After a year blighted by family illness, loss of form and injury, the comeback king is ready to do it all again. As he prepares to defend his Australian Open title in what could be his last season, Andre Agassi talks to Tim Adams
Sitting opposite Andre Agassi you notice first something about his eyes. His father saw it, too, when his son was only a few days old. It looked to him then like a special kind of alertness, and Mike Agassi, the tennis coach at the Tropicana Casino in Las Vegas, encouraged that apparent quickness in his baby’s attention, hung a tennis ball above his crib and let him bat it back and forth all day with his hand. In the 30 years since, those eyes have studied intently the flight of several million tennis balls, and they now seem to possess an almost supernatural acuity. While Agassi talks, his eyes constantly interrogate you, intensely curious for stress and nuance. They are all you really see.
In a penthouse hotel bar in Lyon, where he is playing in a satellite tournament, otherwise slight and unremarkable in a neat grey T-shirt and washed-out jeans, he is looking back unblinking on a year that has been made all the more difficult by the extraordinary triumphant one which preceded it.
For a variety of reasons, he says, he has ”lost his focus”, and the literal implication of that clich seems to trouble him. He has taken his eye off the ball, and for Agassi, these days, that inattention has an almost sacrilegious quality. ”It’s been a year that has been physically impairing, and draining, really, and that takes you down a level. It’s been a difficult year, emotionally and mentally and physically and as a result I feel very far off where I was,” he says, a little wearily. ”Your experience helps speed up the process [of recovery] a lot but you have always to analyse, you know: where is my game? Do I have the ability to still do it?”
This time last year, a couple of months before his 30th birthday, Agassi was doing it better than ever, at the peak of an extraordinary resurgence, a comeback unprecedented in modern tennis. Having slipped at one time to 141st in the world, and having been on the verge of quitting, he had rebuilt his game and his life to reach the final of the previous three Grand Slams, winning two, including his emotional triumph in Paris where he completed his full set of the major tournaments, a unique achievement among his generation. He had finished the season as world number one and he was preparing for the Australian Open where he would again eclipse his nemesis, Pete Sampras, with faultless, instinctive tennis.
By the time Agassi got to Zimbabwe in early February, John McEnroe, his Davis Cup captain, watching him practise (shirtless, of course) was awed by how hard he was hitting the ball. No one, he observed, had ever struck it earlier, or more sweetly. Such perfection, as Agassi knows better than most, can only ever be fleeting, however, and a couple of days later, after he had won his second match in Harare’s dry heat and thin air, still jet-lagged after a 30-hour flight from Melbourne, he was doubled over and washed up, vomiting into a flowerpot at courtside. He went home under medical supervision, and his confidence and his fitness and his game, he insists, have still not quite recovered.
”That’s not an opinion,” he says. ”All you have to do is look at the results. I’ve had a couple of semis since, and that’s it.”
Throughout his career, Agassi has dealt only in extremes. ”When I’m in the zone,” he says, ”I go hard,” but that intensity extracts a toll. As a baseliner, and moreover one who, at 1,78m, lacks the imposing physical stature of most of the players on the tour, Agassi puts his body under absolute strain to compete (Bjorn Borg, the only other baseline player in recent decades to achieve his level of success, retired from competitive tennis at 26). And the vulnerability of his highly strung frame is more than matched by his apparent emotional rawness: his heart constantly competes for space with the indentured Nike swoosh on his sleeve.
Agassi’s dip in form this time around has been exacerbated not only by a succession of injuries but also by the devastating news in the summer that both his mother and his sister, Tammee, were suffering from breast cancer. It has, he says, ever since, been far too easy to separate tennis from the rest of his life: ”Because you have no question where you want to put your energies.”
Although he has been trying to spend as much time as he can with his family he withdrew from the defence of his Olympic title he has not, at this stage in his career, felt able to take a substantial break from the game: ”I can’t afford to take months off,” he says. ”If I did that I could never come back. I try instead to balance it. But it is hard to compete while you are still consumed with thoughts of ‘where am I?”’ Still, he says, philosophically, ”I’ve taken some time away, and all things considered, my family is doing well.”
There are few sports that so relentlessly expose the individual to psychological scrutiny as tennis, and Agassi’s personal rites of passage over the 15 years since he turned professional have been the most vivid of its spectacles.
He refers to the game, more often than not, in abstract, metaphysical terms, presumably because it has always meant so much more to him than simply hitting the balls. ”You don’t know anything else when you start playing before you can remember,” he explains, with a kind of sadness, of his growing up on court. ”I did not know life away from it. It’s kind of like a tortured soul, you know, you have a choice but you don’t have a choice. There are times when you look forward to quitting and times when you don’t imagine ever possibly doing anything different.”
