Pancho Gonzalez may have been the best tennis player of all time, but his fits of rage offended almost everyone in the game, cost him six marriages and alienated him from all but the last of his eight children

Between handshakes and hellos, with the cool clang of money and

the pop and hum of the MGM's endless night echoing in his ears,

Mike Agassi stood in his good suit with a smile on his face and

wondered how he was going to kill Pancho Gonzalez. Should he do

it himself? Scrape up $20,000 and hire a hit man? It was 1981,

in a Las Vegas still proud of its gangster soul, and Agassi had

been on its front lines for years as a casino greeter. He knew

people who knew people. It was only a matter of calculating the

real cost, because Agassi had no illusions about getting away

with murder. He'd spend the rest of his life in jail, he was

sure. Then again, he'd have the satisfaction of seeing the man

dead.

Agassi had come to America 25 years earlier, a tennis fanatic

who'd boxed on the 1952 Iranian Olympic team, and in recent

years his obsessive stewardship of the tennis career of his

oldest daughter, Rita, had hit the shoals of teenage burnout and

rebellion. There was great promise in Mike's 11-year-old son,

Andre--who years earlier, using a sawed-off racket, had wowed

crowds at the Alan King Desert Classic by rallying with Gonzalez

before the final--but there was reason to think that Andre, too,

would wither under Mike's punishing critiques and

5,000-balls-a-day regimen. Gonzalez said Andre was too soft, too

scared, and who knew better than Pancho? In Vegas he was the

tennis king.

There was no more perfect match than Pancho and Vegas: both dark

and disreputable, both hard and mean and impossible to ignore.

At 53 he was still a big man in every way, 6'3", with a

thunderclap voice and a career that had anticipated nearly every

major stage in the evolution of modern tennis. Locked out of

prestigious amateur tournaments such as Wimbledon and the U.S.

Championships during his prime, Gonzalez nonetheless dominated

the game as a pro in the 1950s and early '60s and left its

landscape scorched by the fire of his all-consuming bitterness.

Before the groundbreaking wins by Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe

in the '50s and '60s, before the brattiness of Jimmy Connors and

John McEnroe in the '70s and '80s, before the complaints about

Pete Sampras's untouchable serve in the '90s, Gonzalez smashed

through the game's class and ethnic barriers, abused officials

verbally and paralyzed opponents with a serve so powerful that

it inspired cries to remake the sport. Ion Tiriac, the Romanian

player of the early open era and eventual manager of Guillermo

Vilas, Boris Becker and other pros, has called Gonzalez "the

beginning of professional tennis as we know it...the father of

everything we have today."

Images Press/IMAGES/Getty Images

Now, in the raging autumn of his life, the man who'd beaten Don

Budge and Connors and everyone in between had insinuated himself

into the Agassi clan. And Mike Agassi had no one to blame but

himself. It was Mike, after all, who in 1973 had taken

13-year-old Rita to be coached at Caesars Palace, where Gonzalez

worked as tennis director. This wasn't easy for Mike. Like

everyone else in the Vegas tennis community, he'd endured

Gonzalez's moods, but few people knew how far back their enmity

went: 17 years earlier in Chicago, Mike had worked as a line

judge during a match between Gonzalez and Ken Rosewall. Gonzalez

harangued Agassi so viciously that night that Agassi rose from

his chair, refused to work another point and stalked off into

the bleachers.

Still, Mike was desperate; Rita wouldn't listen anymore, and her

game was slipping away. He turned her over to Gonzalez. When

Rita was 15, Mike, suspecting she had a crush on Gonzalez,

demanded that she stop training with him. She refused. At 17 she

was teaching at Caesars and in love with her coach, a man 32

years her senior. At 18 she left her parents' house and moved

into her own apartment. At 19 she and Gonzalez became an

official item. At 20 she moved in with him.

Mike was livid. He railed in public, telling relatives that he

wanted to hire a hit man. He thought about what might happen to

his wife and the three other kids if he went to jail. "There

were two things to do," he says. "Kill him, or stay away and

forget him."

Mike cut off relations with Rita. "I had no daughter," he says.

He and Gonzalez would pass each other at tennis events without

speaking, but Agassi was sure he could read what Gonzalez was

thinking. "I'm f------ your daughter," Agassi says. "The guy

enjoyed that I didn't like him. I knew what kind of person he

was."

Pancho, 55, and Rita, 23, were married in March 1984--he for the

sixth time, she for the first--in their backyard, in a

windstorm. Mike didn't attend the ceremony. Nearly two decades

later and seven years after Gonzalez's death, Mike still spews

obscenities about Pancho and the storm he stirred. Though tennis

helped Agassi realize the immigrant's ultimate dream, though the

sport gave his son immortality and untold riches, Agassi wishes

he'd never heard of the game. Tennis made him deliver his child

into the hands of a man he despised.

