Peruca I

«Then, catastrophe strikes. The night before the final [Roland Garros 1990], I’m taking a shower and I feel the hairpiece Philly bought me suddenly disintegrate in my hands. I must have used the wrong kind of conditioner. The weave is coming undone – the damned thing is falling apart.
In a state of abject panic I summon Philly to my hotel room.
Fucking disaster, I tell him. My hairpiece – look!
He examines it.
We’ll let it dry, then clip it in place, he says.
With what?
Bobby pins.
He runs all over Paris looking for bobby pins. He can’t find any. He phones me and says, What the hell kind of city is this? No bobby pins?
In the hotel lobby he bumps into Chris Evert and asks her for bobby pins. She doesn’t have any. She asks why he needs them. He doesn’t answer. At last he finds a friend of our sister Rita, who has a bag full of bobby pins. He helps me reconfigure the hairpiece and set it in place, and keeps it there with no fewer than twenty bobby pins.
Will it hold? I ask
Yeah, yeah. Just don’t move around a lot.
We both laugh darkly.
(…)
Warming up before the match, I pray. Not for a win, but for my hairpiece to stay on. Under normal circumstances, playing in my first final of a slam, I’d be tense. But my tenuous hairpiece has me catatonic. »

Open, Andre Agassi