bigwig told an Armenian
newspaper: “Ambassadors serve the president, and they are obliged
to follow his policy. President Bush’s policy as regards the mass
killings of Armenians is precise.”
Precisely what purpose this policy serves is clear: avoid using
the most truthful word in the English language to describe an
eight-decade-old atrocity for fear of offending a crucial NATO ally.
As Bush’s proposed replacement for Evans, Richard Hoagland, put it
last month during his confirmation hearing, “Instead of getting stuck
in the past and vocabulary, I would like to see what we can do to
bring different sides together.”
Vocabulary may not be the president’s best subject — Bush himself has
poked fun at his frequent malapropisms — but he’s shown he knows the
meaning of the word “genocide.” Campaigning for the White House in
2000, Bush told Armenian American groups that “the 20th century was
marred by wars of unimaginable brutality, mass murder and genocide”
and that “history records that the Armenians were the first people
of the last century to have endured these cruelties … If elected
president, I would ensure that our nation properly recognizes the
tragic suffering of the Armenian people.”
It’s one of the more blatant of Bush’s broken campaign promises.
Luckily, the Senate is showing signs of giving this rhetorical
appeasement the rebuke it deserves. Half of the senators on the
Foreign Relations Committee have demanded that the State Department
give an official explanation for Evans’ premature recall, and some
have hinted that Hoagland’s appointment could hang in the balance.
They should block the nomination altogether until the ambassador-to-be
dares to utter the g-word.
And the Bush administration should have the courage of its lack of
conviction and explain forthrightly — not just to Armenian Americans
but too all Americans who believe in calling evil by its proper name —
why U.S. policy is being dictated by Ankara nationalists.

After so many bombings, there is little moral high ground in the Middle East
Sunday Herald – 16 July 2006
Ian Bell
YOU can still find historians prepared to dispute the fact of Adolf
Hitler. What did he really know about genocide, they will ask, in
terribly reasonable voices, and when did he really, evidentially,
know it? My answer tends towards the simple. Long before his
Holocaust, Adolf asked a question of his own. “Who will remember the
Armenians?” he said.
The creep wasn’t kidding. One-and-a-half million perished in 1915
because no-one among the Great Powers cared much, if they cared at
all. Hitler regarded the silence as a licence for his programme. If
no-one minds about the wholesale Turkish eradication of a nation,
Adolf reasoned, who will then care about a million, or three million,
or six million despised Jews?
I turned down a dinner-party invitation, once upon a time, just because
David Irving was on the guest list. That was easy. More complicated
was the assumption, taken for granted among those decent Edinburgh
dinner-party folk, that I might wish to “argue” Holocaust-denial
. Perhaps – for such is a middle-class life – I needed an opportunity
to “debate”, or to “put him straight”. Where I come from, there are
other options.
Who will then remember the Armenians? In March of 1921, in Berlin,
a kid named Soghomon Thelirian approached one Mehmed Talaat from
behind, on a busy street, and put a bullet into the Turk’s skull.
That gentleman, recently his government’s interior minister, had
just resolved “the Armenian problem”. Talaat was promenading through
douce Charlottenburg with 1.5 million souls on his conscience when
Soghomon did him in, simply – according to contemporary reports –
“to avenge the death of my family”.
Where I come from, it counts as an option. Yet had I been Armenian or
Jewish, though I lack that honour, would I ever have stopped wondering
about the nature of revenge? Or rather, would I ever be able to cease
to wonder? How many millions? How many engulfing waves of grief? How
many eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth? How can amends ever be made? Bear
in mind that when Soghomon assassinated the Turk the word “genocide”
had yet to be invented. And this: who will remember the Palestinians?
When Hitler’s dead are remembered, some Jews prefer the word
“Shoah” to holocaust. It translates, as best as I can gather, as
“ritual burning”. It has the sense, to my ear, of sacrifice, of death
sanctified. The world grasps its significance, even while those who
would deny the truth of Hitler’s astounding carnage go on peddling
their lies. The gas chambers and the ovens sent up plumes of sorrow
that will never disperse. Yet still there are some who choose to doubt.
Where is the documentary evidence of Adolf’s intentions? Where is
the piece of paper, with his signature, giving the order? That line
is a favourite. In Turkey, even today, official acknowledgement of
the Armenian genocide amounts to nothing more, as a matter of state
policy, than the claim that there were “crimes on both sides”. In
some parts of the Arab world, meanwhile, Hitler still has his fans.