He could be a real son of a bitch. Everyone knew that about

Richard (Pancho) Gonzalez--friend, foe, wife and family. But

when his contemporaries use the phrase real son of a bitch to

describe him, their anger is often lightened by a weird lilt of

admiration. No: joy. You have to hear his old friend Pancho

Segura describe how Gonzalez hated to lose. You have to hear

another opponent speak of how Gonzalez once stormed into the

locker room and shattered his second-place trophy against the

wall, or how he growled to a man who'd defeated him, "Give your

money back, you a------. You're never going to beat me again."

In 1952 Segura, seven years older than Gonzalez and not nearly

as talented, had the day of his life and crushed Gonzalez at a

pro event 6-2, 6-2, 6-2. "He wouldn't talk to me for days,"

Segura says, laughing, and then he shouts gleefully, "He was a

p----!"

Days? "I was one of his friends, and when I beat him, he

wouldn't talk to me for three months," says 1959 Wimbledon

champion Alex Olmedo. It didn't matter if the match was played

before thousands or no one. In 1964 Gonzalez and his protege

Charlie Pasarell, a top U.S. amateur, were playing practice sets

at the Los Angeles Tennis Club: Loser paid for the balls.

Gonzalez won the first set easily and went up 5-2 in the second

when he noticed a hitch in Pasarell's backhand volley. Gonzalez

stopped to give a 15-minute tutorial. When play resumed,

Pasarell won the set.

"He went ballistic," Pasarell says. "Threw the racket against

the fence: athwoonnng! Grabbed the racket again and hit all the

balls over the fence, beyond Wilcox Avenue. Picked up his

equipment, slammed open the gate, slammed it shut and drove off,

tearing down the street. I figured, Jeez, I guess I've got to

pay for the balls."

Pasarell got off easy. Segura once joked that the nicest thing

Gonzalez said to any of his wives was "Shut up." For all but the

last of his eight children he was a glowering critic who came

and went bearing suitcases and rackets. Pancho and Richard Jr.

won a couple of father-son tournaments together, but what

Richard Jr. remembers about those matches is being loudly

upbraided by his father. Sometimes Pancho would call his son a

"dumb f---."

When, in late 1956, Gonzalez briefly went home to Los Angeles

during a pro tour against Rosewall, he learned that the mother

of his wife, Henrietta, had been murdered. A bereft Henrietta

talked with Pancho about whether he should go back on tour

immediately. To others he expressed no doubt. He told one

intimate, "If it had been Richard Jr., I'd still go."

"He was such a complex person," says Madelyn Gonzalez, who

married Pancho in 1960, two years after he divorced Henrietta.

"He really wanted to be a good guy, but he just couldn't. It

wasn't in him." In 1965 Pancho was playing Chile's Luis Ayala in

Newport, R.I., when he noticed Madelyn walking to her seat. He

stopped play and snarled, "You'd be late to your own father's

funeral."

Yet two years after their divorce in '68, Madelyn remarried

Pancho. They divorced again in '75 and almost remarried in '78.

She keeps a picture of him on her dresser. "I've had many chances

to marry very wealthy men," she says, "but he's a tough act to

follow. It's that fire, that larger-than-life thing."

She isn't the only one who feels that way. Forty years after his

prime as a player, Gonzalez still invades the dreams of the men

he beat, still evokes tears in those who idolized him. Men's

tennis is obsessed with numbers: As Sampras neared his

record-breaking 13th major singles title, the debate over who

was the greatest player in history boiled down to him and Rod

Laver, the only man to win the Grand Slam twice. Gonzalez won

only two majors, the U.S. Championships in 1948 and '49, but the

figure he cut, the game he played, the rage and need that rose

off him like vapor were unlike anything tennis had ever seen.

"He was just so beautiful to watch," says Jennie Hoad, the widow

of Lew Hoad, one of Gonzalez's fiercest--and most

elegant--rivals. "Being tall, he was a little more graceful,

more natural. I don't think he ever moved in an unattractive way."

To see Gonzalez play, said Gussy Moran, the flamboyant women's

tennis star of the '40s, was to watch "a god patrolling his

personal heaven." Writers compared Gonzalez's movement to that

of a jungle cat, his strokes to music or poetry. His

serve--falling as straight and deadly as an executioner's

blade--was so clean that other players beheld it with wonder,

and generations of coaches held it up as the paragon. In 1969

Danish pro Torben Ulrich lost to Gonzalez in the third round of

the U.S. Open but seemed grateful to have been on the receiving

end of genius. "Pancho gives great happiness," he said. "It is

good to watch the master."

Ulrich, a jazz aficionado whose son had saxophone legend Dexter

Gordon for a godfather, calls Gonzalez an artist. "You ask if I

understood Pancho. I did not," Ulrich says. "But if there's real

greatness, you're not supposed to understand it." Still, his

genius never tripped into McEnrovian self-destructiveness. It

was the rest of the world Gonzalez wanted to hurt, and he flew

at his target like a guided missile.

Ulrich tells of a night he had with Gonzalez in 1974, on the

Grand Masters Tour. The two stayed up for five hours in a hotel,

drinking beer and eating, and Gonzalez regaled Ulrich with

stories about Las Vegas and his early days as a drag racer.