It is the presentation of this internal drama, that has, in the past decade or so, made Agassi among the most compelling of all sports stars, an archetypal figure for our neurotic and solipsistic times. No tennis player in that period has seemed so at odds with his gifts, or so questioning of his purpose. Even now, having achieved much of what he set out to achieve, when he talks about tennis it is as if, at times, you are listening to Hamlet quibble with mortality. ”At the end of the day I need to do it or not do it,” Agassi says at one point, ”that has always been the question for me. The question of not doing this thing I was kind of born to do has been with me for 15 years. It’s been hard to ignore it at times. But I’ve had to think about it and answer it, get on the plane and do it again.”
As a younger man he seemed sometimes to be losing the battle with this question, intent on squandering his talent, the prodigy who could not grow up. He turned professional in a blaze of hype at 16, but by the age of 21 he seemed already strung out, eating badly, losing games for fun, his ever-changing appearance apparently reflecting his fragile self-esteem: first he shaved his head, then grew a tall mohican, then bleached it, before finally settling on a shaggy shoulder-length highlighted perm. At one tournament in Florida, when in his teens, he turned up on court wearing torn-off jeans, lipstick and eyeliner (the black socks and day-Glo shirts came later).
Looking back on that time, he reflects: ”Maybe I was rewarded too quickly. I came at a time when tennis needed somebody when tennis was looking for another American. I had so much notoriety before I had really accomplished great things. For me to be doing Nike commercials and Canon commercials and never winning a Grand Slam that left me with a bad rap all image and no substance.”
The trajectory of Agassi’s career to that point seemed like a blueprint for underachieving angst. At times, like many of the tennis stars of his generation, he seemed trapped in his father’s dreams rather than his own. Mike Agassi’s obsession with his son’s success set something of the pattern for the more infamous tennis dads who followed him. Like many of them, he was an immigrant to the United States, desperately looking to find a foothold for his family, and tennis seemed an ideal entre into the American dream.
Mike Agassi already knew all about fighting his way to the top: he represented his native Iran as a boxer in the Olympics at 17, and having emigrated to America was Golden Gloves champion of Chicago three years running. On the night he was to turn pro, however, like a character in a Hemingway short story, he escaped from Madison Square Garden through a bathroom window a few minutes before his debut bout was due to start. The next morning he bought a tennis racket, so the story goes, headed west, and never looked back.
Drifting to Las Vegas, he found himself work as a tennis pro and waiter in the casino hotels. He studied everything he could about the game: from laying courts to preparing equipment, and set himself up in business, stringing the rackets of the tennis and entertainment stars who passed through. Most of Mike Agassi’s considerable energies however, were directed toward coaching his four children.
The three eldest Rita, Philip and Tammee were all schooled daily using tennis serving machines that their father had adapted to fire balls at a higher than normal velocity, on the court he had laid himself in their backyard. By the time Andre was born in 1970, Mike Agassi had his methods honed: he taped a racket to his youngest son’s hand as soon as he could walk, had him serving over-arm on a full-sized court by the time he was two. ”It’s easy to tell people to bend their knees and get the racket back, there are 12 or 15 tips that all the pros know,” recalled Mike Agassi of his methods subsequently, ”but there’s nobody to teach you how to hit a ball at 200kph, say, or with no pace at all.”
Mike Agassi aimed to teach his son just that, and to set his sights high. When Jimmy Connors was in town, Agassi persuaded him to knock up with his four-year-old genius. Borg hit a few balls with him, too, and smiled, so the legend has it, at the way they were returned with interest. Andre’s sisters and brother were also developing into good players (Rita eventually achieved a top-100 ranking on the women’s tour) but little Andre seemed something special. By the age of 10 he was winning tournaments in California in the company of a highly charged group of young players that included Jim Courier, and Michael Chang and Pete Sampras (he was also praying for rain in the Nevada desert so he could be allowed to take a day off).
By the age of 13, when his father thought he could not teach him any more, he was packed off to Nick Bolletieri’s tennis boot camp in Florida. Three years later he had turned professional and two years after that he was ranked number three in the world, heir apparent as American ”personality” on the circuit to Connors and McEnroe.
