It’s the very reason why Jim Bouton was shunned by many of his fellow Major Leaguers when he penned the myth-shattering “Ball Four” in 1970. The ex-Yankee had violated that long-standing unwritten locker room code: “What you see here, what you say here, what you do here, stays here.”
Whether they admit it or not, it’s a code most professional tennis players still live by today. And they don’t take it kindly when you betray it. Take Vince Spadea and his 2006 book “Break Point! The Secret Life of a Pro Tennis Player.” More than a few of his baselining brethren bristled upon its release, including James Blake.
“It’s something that I don’t understand. I would never do it,” said Blake, who the following year published a book of his own, “Breaking Back: How I Lost Everything and Won Back My Life.” “I understand if you want to tell your story, tell anything that’s happened in your life, but I would never bring other guys into it…We all know when there’s a reporter in the locker room.”
Added Blake, “We really do seem to have almost like a traveling collegial relationship, where we’re all friends, we all get along. It’s like a traveling office, where what happens on the road, we can talk about in the locker room, we can talk about it wherever. It really doesn’t have any place in a book.”
But while some have taken offense to portions of Andre Agassi’s much-acclaimed autobiography, “Open,” 14-time Slam champ Pete Sampras among them (Sampras said he was “a little surprised and a little disappointed”), for the most part, Agassi has been given the benefit of the doubt. At the SAP Open in San Jose, Andy Roddick said he wasn’t at all surprised by Agassi’s candor.
“No. I wasn’t,” he told Inside Tennis. “I feel like that was the tone for his whole book. I’ve talked to Andre a lot since the book came out because, selfishly, I wanted to hear it also. I really do think his whole message is that there are a lot of people who are in a rough place, and his story is almost one of vengeance, one of being able to come back from the ultimate depths. I mean crystal meth is a serious thing. To be able to come back from that and be No. 1, there’s an uplifting story there.”
As for Agassi’s somewhat shocking revelation that he hates tennis, Roddick’s not necessarily buying in.
“At eight and nine years old, when you’re training like you’re a professional already, that’s what you talk about at dinner, that’s what you talk about at breakfast, there’s probably a certain amount of animosity toward it,” Roddick explained. “But I don’t believe that Andre hates tennis. I’m sure when he was younger, at times he probably hated it. As a whole, I have a hard time believing that he hates it. But as an eight and nine-year-old, when you’re already training like a professional, that’s a big ask and could certainly create a variety of emotions, some which are probably very negative.”
