A mirror turned inwards

In the late 1980's when my sporting world was crying out for someone to root for, along came Andre Agassi. Ivan Lendl was (and still is) my favorite tennis player ever, but I knew that his days at the top were close to being done, especially after the gut-wrenching twin Wimbledon finals losses in '87 and '88. I liked Andre Agassi for his game and not his looks or fashion sense. I was ambivalent about all that extraneous stuff.  To each his own and all that jazz.

As the years rolled on I watched Chang, Sampras, and Courier (in that order) win Grand Slams while Agassi came close but never sealed the deal.  I despaired for the fellow, feeling that it was my fate in life to root for almost-can causes. And then 1992 happened. After shunning Wimbledon for years, Agassi finally chucked his flamboyant, fluorescent gear for some whites and acquited himself quite well in 1991. The following year he came through and won it all beating Goran Ivanisevic and his (then) Wimbledon record 37 aces in the final (208 for the tournament). Agassi had broken through and, incredibly, it was on the least-expected of surfaces - grass. He had done what Lendl could never do.

It was at the press conference afterwards that he said something that changed the way I perceived top athletes and what drives them. A reporter asked him if he was as surprised as most other people were at winning Wimbledon. Agassi deadpanned, "I am not surprised that I won.  Why would I play a tournament if I did not think I could win it?" Conditioned as I was to years of hearing about how it was the path that was important and not the winning, it served as a jolt to my senses. Since that day I have never been satisfied with moral victories on the playing field. If you don't play to win, you don't play to the best of your abilities. No matter how overmatched I am, I have not lost till the final scoreline is set or the final wicket has fallen.

As the years went by Agassi went through a series of ups and downs (more downs than ups) and re-emerged in 1999 in his latest avatar - a suave, articulate, and sage senior citizen - quietly putting together a stirring bookend to his career, cementing his place in the pantheon of tennis greats. The punctuation on his life was set when he and Steffi Graf settled down together.

Which brings me to Andre Agassi's autobiography, titled Open. The book is exactly that - an open examination of his life and his times from his point of view. Starting from the time he was a young kid to the present day, Agassi takes us with him on a journey of self-discovery and awareness. Co-written with JR Moehringer, the narrative style is in the present tense and is meant as more than an effect. Agassi tells us what he was thinking at that point in time about the events unfolding around and to him. This has led to some wildly misinterpreted outpourings in the media as writers have taken his words as a representation of his current way of thinking. More on that a bit later.**

Open is a shockingly vivid and honest examination of Agassi by himself. Like all of us, he tells things as he perceives them but he is honest enough to admit that. So, if your memory of events differs from his, there is nothing wrong with that. Do you see what I mean?

At last I let my mind go where it's wanted to go. I can't stop it anymore. No longer asking politely, my mind is now forcibly spinning me into the past. And because my mind notes and records the slightest details, I see everything with bright, startling clarity, every setback, victory, rivalry, tantrum, paycheck, girlfriend, betrayal, reporter, wife, child, outfit, fan letter, grudge match, and crying jag. As if a second TV above me were showing highlights from the last twenty-nine years, it all flies past in a high-def whirl.

There are numerous revelations, most of them highlighted over the past few weeks by the media, but I am not here to list them or belabor the importance of those statements. Instead what I want to talk about are the two persons he admires above all - his trainer Gil Reyes and his wife Stefanie Graf (Steffi, he informs us, was a name picked by the German press and she does not like being called that!).

Andre's father was a man possessed with the thought of ensuring that one (or more) of his children lived his dream for him. Andre was lucky that he had a gift - to be able to spot a moving ball better than most mortals - that enabled him to survive the harshness of his father's training sessions. Not everyone can be so lucky. I sincerely believe that one of Agassi's main intentions with this book is to show people that even (superficially) successful people like him have had troubling pasts and to overcome them is hard but it can be done. In Gil Reyes, Agassi found the elder brother/father that he sought. No man engenders more respect from Agassi than Gil does in this book. Agassi-Graf named their first child Jaden Gil in honor of Gil and one of the tenderest moments in the book is when Agassi describes the moment when he told Gil about this.

For a long, long time Agassi admired Graf from afar. The icy Graf does not hate or dislike Agassi. No, in the worst scenario possible for him, she is indifferent about him. Open begins by talking about Agassi and his hatred of tennis but, along the way, transforms into the love story of Agassi and Graf. Even as Agassi's views on tennis and the world change, so does the reader get pulled into this aspect of his life.

Agassi never had a formal education beyond the 7th or 8th grade and he openly acknowledges that tennis gave him the security that most other people with his level of education lack. Therefore, his driving passion these days is his school for underprivileged children set in the middle of Las Vegas' worst neighborhood - the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy. Agassi's labor of love is the focal point of the last chapters of the autobiography and, by then, a more crystallized view of the man emerges. The book ends with a fairytale-ish finish but that highlights a very important change in the man - he does love tennis, after all.

**(Note: Since the book is written in the present tense, Agassi tells us what he is thinking about persons or events as they occur. Like all of us, his opinions change over time, and that is reflected in the book, too. Unfortunately for him, many writers picked up on the subtext from particular times and drew erroneous conclusions from it. Agassi did think that Pete Sampras would never make it in tennis. He did think that Sampras had other defects. But in time, Agassi changes his opinion of the only man who truly outclassed Agassi on the tennis court when he was in his prime. Agassi and Sampras are acknowledged to have had one of the best rivalries in tennis history, but hearing from Agassi you find out that after the initial years he never was Sampras' equal. Any wins he had against Sampras were against the grain as opposed to some deciphering of the Sampras code.

Our rivarly has been one of the lodestars of my career. Losing to Pete has caused me enormous pain, but in the long run it's also made me more resilient. If I'd beaten Pete more often, or if he had come along in a different generation, I'd have a better record, and I might go down as a better player, but I'd be less.

At the very end of Agassi's career he acknowledges that he has run into an opponent far more formidable than Sampras, a player he feels is "well on his way to being the best ever" - Roger Federer. Talking about the 2004 US Open final loss to Federer, Agassi says:

... he (Federer) goes to a place that I don't recognize. He finds a gear that other players simply don't have. He wins 7-1....We were dead even. Now, due to a tiebreak that made my jaw drop with admiration, the rout is on.

Walking to the net, I'm certain that I've lost to the better man, the Everest of the next generation. I pity the young players who will have to contend with him. I feel for the man who is fated to play Agassi to his Sampras. Though I don't mention Pete by name, I have him uppermost in my mind when I tell reporters: It's real simple. Most people have weaknesses. Federer has none.