Something at that time, though, always seemed to be missing from Agassi’s game. Though he did well in some tournaments, they were never the tournaments that really mattered, and as his confidence slipped, so did his ranking. (At one point Connors remarked of the over-exposed pretender: ”God, in our day at least we used to win.”) Agassi looked set to be another Jennifer Capriati, the driven child star who could not quite hack it with the grown-ups. Looking back he says his mind was never really on the court, at the time nor his heart. ”I thought I could just go out there and hit harder than the other guy.” he says. ”Players knew that even when I was playing well, if they could just hang in there long enough I would give the match away.”
The first turning point came at Wimbledon. It was the tournament that he so little expected to win with his game that for the first three years of his career he did not play it at all. In 1992, though, through sheer force of will, he overcame Goran Ivanisevic who, during the tournament, had broken all serving records and opened a debate as to whether there should be changes in the law to preserve the game as a spectacle. Ivanisevic produced more than a set’s worth of aces in the five-set final, but they were not enough to break Agassi’s unexpected resolve. Afterwards, when Agassi smiled paternally down at the trophy in the crook of his arm, it seemed like something more than a coming of age for him.
Recalling that moment, he relives its significance. ”Tennis has always been a vehicle for me to challenge myself and look into myself and become more of who it is I want to be,” he explains. ”And that moment was one of the greatest because when I look at it in photographs now, it is for me about so much more than tennis. Cradling the trophy was for me embracing what was not even a dream, but more fears and doubts and questions about losing three Grand Slam finals, and being told by more than just the media that this was something I couldn’t win. That is the kind of moment that makes sport great: it had so much more to it for me than the game of tennis.”
If in that moment, Agassi had proved to himself he could ”just do it” as his sponsor had long been expensively proclaiming it took a good deal more soul-searching to enable him to repeat the process with any degree of certainty.
In the years since Agassi has made himself something of an icon for the self-help industry, a case study for our times. At around the time of his Wimbledon triumph he put himself into therapy, and immersed himself in a customised new-age Christianity. When he was first on the circuit he would study the Bible with Michael Chang on rest days during tournaments. He would talk about his faith, too, with reporters, explain how it had changed his life; but for a while now, he has not felt the need ”to pick up God’s slack” in this way. (When I ask him about his religion, he replies only with a caveat: ”I’m not religious, but I have my faith. Religion to me is one guy telling some other guy how and what and when and why. But faith certainly is very important to me.”)
His friend Barbra Streisand, the high priestess of self-fulfilment, who sometimes jetted in to see his tournaments, once famously called him ”a Zen master” and certainly, when you ask him, he talks about his tennis as a kind of spiritual journey.
Agassi’s failings tended to increase, it seemed, at around the time of his brief, ill-fated marriage to Brooke Shields. He had first got together with Shields in 1993, though the relationship was conducted through daily faxes Shields was away on location in Africa in which each slowly bared their soul. Shields’s grandfather had been a US Open finalist, but they shared therapyspeak rather than on-court chemistry. When she returned they talked on the phone every day for six weeks, before they finally met each other at the end of the year.
At the time, Agassi told Esquire magazine that he and Shields were made for each other, a pair of damaged souls who could put each other back together: ”We’ve both gone through the same things,” he said, ever earnest. ”We were both celebrities young. We were both thrown into a strange lifestyle young, and we both got bad raps when we were young, so we have a similar history together. And I think both of us haven’t maximised our abilities. But that’s changing.”
These hopes for his relationship with Shields that it would resurrect his game slowly proved unfounded; however, they were married in 1997, by which time Agassi was at his lowest point in tennis terms, rarely playing, and mostly losing when he did. He won’t talk in public about that period now, except to say, smiling that, ”with my game, it was not easy for me to drop that far down, to be ranked at 140. I had to put in a great deal of hard work at the buffet table to achieve that, a great deal of work.”
Oddly, soon after he was married and with his career virtually on hold, Agassi apparently made the decision to finally commit himself to his first love. At 27, when some of his contemporaries were giving up on the game, he set himself the target of fulfilling his dim and distant potential, but this time for himself rather than for anyone else. Many sportsmen dream of comebacks, but only the greatest achieve them. The defining factor in this rehabilitation perhaps came from another, more straight forward relationship, one that also began in 1993. Brad Gilbert had through the Eighties been the player on tour who had done most to maximise a limited talent.