"Come the next day, the draw had been made, but I didn't know,"

Ulrich says. "The matches had started, and Pancho's watching. I

sit next to him and say, softly, 'Good morning, Pancho. Did you

get some rest?' He doesn't answer. So I raise my voice a little

and say, 'Good morning.' He didn't make the smallest

acknowledgement that I was there--because we were playing each

other that day."

As a professional, Gonzalez did as he pleased. His selfishness

was unalloyed. On the pro tour of the 1950s and '60s the players

were expected to travel together and pitch in with promotions.

Gonzalez would have none of it. He did few interviews. The sport

then was a social whirl, with sponsors' cocktail parties and the

like, but Gonzalez did not schmooze. He drove from town to town

in his Thunderbird, showed up late, slept through appointments.

"He was like a lonely wolf," Olmedo says. "But he had his

reasons."

He didn't start out mean. After Gonzalez won the 1948 U.S.

Championships at Forest Hills at age 20, Life magazine called

him "happy-go-lucky" and "good-natured." He was constantly

portrayed as a carefree champion, casual in his approach to

training, open to everyone. "He was really happy," Segura says,

"but he wasn't ready."

Gonzalez was no innocent, but nothing had prepared him for the

WASP-dominated, moneyed world in which he was suddenly moving.

When his father, Manuel, was a child, he walked 900 miles from

Chihuahua, Mexico, to Arizona with his own father. Manuel

eventually settled in South Central L.A., where he met his wife,

Carmen, with whom he would have seven children.

Manuel worked as a housepainter, and despite his heavy hand

Pancho grew up loose and wild. He hustled pool, but he spent

just as much energy teaching himself to play tennis on L.A.'s

public courts with a 51-cent racket he had gotten for Christmas.

Rising fast in Southern California boys' tennis, Pancho quit

high school after two years to play full time, but he was banned

from junior tournaments because he was a dropout. He got busted

for burglarizing houses at 15. "You don't know the thrill of

going out the back window when someone's coming in the front

door," Pancho told his brother Ralph.

Put him away, Manuel told the judge. Pancho spent a year in

detention, then joined the Navy and swabbed decks in the

Pacific. One AWOL and a couple of late returns from leave earned

him a bad-conduct discharge in 1947, and he came home. He

married Henrietta Pedrin and quickly dominated the powerful

men's tennis scene in Southern California. Along the way he took

note of every slight, such as Anglos' habit of calling every

Mexican Pancho. He entered the '48 U.S. Championships ranked

17th in the country and, to everyone's shock, won. The next

year, cocky and still knowing nothing about conditioning, he

defended his title in a five-set classic against Ted Schroeder.

By then he and Henrietta had one son, Richard Jr., and another

on the way. They needed money. Bobby Riggs dangled a $75,000 pro

contract, and Pancho bit.

In that pre-Open era, the pro tour was a Darwinian death march.

While winners of Wimbledon and the U.S. Championships were feted

in the mainstream press, no one had any illusion that those

amateurs were the best players in the game. Top pros like Riggs

and Jack Kramer waited for amateurs to make names for themselves

and then hired them for barnstorming tours in which a seasoned

pro played a series of matches against a newly signed

"challenger." The tours were sold on the prestige of the

challengers, who were paid more as a result and whom the pros

proceeded to beat without mercy. Riggs pitted Gonzalez against

Kramer, who at 28 was considered the world's best player. For

Gonzalez, that would spell disaster.

For 123 nights the two men played on canvas stretched over wood

in high school gyms, armories, even an opera house. Kramer won

by a punishing margin of 96-27. Gonzalez nevertheless enjoyed

himself, gulping Cokes during matches and smoking afterward,

oblivious to the fact that his reputation was slipping away. The

21-year-old didn't understand that once an amateur was

established as a loser, his value as a gate attraction

plummeted. Kramer, tough and principled, wasn't willing to carry

him. Almost as quickly as it had begun, Gonzalez's pro career

was done.

For the next four years Gonzalez diddled away his early prime as

a player, spending most of his time racing hot rods, bowling,

breeding dogs, stringing rackets at his soon-to-fail tennis shop

in L.A.'s Exposition Park. In 1952 he and Henrietta separated.

Finally, in late 1954, Kramer, who was playing less and

promoting more, invited Gonzalez to join a round-robin tour he

had organized for top pros Budge, Frank Sedgman and Segura.

Gonzalez beat the other men consistently, positioning himself to

take apart the next amateur challenger.

Tony Trabert won Wimbledon and the French and U.S. Championships

in 1955, then went for the money. But Kramer kept Gonzalez

waiting as he mulled whether to play Trabert himself. "Jack

completely demoralized him," says Henrietta, who had reunited

with Pancho after a year and a half apart. Kramer finally took

himself out of the running and signed Gonzalez to a seven-year

contract. Pancho was back--and different from the man who'd left

the tour a few years earlier. "A loner," says Schroeder, "and

always the unhappiest man in town."

