INSIDE TENNIS: In your book Open there’s a special voice. You go inside, reveal a lot and let ‘er rip.
ANDRE AGASSI: Yeah, I just didn’t see an alternative. It’s not in my DNA.
IT: Everyone says, “Let’s face it — he just wrote it for the money.”
AA: I’m never going to minimize money, but what blows me out of the water is what I had to lose. My god, anybody that’s read the book understands that honesty.
IT: There’s a big arc in play here. Your dad’s family came across mountains on donkeys from the Soviet Union to Teheran. Your dad ends up in Chicago with 12 bucks in his pocket and now you’ve achieved…
AA: It’s hard to put that in perspective. I’m a roll-up-your-sleeves kind of person. My dad gave me that: discipline, intensity, being hard on myself.
IT: He had you hit 2,500 balls a day. He had an axe handle and a pistol. He shot hawks down from the sky. He knocked a truck driver out. You were just a kid. What did that feel like?
AA: It’s like some poor kid that has an abscessed tooth, but he’s never been to a dentist. So he wakes up every day thinking that that feeling is normal. You felt on edge, you internalized it all. Things scared you. Then all of a sudden that feeling blends into an overall sense that this isn’t the way it is.
IT: Then your dad shipped you off to Bollettieri’s. You were away from home. Was that even worse?
AA: It was worse because it felt like abandonment. There was no one to lead or guide me. All of a sudden everything familiar was ripped away. I still had the same absurdities, except now I had to embrace a whole new world. That’s where my rebellion started.
IT: When your co-author J.R. Moehringer heard your story, he immediately brushed up on his Freud — Civilization and Its Discontents, self-destruction theory and the like. Was your Mohawk, your long, painted fingernails a way to tell the world, “Enough, already!”
AA: It was a cry for help. It was desperate. It was also a nice little “F-U” to my dad. “I don’t get this abandonment thing. I can’t believe I’m here. I want to go home, but I can’t.” But the one thing I could choose every day was my rebellion.
IT: Rebellion as empowerment? You wrote that for all the people out there who “wake up in a life they don’t choose, I want them to find tools. I want them to feel to ownership, to choose their life, to attach new meanings to old tasks, because tomorrow can be what we want it to be.”
AA: That’s one of the things I want people to learn from this. I didn’t really have peace in my life until I chose tennis for myself. And when I chose it, all of a sudden I started to find a reason to do this. It was my choice. I could’ve walked away, but I didn’t. I find that to be such a common, such a powerful problem in the world. So many people are in lives they don’t want, but they somehow find tools to take ownership.
IT: And those tools are?
AA: It’s about new meanings. First of all, you change your attitude. Right? That’s the one thing you can control. And then you can find reasons for what you do. For example, my inspiration was others; being connected to something that was bigger than me. My school became a huge thing. It could be one’s family. Once I chose tennis and focused on the things I was connected to, all of a sudden it became mine. It was a powerful thing to watch myself get out of my own way. It’s all about bringing new meanings to old tasks. You can set powerful forces in motion.
IT: You said that someday you would sit down some and look an interviewer in the eye and tell them the unvarnished truth. So let me look you in the eye as I ask an unvarnished question. Have you ever used performance-enhancing drugs?
AA: No, no.
IT: No steroids?
AA: No, no, no, no. There’s 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 a 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 was over the years, it was never about screwing somebody else, it was always about my own struggles and demons: my own deal. Performance enhancers are fundamentally, just straight-out cheating. It’s a different cat who does that.
IT: So you’re 27, you get this letter that says you’ve been busted. You’re desperate. So you write a letter saying you ingested the meth by accident. But it was a lie. More recently, you offered a more nuanced reflection on lying. But most people just say, “Hey, 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. It’s an interesting question. A wedding vow is more of a pledge. You could contend it certainly is 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. There are a lot of things I’ve said out of confusion, out of exploration.
When somebody asks, “Do you love tennis?” 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 and days I hated it. My lies usually started around myself. And that was usually a result of confusion or a contradiction.
How do you express who you are when you don’t know who you are? So you’re left trying to say what’s true, but things end up not being true.
