I must say, I never did have a taste for autobiographies – people who write them tend to be unforgiving and critical, or rewrite their own revisionist history. Browsing in Borders, I came across Andre Agassi’s autobiography. While it suffers from the same flaws, his memoir was inspiring nonetheless.
I’ve never been much of a tennis fan, but amongst those tennis players I really admire, two of them stand out the most – Roger Federer, for being the greatest tennis player the world has ever seen and for being an utter machine on the courts, and Andre Agassi, for his passion.
Agassi’s autobiography is focused on his tennis career (well, what else?), but captured within his words is his motivation for playing, his dedication to a sport he never really loved, his commitment to get the best he could out of his body, and his determination to quit the sport on his own terms, not because someone asked him to.
I only managed to catch the last 50 pages or so, by which time he had already formulated his plan for building a school for underprivileged children, and that became his motivation to keep on playing, because like he said, every ball he continued to play meant an extra dollar for his school. His school. It would be easy to dismiss his efforts at giving as trivial or showy, but I think it demonstrates his willingness to give. It became his driving passion and reason for playing a sport he hated.
His dedication to his sport saw him tweaking his gym routine constantly for optimum output, undergoing cortisone shots at a time when little was known about the side effects, and dragging himself from court to court despite crippling back injuries (after one match he couldn’t make the distance from the court to the car, which was some distance away, and had to lie down while someone went to get the car). All this, despite the fact that he never liked tennis, playing at first because of his father’s coercion, then because he liked winning. I think it says a lot that even though he hated it to its core (he and Steffi Graf both swore to not encourage their children to play tennis) he still persevered, because of what he had riding on it.
He quit tennis at a time when his contemporaries like Pete Sampras had already retired, stopping because his body called it a day, not because of any other external influence. Reporters had been asking him persistently if he had considered quitting, and his reply was that he did not. He intended to play for as long as he could, for as long as his body could give. When he did quit, it was because his body could give no more.
More than that, he was a true sportsman. He understood that losing teaches more than winning, and that his losses to Pete Sampras in major competitions probably kept him going in his career because of the experiences gained. He understood that sometimes to get the best performance out of yourself, you have to let go of intellect and rely on instinct. Though this lesson had been repeated many times over by various people, including his coaches, the person who really brought the message across was Steffi Graf, his wife. He understood that playing for the sake of playing, without the pressure of expectation, can sometimes be more powerful than the will to win.
Agassi has always been a player I admire because of his passion and dedication. He is by no means perfect – witness his anger management issues, and how he slams Pete Sampras (who he called uninspiring) and Brooke Shields (his first wife). But these flaws do not mar the person that he is – generous, passionate and dedicated. There is so much I wish I could say about how eye-opening his book was, but for now, I will just leave it at that.