"His nature had changed completely," Kramer says. "He became

difficult and arrogant. Losing had changed him. When he got his

next chance, he understood that you either win or you're out of a

job."

Gonzalez resented Trabert, who, Henrietta says, corrected

Pancho's English and dismissed his interest in cars. The

challenger was making a minimum of $80,000, while Gonzalez, the

best pro in the world, was guaranteed only $15,000. Gonzalez

wanted to make him pay. Over six months of singles matches he

crushed Trabert 74-27.

Trabert, for his part, grew to loathe Gonzalez. To him the

selfish, irascible, bullying Gonzalez broke all the rules of

tennis. He made it personal. He turned a genteel sport into a

street fight. In 1956, after a doubles match in which a dispute

over a point led to an exchange of smashes aimed at the body,

Gonzalez marched off the court without shaking hands with

Trabert or his partner. Then, as Gonzalez stood by, Trabert told

a reporter, "You just saw one of the most chickens--- things in

sports." Another time Trabert told Gonzalez, "Somebody's going

to flush you down the toilet before your life's over--and I just

might be the one to pull the handle."

When the Gonzalez-Trabert tour ended in '56, Gonzalez dismantled

Frank Parker and Dinny Pails in a round-robin 45-7. Then came

Rosewall. Then Hoad. Gonzalez beat them all. He also beheaded

the microphone of a chair ump who refused to overrule a call

during one match, and shattered a wall clock when he smacked a

ball away in frustration during another match. He blew off

promoters. He shredded opponents' concentration by stopping play

to pose for pictures. Hoad's Aussie contemporaries say he braced

Gonzalez against a locker one night and threatened to beat him

senseless. But Gonzalez drew crowds like no one else in the game.

That's why he resented Kramer more than any opponent. Kramer

stuck to his policy of offering far more money to the amateur

challenger, insisting that the tour's appeal lay in seeing if

the amateur could dethrone the king. Gonzalez, the established

No. 1, wanted to be paid like it. He sued Kramer to get out of

the contract and lost. Pancho told Ralph, who often accompanied

him on tour, "I'm just a piece of meat. They cut off a piece,

and they sell it. I'm hanging on the goddam hook."

"He took it too personally," Ralph says. Told that Trabert once

said Pancho had "a persecution complex," Ralph nods in

agreement. "Born a------," he says of Trabert, "but he's right."

If Gonzalez had no time for his fellow players, he had little

for Henrietta or their three young sons: Richard Jr., Michael

and Daniel. Pancho and Henrietta separated again and headed for

divorce. One evening in 1958 Lew and Jennie Hoad and their

little daughter went to visit Henrietta at her house and found

her passed out from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.

They called Pancho, who came over and brought Henrietta out of

her stupor by tossing her into the shower. He was furious. He

roared and threw furniture around. Jennie locked herself and her

daughter in the study. "She no doubt was looking for sympathy

from Pancho," Jennie says of Henrietta. "She didn't get it. He

left the house in a mess and charged out."

The end of that marriage also marked a beginning for Pancho. In

Madelyn Darrow, a recently minted Miss Rheingold, he collided

head-on with the one person who could make him as miserable as

he made everyone else. For an outsider like Pancho she was

inside incarnate: haughty and accustomed to getting her way.

They fell instantly for each other, but Madelyn didn't want

anything to do with hot rods. She wanted cocktail parties,

famous faces and a house in the hills. She and Pancho married

and moved to Malibu, then Brentwood and finally Holmby Hills.

"She destroyed him," says Segura. "I told him, 'You made a

mistake divorcing Henrietta. You could eat standing up and

nobody cared. You didn't have to worry about using a knife or

fork.' Madelyn tried to improve him. This is a man who hated

ties. She told him he had to put on a jacket and tie. It always

happens to athletes. Your tennis brings you up around these

people--a lot of horses---! It kills your soul."

Pancho adored drag racing, but most of all he loved tinkering

with engines, stripping them down and making them sing. "I hated

those cars," Madelyn says. "He poured the little bit of money we

had into those stupid cars, or the crap tables." He moved his

tools and auto parts to Ralph's house and spent hours there.

Often he met his sons at the races. On the way home he would

stop to scrub his fingernails clean. "It was sad," says Richard

Jr.

Pancho and Madelyn had three daughters together: twins Mariessa

and Christina, born in 1961, and Andrea, born in '63. Ralph

never felt comfortable in Madelyn and Pancho's home. Pancho's

sons later worked with their dad at the tennis ranch he opened

in Malibu in '66, but only Richard Jr. went to his house much.

"Once I was in the kitchen, and I heard [Madelyn] say my

father's friends were a bunch of rubes," says Richard Jr. "I

didn't know what a rube was. I thought it might be good."

Madelyn had little in common with her in-laws, but she says it

was Pancho who kept them at a distance. He told Henrietta that

the only family he had then was Madelyn and their daughters.