IT: Do you know about the 27 Club?
AA: No.
IT: All these talents, these musical geniuses — Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain, among others — became entwined in drugs and died at 27. You were 27 and desperate and had no one to confide in, so you winged it.
AA: For starters, 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 in drugs, the problem with it.
Would I do it again? No. And if I did do it again, I would be a lot clearer on what I was missing. I would choose much healthier ways. My wife didn’t even know I was doing it. The reason I refuse to answer how many times I did meth is that I can’t speak conclusively. It was a lot more than it should have been. But 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 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 — Nadal, Safin, Bruguera and Johansson, harshed you big-time. Even Federer was critical. He said, “There’s a dark cloud over our sport.”
AA: I think he’s 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. I don’t begrudge him because I’ve reacted a lot in my life and said a lot of inaccurate things.
IT: So 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 [Frenchman Richard Gasquet] tested positive for cocaine. He made a claim that it got in his system accidentally.
IT: From kissing that mysterious woman Pamela.
AA: This was supposed to come with a two-year suspension. But it came down to a little humanity…The report said he’s a man of integrity, we believe him. It was a performance inhibitor. Issue closed. We need to call it for what it was. I was hurting myself.
IT: You said there are two kinds of drugs — performance enhancers and recreational — and your contention is that people should be compassionate about recreational drugs. We should reach out, because people could have serious problems.
AA: Even the most scrutinizing governance body in sports, WADA, said [in Gasquet’s case] “Fair enough. Here’s a little understanding.”
IT: Martina Navratilova was very critical of you, saying that you were just like Roger Clemens. She’s one of our best athletes, yet some have said there’s a judgmental quality…
AA: Be careful because you know how it is when you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. I don’t know the demons that people have, what they’ve been through. I look at Martina and I see someone I’ve respected for years. Do I respect her reaction? No. [But] this book is also about forgiveness, it’s about learning to forgive yourself and when you really can do that, it puts you in a position to understand and forgive others. And that’s where I find myself in all of this. Life is too short to do that. If someone casts aspersions and judgments, it’s a choice they’re making. It’s not something that I live with.
IT: So don’t attach, let it be?
AA: Yeah, it’s fine to have thoughts on the merits of what somebody’s saying, but I try to take it at face value. The comparison to Clemens: the judgment, the intention, the desire to hurt or be out there. This is her choice and if she’s going to live seeing things that way, I have to be strong enough to allow that to be.
IT: She added that although you were owning-up to it all, it was too late.
AA: It’s never too late. Should I have told it earlier? I should have owned up straight away, she’s 100 percent right. I should never have lied, but this isn’t something you give out in a press release or is covered in an article. This is something that’s one shade in a body of work that happens to be my life. And had I been suspended, it would have been three months off, and I just might have been liberated in a huge way that could have made a huge difference. Or, as a result, maybe my school would have never been built and maybe these thousands of lives wouldn’t have been changed. So there’s no question — she’s right. I shouldn’t have done that.
IT: You poignantly talked about how you’ve been cheered and booed in stadiums across the world, but there’s nothing worse than being booed by yourself in those intimate 10 minutes when you’re lying there in bed just before you go to sleep. These days, with all the hullabaloo, all the criticism, what do you think in those 10 minutes?
AA: I’m really proud. I’m proud of my life. I’m not proud of a lot of things I’ve done. I’m really proud of this book.
IT: Why?
AA: Because I’ve gone through it. I’ve lived it. I’ve been at some real depths. I’ve grown to understand myself. I look around and see the people and the pillars of my life who are still there, the relationships I’ve built. I’m ultimately proud of who it is I am because I finally know who I am. At 39 years old — three years removed from retirement — I’ve spent this time looking at myself. I’m pretty darn comfortable. I’ve communicated that [in the book] because I believe that there is a real power. But beyond that, when I go to sleep at night, I find myself going, “You know, this is going to help so many people I’ll never meet. This is going to inspire so many people that I’ll never know. Life is short.”
IT: So what about Serena at the U.S. Open? At the edge of a tight match she got a tough call and flipped out.
