‘A man of contradictions’ goes nowhere near to accounting for Andre Agassi. Perceived as an obnoxious lightweight who couldn’t decide whether he was serious or not about his sport, he became, in the long run, in 2003, the oldest man ever (at 33) to hold the number 1 spot in the world rankings. In 1998, he staged the biggest comeback that had ever happened: from 141st to 6th, in a single year. At the start of 1999, the British Davis Cup captain David Lloyd flatly declared, ‘He couldn’t beat my mum now. He’s finished.’ Agassi then went on to win the French Open and the US Open in 1999, and the Australian Open the following year. The effort was heroic. The achievement was extremely improbable. In fact, though, one might see Agassi’s amazing mid-career comeback as a magnified version of what happened in so many of his matches. Win two sets easily, then drop the third and fourth spectacularly, and then - having made sure you’ve drawn all the crowd’s anxiety to your cause (‘Come on, Andre! Come on, Andre! We love you, Andre! It can’t be all over!’) - fight back and win by 10 games to 8 in a gut-buckling fifth. But it was no less remarkable for that. In July 1999, therefore, he was not only on glorious form; it was a perfect mid-point in his Wimbledon career. Seven years earlier, he had become champion - in a field that still included John McEnroe, Stefan Edberg, Ivan Lendl and Boris Becker. A full seven years later, Agassi would finally retire from Wimbledon, when beaten in the third round by Rafael Nadal - a man who was so far his junior that he was, literally, in the womb when the 16-year-old Andre Agassi turned professional in May 1986.
Didn’t Andre Agassi present a far greater (and more interesting) challenge to sports journalism than Pete Sampras? So why was he so hard, or unrewarding, to write about? Well, it didn’t help, probably, that his entire motivation in life seemed to be to prove everybody wrong, all the time. You might also argue that the unconventional, not to say amorphous, shape of Agassi’s tennis career was impossible to assess while it was still going on: his roller-coaster form was probably a truly tiresome phenomenon to observe at close hand. But if it was pointless to try, I’m sure he very much wanted it that way. He often skipped press conferences, preferring to pay the tiddly fine instead. Asked once at a Melbourne press conference to distinguish the latest comeback from the one before, he said, smilingly but unhelpfully: ‘Well, that was my new, new attitude. This is my new, new, new attitude.’ He has now been paid $5 million by a New York publisher to write his memoirs - a fact that suggests he hasn’t lost the knack of getting top dollar ( John McEnroe got a measly one million for his excellent book Serious). It’s just a bit worrying that no one in publishing has noticed Andre Agassi’s careerlong propensity for creating false expectations (‘He’s going to win!’/‘He’s going to lose!’/‘He’s going to write his memoirs!’), and then doing his utmost to defy them.
However, the big issue Agassi raises most uncomfortably for sports journalism is that of where sport meets entertainment. It is, you see, the main tenet of sports journalism that spectator sport is never to be confused with other spectator activities; other ways of paying professionals (actors, circus folk, rock musicians) to entertain you by doing what they’re good at. For myself, sometimes I can see the distinction quite clearly, and I can even uphold it with gusto; at other times, something flips in my brain and the distinction just melts away, exposing sport as quite monstrously bogus in how seriously it takes itself. The vital difference between sport and theatre, or sport and opera, of course, is that sport is unwritten; it happens for real. No authorial brain devises it before it takes place. In the world of sport, if Konstantin shoots himself in the last minute of extra time, no one has told him to, and it gets listed under the heading of unforced error. But for all this absolute spontaneity on the field of play, the relationship between sport and ‘reality’ is obviously a bit tenuous, when you think about it. Wimbledon finals do not simply break out when two terribly well-matched young people can’t suppress their competitive yearnings any longer. Sport is staged - at great expense, with great expertise, and at great profit, too. Spectators book their seats months in advance. And at home afterwards, the handsomely rewarded players pause only to light the gas with the top £50 note (from a handy foot-high stack of £50 notes) before turning the page on the calendar and looking forward to next week’s tournament, excitedly humming that great showbiz curtainraiser from Kiss Me, Kate, ‘Another op’nin’, another show!/In Philly, Boston or Baltimo’!/A chance for stage folks to say hello!/Another op’nin’ of another show!’
The money thing is so tricky. No one would want the Wimbledon champion to be asked, after his victory, in front of the crowd, whether he has specific plans for the big cheque (new curtains, that kind of thing), or even, ‘So, where will you be playing next week?’ It would break a spell. But it is nevertheless quite strange that no one involved in sport ever acknowledges the truth of the matter: that without the existence of a paying public, professional sport would not take place. There is somehow an accepted belief that all these matches, races, heats, games, rounds, bouts, legs, chukkas, rallies, regattas and rubbers just happen because they have to. Sport occurs by some imperative law of nature, for its own sake, in a pure, self-sustaining and perpetual world of competition - a world to which avid spectators may be admitted, incidentally, but only if they are prepared to fight for the privilege, and don’t demand too much by way of value for money. What sustains this idea is the genuine earnestness of the players. They really care whether they win or lose. It is their life. They put themselves on the line for reasons of personal pride. If they notice the adulation of the crowd at all, they consider it their sportsmanly duty not to let it distract them from the job in hand. As for the issue of the prize money - well, we are led to believe that any sum involved is a mere token. Look at a triumphant Wimbledon finalist and you certainly don’t see a man thinking (or not primarily), ‘Oh thank God. This means I don’t have to sell the car.’
A similar topsy-turvydom characterises the relationship between sport and sports journalism. Sport takes the line that it’s doing the media a huge favour by letting them in. The football grounds give you a nasty room to work in, and shout at you if you go the wrong way looking for the Ladies, or sit at the wrong sort of table in the canteen. Football managers give press conferences with extremely bad grace. The press is a nuisance that is barely tolerated - but no one objects that the boot is on the other foot;that without the keen and extensive publicity that professional sport receives from newspapers and other media, it would simply not exist. Again, it is the sheer seriousness with which the players take their job that elevates the enterprise. I wonder if this is why the rhetoric of sporting ‘greatness’ sticks in my craw as much as it does. True, the poetic tribute to an athlete has a great tradition, and can be stirring when it’s well done. Two and a half thousand years ago, the great lyric poet Pindar (518-438 BC) was hymning the heroes who had won mule-cart races at the ancient games - and although we now don’t know anything else about those garlanded winners, Pindar’s words are still very lovely to read. ‘Great deeds give choice of many tales,’ he wrote in his ‘Pythian IX’ (‘For Telesikrates of Kyrene, Winner of the Race in Armour’ - translated by Maurice Bowra). ‘Choose a slight tale, enrich it large, and then/Let wise men listen!’ But it just seems to me that there’s an element of credulousness in celebrating the greatness of these chaps, who are themselves the cat’s paws of the system. Every time a journalist enriches a tale of ‘great deeds’ - deeds done quite unnecessarily, of course; and in artificially created conditions, for the profit of others - it sends the message to the sports organisers that their secret is safe, that no one will ever find them out.
Against this background, it’s not surprising that Andre Agassi was not a darling of the press - or not until the second, humbler half of his career, when the screaming had died down and he was wearing a plain white sleeveless woolly. How do you argue that sport is not a branch of entertainment when it’s quite clear that thousands of people would pay good money just to watch this man knock a ball
against a door? How do you insist it’s not about money when he owns a customised Boeing 727? Asked once what he liked about Agassi, the famously laconic Sampras said, ‘I like the way he travels’ (referring to the jet).’This child of Las Vegas’ was how the bbc’s Wimbledon commentators regularly described Agassi. ‘He’s a star, the boy,’ said Des Lynam in 1991, just before Agassi’s quarter-final against David Wheaton. ‘What a showman,’ everyone said, with a giveaway wrinkle of the nose. Disregarding the hoo-ha is something a sports writer is trained to do, because hoo-ha is irrelevant to the serious matter of bat and ball. But this was the problem with Agassi. You couldn’t extract him from the hoo-ha, and you certainly couldn’t take the hoo-ha out of him.
Why was he more popular with the crowds than Sampras? Was it because he was a shallow character with a large portfolio of advertising deals? The reason was actually a bit more respectable than that. What pleased the crowds was his miraculously quick and deep return of serve, which meant that ( just in time) he single-handedly rescued men’s tennis from being a monotonous display of one-sided power serving from a new breed of faceless middle Europeans who didn’t appeal to anybody and who wore unpleasant socks. All right, the claim ‘he rescued men’s tennis’ may be a bit of an over-statement; and the big servers didn’t all have unpleasant socks; and all right, I know I also liked the way Agassi’s shirt was cunningly cut short at the front so that it showed his hairy torso when he served. However, when I close my eyes I can picture him in the old ponytail days, standing behind the baseline, looking brave and small (at 5’11”, he is shorter than a lot of the top players), and a bit worried and decidedly pigeon-toed. He frowns a bit. The crowd falls silent. He looks like a waif. At the other end, a man twelve feet tall with feet the size of doormats (and strange hosiery) winds himself up to launch a ball at 150 miles per hour, which goes faster than the human eye can see it.
Whap. Basically this is like watching a person catch bullets between his teeth. Except that Agassi returns the bullet! With a lightning reflex whip of the wrist, he flips the ball straight down the line, or whizzes it across the court, stranding the enormous, Neanderthal server midstride as he lumbers to the net. Does a crowd like to see this? Of course it bloody does. The ability to catch the ball on the rise and whack it back before anyone knew what was happening was what made Andre Agassi so popular with tennis fans from his very first appearance on the scene. The appeal was atavistic. It was David v Goliath. It was standing up to the big bully with the thick accent and the duelling scar. And above all, it was keeping the ball in play, for heaven’s sake, which meant there was a chance some actual tennis might ensue. For all these reasons, plus the furry tum, beyond anything else you can see on a court, it made you cheer, ‘Hooray!’
All the famous contrasts to Sampras doubtless show Sampras as the superior being, sportsman-wise. Agassi loved to talk and analyse; Sampras’s favourite line in literature was supposed to be ‘Don’t ever tell anybody anything’ from The Catcher in the Rye. Andre was beloved by the crowd; Sampras was once asked whether he might ever drop his Borg-like cool, and he observed, ‘It’s worked so far.’ Sampras served; Agassi returned. Sampras had the greatest forehand; Agassi’s best shot was the backhand. Sampras had beautiful running shots; Agassi usually preferred to hit the ball with both feet firmly on the ground. In that 1999 final, Sampras dived for volleys twice, scraping his forearm quite badly in the process. Once it worked and once it didn’t, but the abiding memory is of Andre’s stunned, blank disbelief that such a brilliant drop shot could be reached. Andre never dived, did he? I can’t remember him doing it. His movements were never so extravagant. He hardly seemed even to reach very far - all his shots took place quite near his body, neat and small and tight. In a joint profile of both players in the New York Times in 1995, Sampras rather meanly told the writer Peter de Jonge that Andre ‘told me that if he ever dove for a ball, he’d look like a fool’.
But the main difference between them, always acknowledged by Agassi, was this huge psychological contrast: Pete Sampras knew he was good, while Andre Agassi was a mass of self-doubt. And again, crowds sensed this, and responded to it. Did it have a lot to do with their respective childhoods, you ask. Well, I’m hardly qualified to say, but I would suggest that if psychologists were hoping for a field day, they’d be disappointed here, if only because it’s all so clear and straightforward. Sam Sampras, Pete’s father, always took the view, ‘Whatever makes Pete happy makes his mother and me happy.’ And whenever I read that, it makes me sniff. The nightmarish Mike Agassi, on the other hand - who had started training Andre’s hand-eye coordination in the cot, and who drove away Andre’s older sister Rita with his appalling, trouble-making tennis-parent ways - greeted his 22-year-old son back from his Wimbledon triumph in 1992 with the barked question, ‘Why did you lose the fourth set?’ What chance did poor Andre have? ‘My father put a lot of pressure on me to not accept losing,’ Agassi said on cbs’s 60 Minutes in 1995. ‘I never felt pressure to win. I felt pressured just to not accept losing.’ As for the difference between him and Sampras, he said, ‘The one thing that Pete has over me - or I shouldn’t say over me - that I wish I had - is such a simple approach and raw belief that he is just better than everybody. With me, it’s different. Even at the level of number one…I still could convince myself that, Geez, maybe I’m just not as good as I think I am.’