In truth, winning was his pride and joy. After beating Hoad

51-36 in 1958, Gonzalez spent the next few years dispatching all

comers: Ashley Cooper, Mal Anderson, Rosewall, Olmedo, Andres

Gimeno, Barry MacKay. He retired in 1961, at the end of his

contract with Kramer, then returned for a humiliating

first-round loss to Olmedo at the U.S. Professional Grass Court

Championships at Forest Hills. There, after cautioning reporters

not to write him off, Pancho took Madelyn's hand and sat while

his eyes filled with tears.

In '63 Gonzalez coached the U.S. team to the Davis Cup final,

against Australia, in Adelaide. The team arrived Down Under in

mid-December, and, says Dennis Ralston, one of the U.S. players,

"Madelyn would refuse Pancho's collect phone calls." According to

Ralston, she was angry at Pancho because he wouldn't be home for

the holidays. (Madelyn says she doesn't recall this.) "She

wouldn't let him talk to his kids at Christmas," Ralston says.

"He'd slam the phone down and take four or five drinks."

Gonzalez headed home before the matches began. "Trying to keep

peace in the family," he said in a TV interview.

When he felt like it, Gonzalez could turn on a radiant charm. He

made room in his life to tutor young U.S. players such as Ashe,

Cliff Richey, Pasarell and Ralston, who all held him in awe, but

his generosity often lost out to his rage. On that same Davis

Cup trip to Australia, Gonzalez and Ralston were playing a

practice match in front of some 1,500 people, five dollars a

set. Ralston lost the first 6-4 and said playfully, "Double or

nothing, but you got to give me a game and the serve."

Gonzalez glared at him. "Get out the way you got in, punk," he

said. Ralston went up 4-0, and Gonzalez gathered his rackets.

"Listen, you son of a bitch, you crybaby, all you do is cry," he

snapped at Ralston. Then he walked off the court. The crowd

heard it all.

"I was heartbroken," Ralston says. "This was my idol. There was

a party that night at the U.S. ambassador's, and I didn't want

to go. Pancho came over and apologized: 'I'm sorry, kid; I just

lost it.'"

In 1965, 17-year-old Richard Jr. gave his father some bad news:

Richard's girlfriend was pregnant. Richard expected anger,

disdain--anything but what happened next. Pancho began to cry.

He wrapped Richard in his arms and held him close, tears

streaming down his cheeks. Richard had never seen his father

weep, and he thought Pancho was looking back at his own life, at

his marriage to Henrietta and the son he'd had at 20, the son

whose life had now changed for good. Richard had never known a

moment like this.

It would be another 30 years before he got that close to his

father again.

The boy was hungry. He knew few people in London on that June

day in 1969, and he was alone and far from home. His mother

would've told him to eat, to spend his 50 pence of dinner money,

but Vijay Amritraj had no intention of eating. Pancho Gonzalez

was playing at Wimbledon that evening, and the 15-year-old

Amritraj knew he had to be there. As a rising junior player in

India, poring over newspaper stories and photos, Amritraj had

worshiped Gonzalez without ever having seen him play. Stomach

growling, he spent the 50p on a standing-room ticket for Centre

Court.

Just before 6 p.m. Gonzalez stepped out of a black-and-white

past into Technicolor, swaggering onto the grass for his

first-round match with Pasarell. "He lived up to my dreams,"

Amritraj says of Gonzalez that evening. "I still don't see

anybody who devoured the sport as he did."

In truth, Gonzalez didn't look so good. He was 41 and had not

played consistently in recent years. Sensing the onset of the

Open era and convinced that to compete with the young guns he

had to weigh less than he did at 20, he had indulged in wild

diets to keep at 180 pounds. He drank little water. "He said you

had to be like the [American] Indians, who he said never drank

water," says Richey. In 1968, in a tournament at Bournemouth,

England, Gonzalez inaugurated the Open era of tennis by losing

to British amateur Mark Cox in five sets. "After waiting for it

all these years," Gonzalez had said, "I had to be here when it

finally happened." He played Wimbledon for the first time since

1949 but lost early: Tennis history, it seemed, was going to

leave him behind.

Gonzalez decided not to let it. He spent the last few months

before Wimbledon '69 punishing his body for the last push of his

playing career. "He would eat nothing but soup," Ulrich says.

"He was fearsome on himself."

A dashing gray streak cut through his still-thick hair, but deep

wrinkles creased his elbows, and his sun-baked skin seemed

stretched over his thin frame, his gaunt face. Age had made him

even more of a craftsman. His aluminum rackets were strung at

widely different tensions--tighter for receiving, looser for

serving. For Wimbledon he had prepared an arsenal, drilling

holes from the handles to the heads of the rackets (12 to 15

holes per racket) to lighten them for touch and as a hedge

against fatigue. In long matches he'd work all the way through

his quiver, from the weapon with the fewest holes to the one

with the most.

