Reyes Of Light
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By Joel Drucker
08/16/2006
When Andre Agassi completes his last match at the U.S. Open, it will be the
signal for a man recognized often on television by his stoic expression and
ponytail to take a familiar walk. Gil Reyes will exit his seat and head to
the corridors underneath Arthur Ashe Stadium that link the locker room,
player's lounge and tournament office.
He has made this journey many times.
As Agassi mends in the locker room prior to his own press conference, Reyes
has often been the player’s informal spokesperson, speaking eloquently of
matters related to courage, competition and the many emotional, mental and
physical elements that make his charge one of the finest tennis players in
history.
But this year’s New York day promises more. Says Reyes, "I suspect a lot of
knees will be buckling for Andre and his last match. I think mine might be
buckling even more."
For 17 years, Reyes has been Agassi's cornerman par excellence. Technically,
he has been Agassi's physical trainer and, when appropriate, chief of
security, arranging everything from discreet seating for Steffi Graf to
rapid-fire exits. But that job description hardly does justice to Reyes's
impact on Agassi and, in turn, the world of tennis. Says Murphy Jensen, a
friend of Agassi's since the days they played junior doubles together, "They’
re not just pumping iron. They’re pumping life. Gil has a fire and a peace
within himself that has elevated Andre to places he’d never been."
Agassi's final American summer began in July at the Countrywide Classic, the
ATP stop held on the UCLA campus. Taking in the surroundings, Reyes was
overjoyed. This was the campus where as a boy growing up in Los Angeles he’d
loved watching the dominant UCLA basketball teams led by John Wooden. This
was the Los Angeles that had shaped his relationship to language, society,
music, sports, politics and family. Significantly, the privileged,
comfortable Los Angeles of UCLA may only have been 15 miles from where Reyes
grew up, but it might just as well have been 15,000 miles away. Sitting in a
cozy restaurant at a hotel near UCLA, Reyes says, "This to me is a foreign
planet."
Reyes came of age in East Los Angeles, child of a blue collar family. His
father, Rito, was a mechanic at a chemical plant. His mother, Alicia, tended
the home. Throughout his childhood, he bounced back and forth between this
working class neighborhood and time in the farming community of Las Cruces,
New Mexico, located right near the Mexican border. Not until he was 11 years
old did Reyes speak English, a language he honed by listening to the great
Vin Scully’s broadcasts of Los Angeles Dodgers baseball games.
But no matter what the language, Reyes learned valuable lessons from his
parents. "My parents inspired me to dream, but also to work — and to work
very hard," he says. Reyes’s sensibility was shaped by California history:
the optimism of the burgeoning ’50s and the social consciousness of the ’
60s, melded together to create a man at once amazed by what life offered and
well aware that, where he came from, choices could hold fatal consequences.
Talk with Reyes long enough and you uncover a man with a kaleidoscopic grasp
of the life and times of his world: in music, songs like Barry McGuire’s
"Eve of Destruction" and Buffalo Springfield’s "For What It’s
Worth"("Paranoia strikes deep/Into your life it will creep"); in sports,
UCLA, the Dodgers, the Rams and the Lakers; and events such as the Watts
riots of 1965 also cast their shadow. Says Reyes, "I was immersed in a sort
of survival, trying to figure out what was going on, what everyone was doing,
where did I fit in. Guys were looting. And my mother let me know, 'It’s not
a crime to be poor. But it's a disgrace to take things that don’t belong to
you.' "
Crime was never too far from Reyes's world. And as he saw people confused,
victimized and uncertain of which steps to take, Reyes also recognized that,
"I had tremendous respect for physical prowess. The time I put in the weight
room — and the exercises I learned from everyone from ex-prisoners to
athletes — gave me confidence and discipline. I liked getting stronger, and
I liked studying it too."
Having earned a degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara in
1973, Reyes continued as an ardent student of physical fitness. In time, he
made his way to Las Vegas, where at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas his
expertise in physical training and fitness helped shape a powerhouse
basketball team that won the 1990 NCAA championship. So dominant were the
Running Rebels that they caught the eye of another notable Las Vegas
resident. Reyes knew his name, but had not a clue about his game.
"Andre called me and said he wanted to use our facilities," says Reyes. "I
had never seen a single point of tennis. I knew it took skill, but I had no
concept of its physicality."
Soon after, Agassi asked Reyes to leave UNLV and become his full-time
trainer. Reyes's lack of tennis knowledge meant nothing to Agassi. "We'd
trade," says Reyes. "He'd teach me tennis; I would make him stronger."
The college coaching fraternity couldn't believe Reyes would leave UNLV to
devote himself to this barely 20-year-old prodigy in a sport that few of them
hardly understood. But Reyes saw something different. "There was something
special in him, something in my heart that knew this was the right thing to
do."