AA: I certainly can identify with that. I understand getting mad. I’ve gotten mad many, many times. But crossing the line and actually threatening is something I don’t identify with. But like any mistake, it’s not the mistake, it’s what you do with it. Any point can be our finest or our darkest. It’s our choice. So I would hold her more accountable to how she handled and continues to handle the mistake.
IT: She began with a perplexing press conference. Then there was a weak explanation before she came out with a fairly decent apology. But since then there hasn’t been much.
AA: Yeah, I would react to that mistake differently if I were her.
IT: When Sampras went into the Hall of Fame, he gave a poignant, very ‘Pete-like’ speech, saying that he was “just a tennis player — nothing more, nothing less.” When you’re up at that podium, who do you say you are?
AA: I’m a man of process and I will be different tomorrow than I am today, because I’ll be more refined. I’ll be clearer. Tennis was never that for me. Tennis was what I found myself in, what I used to explore, to grow and understand myself.
IT: Nelson Mandela said that there is clarity and nobility in being a journeyer.
AA: It’s like we’re all swimming to Hawaii and nobody’s going to make it — some might get further. So if you know we’re not going to make it, the question is what is life really about then? It has to be about how you choose to go about it, regardless of your success or failures, regardless of the intersections, there has to be a process and a connection that you have with the journey. That’s how I see it, so whatever this book means, I’ve connected to it. I’ve poured myself in it, and it’s a gift, I believe, I’m giving. Every journey is hugely important. Just because Mandela’s journey was so extraordinary doesn’t mean that ours has less value. He says that no journey is unimportant. It’s not just a beautiful message, it’s a reality.
IT: It’s been said that your life has been like a fairy tale. There was that fabled ball machine your dad imposed on you that you called “the dragon.” Bollettieri’s was a prison, a kind of dungeon. You could say your guide, Gil Reyes, was a Merlin-like wiz and he felt you were Lancelot. The two of you called the Roland Garros stadium “the monster” and in the end you did get the princess — Steffi Graf.
AA: That’s a form of storytelling. It’s finding the strand, the narrative in your life, the common places that are true. There’s a hero’s journey in it. There’s an authenticity to the depths of the soul — through the good and bad times, confusion.
IT: Gil said you had to be part engineer, part mathematician part artist, part…
AA: Mystic. It’s an intangible. It’s an ability to sense how somebody is feeling so that you ask just enough of them to get better, without asking so much that it comes with a cost.
IT: You’ve long been looked up to and have been a leader, even an idol to some. What’s the role of heroes in society? Do we need them?
AA: They’re part of the human experience. We need them. It’s like the rankings. You’re always measured with those who are better, and heroes are inspirational figures. But they’re also role models who teach you what to do and what not to do. A hero teaches you that it can happen, but it’s not what you think it is. You know what I mean? They’re important figures and important to our learning ability.
IT: So what’s the most fun part of this grueling book tour you’re on?
AA: Here’s what surprised me, and this is important, so you should communicate this. When somebody walks up for me to sign a book, before they say a word, I can tell you if they’ve read the book.
IT: Wow, just by their expression?
AA: By their complete aura. Because all of a sudden, they know me the way others don’t. I can tell by looking at them.
IT: In the book, we saw a portrait of a small, very pained boy who was struggling so desperately, but hung in there and just kept returning serve and going and going and fell to the lowest of low points, but was very adept at gathering an incredible support system, Gil in particular off-court and Brad on-court, and then he used his tools to win the tournament that was most important to him [Roland Garros] and was very clever and determined in attracting a transformative woman. So the confused boy went on to become a man who wisely and tirelessly used these tools to try and…
AA: Try to help people, man. You know I’m really freaking proud of it, proud of the conclusions I’ve come to. What I’m proud about is what I fight for every day.
IT: You use this astounding phrase — “I fight for peace” — which I find incredible. In four words there’s such a striking contradiction. Do you find peace most days?
AA: Most days I win. But you have to fight. It’s work to keep your focus in a cluttered world.
Part II of the interview will appear in our March issue.