He would need every one against the 25-year-old Pasarell. The

son of Puerto Rican tennis champions, Pasarell was a younger,

prettier, nicer version of Gonzalez, with perfect strokes and a

classic serve-and-volley game. The match began as a service war,

with neither man close to breaking the other as the daylight

dimmed. Pasarell looked to wear the old man down, moving him

around relentlessly and lobbing over his head, and in the first

set the strategy worked--eventually. This was before the

introduction of the tiebreaker; in numbing and increasingly

riveting fashion, the games of the first set mounted to the

equivalent of nearly five sets played on today's tour. Finally,

in the 46th game, on Pasarell's 12th set point, the younger man

broke serve by throwing up one more lob that Gonzalez couldn't

run down. It was 8 p.m., and as the unreal score of 24-22 lit up

the scoreboard, Gonzalez hunched over gasping. "He looked half

dead," Amritraj says.

It got only worse. After Pasarell won the first point of the

second set, Gonzalez asked the chair umpire, "How much longer do

we have to play in this absolute darkness?" He asked again after

the first game and threatened to default if the remainder of the

match wasn't postponed. Referee Mike Gibson said no. Furious,

Gonzalez spent most of the set screaming about the poor

visibility. The crowd jeered at him to play on. "I've never seen

this happen at Wimbledon before," intoned BBC broadcaster Dan

Maskell. But Maskell's partner in the booth was hardly

surprised. Jack Kramer had been watching Gonzalez behave this

way for two decades.

Pasarell understood what was happening: Pancho knows he's in

trouble. He abandoned his chip-and-lob tactics and began driving

his returns, sure that Gonzalez couldn't pick them up in the

dark. As Gonzalez served at 1-4, 15-30, the umpire mistakenly

awarded him a point to make it 30-30. "Umpire, it's 15-40,"

Gonzalez shouted in disgust across the court. His subsequent

cursing was drowned out by cheers for his sportsmanship. But

Pasarell won the last two games to take the second set 6-1.

Gibson then suspended play. Gonzalez hurled his racket at the

umpire's chair, gathered his other rackets and stomped off. He

didn't wait for Pasarell. He didn't stop to bow to the royal

box. For perhaps the first time in the history of Wimbledon a

player was booed off the court. Everyone began writing

Gonzalez's professional obituary.

Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images

The next day, on the drive to Wimbledon for the resumption of

the match, Pancho said to Madelyn, "I'm going to win." Amritraj,

who would one day be coached into the top 10 by Gonzalez,

arrived early and stood in line for hours, lunch money in hand.

The third set began like the first, with both men easily holding

serve, but as the games piled up, it became clear that

Pasarell's level of play had dropped. People kept filing into

Centre Court, packing it to capacity. Finally, with Pasarell

serving at 15-40 in the 30th game, Gonzalez drove a hard, flat

forehand up the line. His racket made a sound it hadn't made all

match, like an ax biting into dead oak. Pasarell hit a backhand

volley wide. Gonzalez had the break and the third set, 16-14,

and as the cheers rose, he flicked his head back as if to say,

Here I am, you bastards.

"What a monumental fighter this fellow is, Dan," Kramer said

over the BBC. In the fourth set Gonzalez took complete charge.

He pounced on balls, the years falling off him with every step,

and won the set 6-3 to even the match.

The fifth set was another marathon, but Gonzalez only seemed

stronger, even moving backward with astonishing speed. Serving

at 4-5, however, he buckled and went down 0-40: three match

points for Pasarell. Gonzalez calmly won the next two points and

then watched as a lob by Pasarell fell an inch wide to bring the

game back to deuce. Two points later Gonzalez dived for a ball,

fell and lay flat on his stomach. For a moment he didn't move.

Pasarell approached and asked if he was O.K. Gonzalez struggled

to his feet, propping himself up with the racket like a man with

a cane. Pasarell thought, Why doesn't he just give up?

Gonzalez held serve. Two games later Pasarell again had him

pinned, triple match point, only to watch Gonzalez wriggle free:

an overhead smash, a drop volley, a service winner. Five of six

times he had faced match point, Gonzalez had pounded his first

serve in. "I've seen Sampras lose many matches because his serve

wasn't working," says Pasarell, who now runs the ATP tournament

at Indian Wells. "I never saw Gonzalez lose because his serve let

him down."

Gonzalez held again, but as the roars shook Centre Court, he

looked indifferent. He may have raged between points the evening

before, but this afternoon he was strangely calm. He gave nothing

away.

Pasarell had one more shot, his seventh and last. At 7-8, ad

out, match point for the younger player, Gonzalez plunked his

first serve into the net. He didn't hesitate: He drove his

second serve so deep in the box that it took Pasarell by

surprise. He managed a return, but Gonzalez struck a biting

volley, and Pasarell lofted one last backhand lob--and a prayer.

This time he died with it; the lob went way long. Gonzalez

served out easily, flipping his head back like a prancing

thoroughbred. Pasarell rebounded to go up 9-8, and by then no

one doubted the match was destined for legend. "I don't think

I've ever seen one like this," Kramer said.

Gonzalez held again, and at 9-9 Pasarell finally cracked. He went

down 0-30 on his serve, and Gonzalez gave him some of his own

medicine, lofting a backhand lob that kissed the inside of the

baseline. Facing three break points, Pasarell showed none of

Gonzalez's grit; he struck a forehand volley long. Break in hand,

Gonzalez stepped on Pasarell's air hose, serving a love game to

win the match by the lunatic score of 22-24, 1-6, 16-14, 6-3,

11-9.

"Seven match points," Pasarell says all these years later. "The

son of a bitch." The crowd that had booed Gonzalez less than 24

hours earlier stood and flooded him with adulation. Later he

found the humiliated Pasarell in the corner of the locker room,

sobbing. Gonzalez, who never apologized for winning, sat down

next to the young man, put his arm on his shoulders and said,

"Kid, I'm sorry. I was really lucky to win."

Luck had nothing to do with it. Kramer rates Gonzalez a better

player than Sampras or Laver. Ashe called Gonzalez the only idol

he ever had. Segura, Olmedo and Ralston say Gonzalez was the best

player in history. Connors said once that if he needed someone to

play for his life, he'd pick Gonzalez. Pasarell agrees: "He was

the toughest competitor who ever played. He just fought and

fought and fought until he died."

The five-hour, 12-minute epic between Gonzalez and Pasarell made

Wimbledon history: longest match, most games played. For tennis

aficionados it's surpassed in drama only by the 1980 final

between McEnroe and Bjorn Borg, but in one sense it had more

impact. In 1970, using Gonzalez-Pasarell as Exhibit A, the U.S.

Open instituted the tiebreaker--the biggest structural change in

tennis in a century.

Still, by the end of that first week of Wimbledon '69, Gonzalez

was gone, having lost to Ashe in the round of 16. At the U.S.

Open, Gonzalez battled severe cramps to beat Ulrich in five

sets. In the locker room afterward his bony frame seized up

grotesquely. "I can't do this anymore," he croaked to Ralph. He

wondered if he was losing his mind. "I feel like Van Gogh out

there."

Ralph tried to lighten the mood. "Don't cut off your ear!" he

said.

"Goddammit, you don't understand!" Pancho yelled. "Nobody

understands what I'm trying to do on the court, nobody--and I

can't do it anymore."

But he could. Four weeks later he rolled through the cream of

the tennis crop at the Howard Hughes Open in Vegas, swatting

aside John Newcombe, Rosewall, Stan Smith and Ashe. Then, in

January 1970, at Madison Square Garden, Gonzalez beat Laver--the

No. 1 player in the world, four months removed from winning his

second Grand Slam--in five sets. A few months later, in

102[degree] heat in Vegas, he beat Laver again.

The following year the 43-year-old Gonzalez beat a 19-year-old

Connors from the baseline in the Pacific Southwest Open. "Nobody

remembers," Olmedo says of that match. Once, in the early '90s,

Sampras was at dinner with commentator Mary Carillo when the

subject of Gonzalez came up. "Pete had never heard of him,"

Carillo says, "because he'd never won Wimbledon." Andre Agassi

isn't surprised to hear this. "The history of tennis is pretty

complex," says Agassi, who was never close to his onetime

brother-in-law, "and unless you're aware, you might not have a

sense of how important a figure Pancho Gonzalez was."

Pancho was always aware. One night after a match at the L.A.

Coliseum he drank a few beers with the 26-year-old Newcombe and

then staggered out to the parking lot. As Gonzalez started his

hotted-up Mustang, Newcombe jumped on the hood and playfully gave

him the finger. Gonzalez floored it, lurched ahead and stomped on

the brakes. Newcombe catapulted off, and as he lay in a heap on

the asphalt, pants torn, Gonzalez rolled down the window and

rasped, "Don't f--- with me, kid," before driving off.

Beg? take a handout? No. Ralph Gonzalez once accused Pancho of

drawing a three-foot circle around himself and leaving room for

no one else inside. "That's right," Pancho replied. He hadn't let

the world in when he was on top, and he wouldn't now that he was

broke. It was the early '90s. Segura wanted to put on a benefit

for him. No, Gonzalez said. "So he chose to be down-and-out,"

Madelyn says, "and live in this nasty little house."

It wasn't nasty. It was his own idea of peace. Five minutes from

the Vegas airport, it was a runty yellow-stucco affair--but he

had it all to himself. At last Gonzalez was alone. He had carved

his life down to the barest bones. He and Madelyn had split up

for good in 1980. Since then he had had three other wives and

two children, ending with Rita Agassi and their son, Skylar, but

women and kids just complicated things. Pancho and Rita divorced

in 1989 after nearly 10 years together. For a while Pancho lived

in a motor home in an R.V. park. The little yellow house was

better.

There he had things the way he'd always wanted: a hook on a wall

to hang his rackets, a workbench in the kitchen, a row of shelves

for the groceries. He slept on a mattress on the bedroom floor.

He used the same plastic cup and plate for every meal.