People still read The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion as though a
forgery concocted by Tsarist secret police amounts to documentary
evidence. In Iran, a democratically-elected president talks of wiping
Israel off the map for that, too, is “policy”.
When the scales are balanced, all moral weight rests with the
murdered. Part of Turkey’s reluctance to face responsibility for the
Armenians stems, it is said, from a fear of reparations. How many
millions, how many billions, might have to be paid to achieve some
sort of settlement? Germany’s democracy has been paying vast sums to
Jews for a very long time, after all, in an effort to answer that same
impossible question. Something is owed and the world, its rational
portion at least, knows as much.
In the years since it declared itself an independent republic –
May 14, 1948 – the state of Israel has demanded a moral authority
unique in history. The point of its entire existence has rested on
a single statement: never again. We, they say, will never again be
massacred. We will not be eradicated. Surrounded by despicable regimes
dedicated to its destruction, the only real democracy in the region,
Israel has stood witness to the fate of the six million.
So here comes the weightiest question I can shoulder: are the citizens
of Israel these days themselves complicit in genocide? And am I,
or is anyone, entitled to ask the question?
All the news from what was once known as the Holy Land is bad. By
the time you read this, things will undoubtedly have gone from bad to
very much worse. Because of a single captured boy soldier, Gaza has
been reduced to near-starvation. Because one “operation” creates the
logic for a second, Lebanon is under siege. Two Israelis are prisoners,
but as I write, 50 Lebanese are dead and the bombs are still falling.
By no possible yardstick is any of this proportionate. Israel has
used a single incident to stamp its military authority, yet again,
over the Middle East. Yet they ask us, in so many words, what else
we could possibly expect. Palestine’s Hamas government will not even
acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. In Lebanon, Hezbollah persists
in launching missiles at Israeli civilians. The death cult of the
teenage suicide bomber, the child dedicated to killing children,
continues. What, asks Israel, is “proportionate”, exactly?
It won’t do. Even an ocean of hatred does not excuse the fact Israel
is these days treating Palestinians as Jews once were treated.
Yet if I say so, one consequence is guaranteed: someone, doubtless
Israeli or American, will accuse me of anti-Semitism. If I meanwhile
add that the threat to Israel’s very existence is all too real,
another group, often styling itself as “left”, will call me a
Zionist lackey. On both sides there is an attempt, well-organised
and well-funded, to close down all debate.
These days, born-again American conservatives are Israel’s most vocal
allies. On the European left, meanwhile, arguments over Zionism can
be stripped down, far too easily, to a barely-coded version of the
old anti-Semitic garbage. At one remove the legacy of the Holocaust
is traded like a kind of moral currency. At another, the suffering
of the Palestinians is exploited by theocratic thugs who have done
nothing useful or real, ever, for those people.
Can you criticise Israel without insulting the victims of genocide?
Not according to some of those I have outraged in years gone by. Can
you meanwhile support the Palestinians without subscribing to each and
every piece of Islamist nonsense? Such a position is inadmissible,
it seems, in some circles. Instead, apparently, you are required
to become the sort of walking farce who cannot tell the difference
between political thought and Big Brother.
Given the madhouse that is the Middle East, it is presumptuous to
propose “solutions”. Instead, we should reclaim some language. We
should say that the atrocity auctions – who did what to whom and when
– must end. We should state, once and for all, that Hitler’s murders
did not grant Israel an eternal, irrevocable moral licence. This is
a real rogue state, complete with actual weapons of mass destruction,
and it should be treated as such.
While we’re at it, nevertheless, we should also add that Hamas,
democratically-elected or not, has no legitimacy if it remains
dedicated to the eradication of a nation, that Iran must remain a
pariah if wiping Israel off the map is its democratic choice. In
the process, predictably enough, we will please no-one. That much
I guarantee.
Who will remember the Palestinians? In Israel’s calculation, it seems
those who might ask don’t matter. To mention the Nazis in such a
context is to risk the gravest insult imaginable, but the echoes of
the past are real and they are inescapable.
If we ignore them, moreover, we also insult Hitler’s victims. The
Holocaust established a moral standard for us all, but it bound Israel,
first and foremost, to a duty. In Gaza, in Lebanon, that duty is
being held in contempt. We should be able to say so.
Instead, if experience is anything to go by, e-mail abuse will
follow. Both sides will invoke their martyrs and both will claim
justice as a reason for their actions. Honour satisfied, the killing
will then resume. All I hope is that neither tribe mentions a
loving god.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress