INSIDE TENNIS: Andre you noted that you’re a man that’s written a book called “Open” and that some day you would sit down some and look an interviewer in the eye and tell him or her the unvarnished truth. So let me look you in the eye and ask a straight unvarnished question. Have you ever used performance…
ANDRE AGASSI: No, no.
IT: No steroids?
AA: No, no, no, no. There is a huge distinction between the desire to cheat others and the self-infliction of hurting yourself. That was always my deal. My deal was always internal. My life wasn’t a lie. My life was constant pursuit of the truth. You asked me a straight question and I’ll give you a straight answer. But if you look at who I am over the years, it was never about screwing somebody else, it was always about my own struggles and my own demons and my own deal. Performance enhancers are fundamentally straight, just cheating. It’s a different cat that does that.
IT: So you’re 27, you get this letter that says, “Hey, you’ve been busted.” You’re desperate. You write a letter saying you ingested the drug by accident. But it was a lie. And more recently, you reflected on the whole notion of lying. But most people just say a “lie is a lie.”
AA: Let me ask you this. Is it a lie when you tell your first wife, “I do?”
IT: I know you said that and I thought about that. That’s a very interesting question. A wedding vow is more of a pledge, even you could contend a hope, and, of course in our culture, time and time again …
AA: But my point is – if you don’t know yourself – you believe it and you say it. And I’ve never known myself. There are a lot of things I’ve said out of confusion, out of exploration.
When somebody says,’ “Did you love tennis?” And you just had a match, where you accomplished something. I reserve the right to have those conflicts. I don’t qualify my conflicts. My book has been a reconciliation of my psyche. There were days I loved it, there were days I hated it. My lies usually started around myself. And that was usually a result of confusion and a contradiction.
How do you express who you are? When you don’t know who you are? So you are left trying to say what’s true, but things end up not being true.
IT: Do you know about the “the 27 Club?”
AA: No.
IT: All these brilliant talents, all these musical geniuses that became entwined in drugs – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones – died at age 27. So you were 27 and desperate and you had no one to confide in and you winged it …
AA: First of all, I was depressed and I didn’t know it. I didn’t even recognize it as such. Secondly, I was very alone and in a marriage I didn’t want to be in. So I needed some sort of escape, which is the hook, the problem with drugs.
So, would I do it again? No. If I would do it again, I would be a lot clearer on what I’m missing. I would choose much healthier ways. First of all, my wife didn’t even know I was doing it. The reason I refused to conclusively answer how many times I did meth – and it was a lot more than it should have been … But it wasn’t like it had its hooks, because I walked away. I can’t speak to the addiction. What I can speak to is depression and the tools people use to escape that feeling.
IT: Self-destruction was always a part of the picture.
AA: No question, I’ve always had that as part of my life.
IT: On the one hand, you skated. The ATP said, “You’re cool.” On the other hand, when your book came out, the Euros, in particular: Safin, Bruguera, Johansson, Nadal and even Roger hashed you big-time. How did you feel when Roger, our leading light, said, “There’s a dark cloud over our sport?”
AA: Well, I think he’s just wrong. I like Roger, but my experience is that “reacting” is never as good as “responding.” And he can’t possibly make a comment that “There’s a dark cloud” when he doesn’t have all the facts, when he doesn’t know what it is.
I can speak to the merits of what he’s saying. I don’t begrudge him because I’ve reacted a lot in my life and I’ve said a lot of things that were just inaccurate. I believe what he said is not accurate. It’s not the case. Do you want to discuss the merits of why that’s not the case?
IT: So you are saying there’s not a cloud over tennis because…
AA: [It was] 13 years ago? We were always a leader in sports and in protecting tennis from drug cheats. What I did was a performance inhibitor. Just recently we had a case where someone [Richard Gasquet] tested positive for a drug inhibitor, cocaine. He made a claim that it got in his system accidentally.
IT: From that mysterious woman Pamela …
AA: This was supposed to come with a two-year suspension. But it came down to a little humanity. I read the article. It was very clear. [The report said] he’s a man of integrity, we believe him. It was a performance inhibitor. Issue closed. So, if you want to talk about black eyes, let’s stick this in the framework. We need to call it for what it was. I was hurting myself. People might need help.
IT: You’ve contended that there are basically two kinds of drugs, performance enhancers and recreational drugs and your position was that people should be compassionate about recreational drugs. We should reach out to people. People could be having serious problems and there should be some humanity.
AA: Even in the most scrutinizing governance body of sports, WADA, said you know what [Gasquet] fair enough… here’s a little understanding.