"I want a simple life," he said when Ralph tried to give him some

drinking glasses. "If it breaks, I've got to clean it up." For a

time he rode around in an old U-Haul van. "He was happy," Ralph

says. Pancho told his kids not to expect any money when he died.

All his bridges had been burned. He had made $75,000 a year from

an endorsement deal with Spalding, but he treated company

employees as if he were a lord, and in 1981, after a nearly

30-year association, Spalding didn't renew his annual contract.

For 16 years he'd had the best professional relationship of his

life working for Cliff Perlman as the tournament director at

Caesars Palace, but Perlman left and the new man had no history

with Gonzalez. It didn't help that Gonzalez only grudgingly

agreed to his boss's request that he hit with Colin Powell and

refused to give private lessons to the boss's wife. In 1985

Caesars cut Gonzalez loose. "He didn't know how to treat

people," Olmedo says. "He was very proud, and that's what made

him a great champion. He was like a goddam lion. But off the

court he didn't know how to behave."

"He became impossible to be around," Rita says. His one

redeeming relationship was with Skylar. When the boy was 10

months old, Rita had found him sinking in their swimming pool

and had him rushed to the hospital. (Pancho was asleep inside

the house.) Pancho's daughter Mariessa had died at age 11 after

being thrown by a horse. Pancho hadn't been close to her. He

made sure, once Skylar was out of danger, not to be a stranger

to the youngest of his children.

He opened himself to the boy as he had to no one else in his

life. Most nights Skylar would stay with Rita or her parents,

but he spent his days, while Rita was working, with Pancho. With

Skylar, Pancho was warm and patient. They would ride dirt bikes

and go-karts and hit golf balls into the desert. All the love

Pancho had held back from his brothers and his women and his

other children he poured into Skylar. The boy would curl up in a

ball and nap by his side. Pancho's friends were stunned. "I just

want to be around long enough to get him through high school,"

Pancho would say.

During the 1994 U.S. Open, as Andre Agassi was beating Michael

Chang in the fourth round, Gonzalez lay in his hotel room in New

York City, racked with back and abdominal spasms. When he

returned home, X-rays revealed cancer in his stomach, esophagus,

chin and brain. For the next few months, as he underwent

chemotherapy and radiation treatments, he kept saying he was

going to beat the cancer, but he knew better. In March he told

Laver not to feel sorry for him. He'd lived a good life. He was

happy. He made peace with Kramer. "For the first time in my

life, I'm open," he told a reporter. "I'm no longer selfish."

But flashes of the old Pancho remained. Ralph, too, had learned

he had cancer--of the prostate--but he and his wife, Ona, moved

into Pancho's house to help him. They soon chafed at his

arrogance and neediness. One night the two stooped men in their

60s lunged at each other with their fists. "Die like a man, you

son of a bitch!" Ralph yelled. Later that night the two brothers

sat in the bedroom together and cried.

In late June, Pancho, his skin gone yellow, entered the

hospital. After a few days he phoned Mike Agassi--whose house he

refused to set foot in. The hostility between the two men had

ratcheted down a level since Skylar's pool accident. "I cannot

take care of my son," Gonzalez told Agassi. Sure that Skylar

would carry some of his traits, Pancho added, "It's going to be

hard for Rita because he's mine. Please raise him."

Mike came to the hospital carrying a jug of mushroom tea. He

told Pancho, "Don't worry. We'll take care of him."

"It was sad," Mike says. "A great man, flat broke; a great man,

his life is finished; a great man, has no friends."

On July 2, the day before he died, Gonzalez tried to watch

Wimbledon on TV. Skylar came to say goodbye. Pancho faded in and

out of consciousness, pillowed by morphine. He and Richard Jr.

hadn't spoken for a few months because of a petty argument, but

now Richard came and sat with him. Pancho went to the bathroom

but was too weak to clean himself, so Richard Jr. did the job as

that loud voice barked out intricate instructions. "I never

could say no to him," Richard Jr. says, "and there I was again

at the end." Later he took his father's hand. For the second

time in his life he felt like a son should. "I sat with him the

whole night," he says. "He held my hand, and he just kept

squeezing it."

Skylar Gonzalez is 16. He has spent most of the last seven years

with Rita. Every year, from May until July 3, he falls into a

funk. Occasionally he goes to his father's grave and stares at

the stone as the sound of traffic rumbles over the grass.

Pictures of Pancho paper Skylar's bedrooms at Mike's house and

Rita's house. "He says, 'Daddy, I love you' to the picture," Mike

says. "Anytime there's something about Pancho on TV, he stands

and watches with tears in his eyes. Skylar says, 'Everybody has a

father. I wonder sometimes why I can't have a father.'" He dreams

of his father still, and in his dreams the old wolf is always

wise and kind.

Andre Agassi paid for Pancho's funeral. The crowd was small,

everyone's memories a mix of good and bad. Mike Agassi opened up

his home to the mourners and fed them. He didn't kill Pancho

Gonzalez, but he saw him humbled, and he saw him dead.