It is probably clear from all this that I loved Andre Agassi. From start to finish, I knew I was being quite cynically taken in by something that wasn’t strictly tennis-related, but I didn’t care. ‘Come on, Andre!’ I yelled. His propensity for dropping sets at key moments simply made his matches more dramatic; the sense of a man conducting a desperate internal psychodrama made every match a drainingly cathartic experience (except when it inexplicably didn’t). His unauthorised biographer Paul Bauman, in his 1997 book Agassi and Ecstasy, has a convincing explanation for some of those strange not-playing-any-more stretches in Agassi’s matches: that if you deliberately don’t play, you can tell yourself you weren’t really beaten. This is the sort of immature and unprofessional attitude to one’s sport that can really wear out the patience of the people paid to write about you. You fight your way to a quarterfinal and then you piss it away? Why? The word ‘tanking’ comes up all the time in accounts of Agassi. I thought it might have connotations of chucking a game, but it seems to mean only losing when you shouldn’t - which, I have to say, makes other people’s annoyance with him for doing it all the more interesting. Whose business was it, besides his own, if he lost matches that appeared to be in the bag? Well, it seems as if it was everybody’s. Early in his career, Agassi caught the attention of the American sports writer John Feinstein, who was then writing his book Hard Courts (1991). ‘He has become the most blatant tank artist in the game,’ Feinstein wrote. In 1988, Agassi had infuriated John McEnroe by tanking; by dropping a set against him in a semi-final in Los Angeles. McEnroe called it ‘insulting, immature, a cop-out’.
I would say that Agassi’s whole career hinged this way and that on how he handled the flight or fight question. As a kid, he was always threatening to quit; as a young man on the tour he swore and spat at umpires; later, he was forever being fined for skipping press conferences and getting the hell out of there (by large private jet, with ‘Air Agassi’ on the tail fin). He pulled out of tournaments at the last minute. ‘I don’t have to do this,’ was the obvious feeling behind it. He was famously addicted to junk food, and memorably quipped, ‘You can never beat anyone too badly or go too far for a Taco Bell.’ He dressed like a rebel, but was a born-again Christian. It is fascinating to me that his one championship win at Wimbledon should have been against Goran Ivanišević, a man whose mental well-being was even more visibly on the line than Agassi’s own, but who was at the other end of the scale in his commitment to the game. When Ivanišević lost to Sampras in the final in 1998 (he had lost to him in 1994 as well), his despair was Miltonic. Instead of playing the role of plucky runner-up, he sat
on his chair with a towel over his head for a very, very long time. Asked afterwards if he would be cheering Croatia in the World Cup, he said, ‘I cannot cheer anybody now. I go kill myself.’ By contrast, when Agassi was asked after his Wimbledon win whether his kneeling down in thanks had been a deliberate (or even rehearsed) gesture to remind the crowds of Bjorn Borg, he was so insulted he said, ‘If I find myself having to defend that, I’ll leave the game.’
But by July 4, 1999, it seemed that the fight-or-flight question had been resolved in Andre Agassi. He had evidently decided to fight, after all. You might say this was his new, new, new, new, new, new attitude - and for once, you could believe it. In his personal life, divorce from Brooke Shields was safely behind him. The hair was gone. The clothes were conventional. Brad Gilbert - famous for preaching the philosophy of ‘winning ugly’ - had been Agassi’s coach for five years, and their relationship was surprisingly firm considering how much unattractive losing Agassi had done under his guidance, especially in 1997-98. Gilbert’s coaching is often contrasted with that which Sampras received first from Tim Gullikson (who died from a brain tumour in 1996) and then from Paul Annacone. While Sampras appreciated minimum intervention from his coaches, preferring to play instinctively and to practise in virtual silence, Agassi went on court with his head brimming with a zillion strategic instructions implanted directly from ‘the best brain in tennis’. Gilbert’s combative credo is that you must force your opponents to play ‘shots they don’t like from positions they don’t want’. And by all accounts, he is not a man who keeps his ideas to himself. Sampras told the New York Times in 1995 that he could never work with Gilbert because, ‘I couldn’t take all that talking, discussing every angle, every shot. Whenever we used to practise together, I’d say, “Brad, would you just shut the fuck up for 30 minutes?”’