Over the years, the world has become quite familiar with how Reyes has helped
sculpt Agassi's body. There has been the beefed-up Andre, the chiseled Andre,
the Andre made faster, stronger, thinner. All of this has been a function of
the work Reyes has done — and done with exquisite care, attention and
creativity.
Reyes prides himself on constantly questioning assumptions about how the body
works and how to build better athletes. Working with Agassi, he'd see how an
exercise would strengthen one muscle but hurt another. With Agassi's backing,
Reyes set out on the task of building customized exercise equipment. Some
artists work in pastels, others in oil. For Reyes, the medium of choice is
the coat hanger. For hours on end, often past midnight, he will take a series
of hangers and twist them into the shape of a workable piece of equipment.
From there he works with designers and manufacturers to create the tools that
work for Agassi.
And so while by night Reyes created the equipment, by day he would work with
Agassi. Receptive as Agassi was to much of Reyes's input, there were also
many times when Agassi's own commitment to tennis would waver — to say the
least, for no player in tennis history so willingly turned his life into a
rollercoaster. Only in an individual sport could someone conduct his
competitive business with the volatility of Agassi. And Reyes, for all his
love of team sports and personal responsibility, made every effort to
understand what his charge was going through.
"Constantly I asked myself, ‘What can I teach this young person?’" says
Reyes. "When his tennis went down, I felt so deeply invested in him as a
friend. It's not that Andre stopped caring about his body. But he was also
faced with decisions and personal choices. And I realized that he needed to
figure it out for himself. And I told him that I'd rather he miss out on
great tennis than miss out on what life needs to be for [him]."
All of Agassi's ambivalence made his late 1997 decision to throw himself into
tennis exceptionally powerful. Says Reyes, "My feeling at this point was, ‘
Let’s go the distance. Let's play this tennis thought as much as we can and
see where it takes us.’ When Andre faltered, he'd need me to be there, but
it was going to be worth it just to make the effort."
Barely more than 18 months after Agassi had been flipping his own scorecards
at Challenger events, he, Reyes and coach Brad Gilbert took a fateful drive
through the City of Light. Says Reyes, "You drive through Paris, and boom!
There's the stadium, right there, like a big dragon. We'd faced
disappointment and sadness in that stadium, and just knew, somehow, we had to
slay the dragon."
One memory Reyes has of Agassi's 1999 French Open victory is of an event that
occurred immediately after he'd won the final. Near his own seat, Reyes saw
an elegant woman weeping like a baby. The victory and the woman's tears made
Reyes wonder: What kind of effect does this kid have on people? And it also
commenced one of the most successful back halves of a career in tennis
history. From the age of 29 on, Agassi won five Grand Slam tournament singles
titles, a feat only matched by Rod Laver.
It also marked the time of Agassi's romance of Graf, which led to marriage
and the birth of their first child, a boy with the first name of Jaden and
the middle name of his godfather — Gil. Listen to Agassi's introspective
comments and hear the echoes of Reyes. Hour after hour of time in the gym,
running the hills and shaping his body is spent frequently discussing the
meaning of life, sorting out priorities, clarifying and analyzing everything
from song lyrics to motivational axioms to philosophical quandaries.
"Coaching is giving," says Reyes. "A good coach is someone who's observant,
who's constantly learning and listening. I take a lot of time to listen, and
I've come to see that tennis in many ways is a perfect sport. It requires
skill, reflexes, decision-making, problem-solving and geometry. Throw two
guys in an arena and it's pretty compelling stuff."
As his tenure with Agassi draws to a close, Reyes has intentionally refused
to consider his next step. He enjoys spending time with his daughters,
Kalila, Kasey and Kerri. The youngest, Kerri, is just starting her freshman
year at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, and Reyes is excited about
watching her play basketball for coach Kirsten McKnight. He has also been
approached by several pros, but, fortunately, has enough financial resources
to feel no haste to return to the tour. After all, this is a man who has had
a front row seat for one of tennis’s finest acts. After expanding all the
energy he has devoted to Agassi, Reyes at this point is taking stock on what
it has all meant.
"To understand all Andre has been through and that I've taken part in is just
so incredible," he says. "As you know, we travel quite a lot on airplanes,
and one day Andre and I were talking about the [oxygen] mask that comes down
in an emergency and how to handle that when you're with a child. Andre said
his first reaction was that he'd want to put the mask on his child. But the
flight attendant says you've got to put it on yourself first. You've got to
save yourself before you can save others. Andre learned that, and I'm glad
I've been able to be right there with him through that journey."
Leave it to Agassi to have the last word: "If my boy can become half the man
Gil Reyes is, that will be incredible."
Contributing Writer Joel Drucker's book "Jimmy Connors Saved My Life" is
scheduled for a September publication in paperback.
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This story is featured in the current issue of Tennis Week along with Steve
Flink's feature on James Blake, Richard Evans' profile of Ion Tiriac "Super
Agent Or Super Man?", Andre Christopher's interview with the television
tandem of John McEnroe and Ted Robinson and a U.S. Open preview.
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