Gilbert delighted in proving that even the best could be beaten by application and mental toughness. (At the Masters tournament in 1986, John McEnroe told Gilbert: ”You don’t deserve to be on the same court as me! You are the worst, the fucking worst!” He went on to lose, and afterwards talked for the first time about retirement.) Gilbert wrote a book about his approach called Winning Ugly. Intrigued, and after having been dumped by his long-time coach Bolletieri (who took up with Boris Becker), Agassi asked Gilbert if he could help him out. ”Brad could not believe it,” Agassi observes of their differing approaches, ”when I told him that sometimes I’d decide where I was going to hit my serve during the ball toss. For Brad, that was unacceptable because he was the kind of player who would think about where he was going to hit the serve two weeks before the toss.” Above all, Gilbert forced Agassi to believe that he could become what he has become.
Watching Agassi train with his coach in Lyon, you can see how Gilbert has helped him to focus on every ball. One of the great pleasures of watching Agassi since his return to form has been to see him slowly unpick an opponent’s game, impose himself on a match.
It is perhaps no coincidence that having fallen back in love with the game, Agassi has also found love within it. He is not a man who gives up his secrets lightly, though, and when you ask him about Steffi Graf, the eyes immediately warn you off. Asked whether it has been easier for him to have a relationship with someone who understands as well as he does the pressures, he says curtly: ”I don’t think it’s necessary for a relationship to have that kind of professional understanding, but I think if you do, it’s an incredible asset.” In response to a question as to whether Graf helps him in preparation for games he observes only that ”I find myself very interested in what she thinks about a lot of things, and that includes tennis.”
I wonder, finally, if Graf’s decision to quit while still at the peak of the profession will have any influence on his own decision to eventually call it a day? ”No,” he says carefully. ”Every athlete is different. To compare it is to try to write the script before it is written, my career has not been normal, and I’m sure my retirement won’t be normal either.”
As he prepares for the defence of his Australian Open title starting on Monday, the question whether he should try to make this his last golden season seems to loom large for Agassi, though he won’t acknowledge it directly. His longevity as a tennis player has been brought into sharper focus by a number of things recently: first, there was the retirement last year of Jim Courier. Courier’s going, he says, ”did send signals, though more from an emotional standpoint. You know it gets tougher as you get older, emotionally growing up with a player, and having the same dreams and the same goals and just the same schedules, for that to be over for him, it leaves you feeling somewhat nostalgic, somewhat sad. And it does make me critically aware of my own situation.”
That awareness has perhaps been further heightened by a promotional campaign from the tennis authorities which has depicted himself and Pete Sampras, surveying the younger talent, and posing the question of succession. ”New balls, please,” runs the strapline. I wonder if there is any extra motivation, as there always seemed to be for say, Connors, to prove himself against the new kids on the block? Agassi laughs. ”I would probably consider it a great success never to be like Jimmy Connors in any respect whatsoever,” he says.
His generation, as he points out, has set a very difficult standard to follow, but he points to the fact that Gustavo Kuerten and Marat Safin in particular have come through this year, and he ”likes Lleyton Hewitt’s game” and suggests that, despite some anxiety among the powers that be about the absence, in particular, of a young American challenger, there is not a lot to worry about. ”You are talking about a sport that transcends the lines of life. One on one, man to man, you are talking about how what I do affects what you do and how you deal with that. There’s something fundamental there. And you are talking about something that people can play for a lifetime. So I’m not worried about tennis.”
Great tennis players have always needed great rivals to extend them, and in this sense both Agassi and Sampras seem grateful for the fact that the other has been around at the same time. When Agassi was thinking of quitting the game, Sampras expressed his hope that he would come back to challenge him. When he won the French Open in 1999, he received a telegram from Sampras welcoming him back into the fray.
Do they talk much away from the game? Agassi laughs at the idea. ”No, he’s a way different cat than I am,” he says. ”I think each of our worst nightmares would certainly be to wake up and be the other one.”
When I saw him, Agassi believed he would be ready to resume that special relationship at the Australian Open: ”It’s been a while since my mind was in a place where I could take in and use the expectations of the public,” he said. ”It hasn’t been about winning and losing over the years as about my desire to keep getting better. Between the practice court and the tournament, it hasn’t happened but I know it is only a matter of time.”
And when, later, the time comes for him to step away from the game, the only thing he has known, does he think he will know the right moment for that, too? ”I hope so,” he says. ”Certainly I’m more afraid about how it is at the end right now, than what happens after. But as soon as I think about how it’s going to end then I guess it’s over. In thinking about the end, the end is already there.” His eyes are flashing at the complexity of this prospect. ”What I hope,” he says, finally, ”is that the fight happens in a way that I am proud of.” In the meantime, you guess, all Andre Agassi really wants to focus his circuitous, exhilarating attention on, is the next ball, and then the one after that. This article first appeared in the Observer Sport Monthly