Ask the International Tennis Hall of Fame’s latest addition if all the sacrifice, all the hardship, was worth it and he’ll give you the short answer.
“Yes.”
In his 2009 bio “Open,” Andre Agassi candidly revealed a lonely, isolated upbringing in which his father, a hard-nosed former Olympic boxer from Iran who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s, infamously dangled a tennis ball over his crib and eventually forced him to hit 2,500 tennis balls a day, 17,500 a week. Mike Agassi’s brutally simplistic mantra was “put a blister on the other guy’s brain,” and he told his son: “You’re going to be No. 1 in the world. You’re going to make lots of money. That’s the plan and that’s the end of it.”
But as he reflected on his induction into the hallowed halls of the Newport Casino on Thursday from the Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas, you got the feeling the 40-year-old would do it all over again. Well, maybe not ALL of it.
“We all have our cross to bear in life, so to speak,” Agassi told Inside Tennis. “While [my sacrifices] were certainly unique in some cases, it did teach me a lot about myself. I learned a lot about myself probably at a slower rate in some cases, but in others at a faster rate. At each intersection of my life, I was always striving to understand myself better. I had what I call a ‘hate-love’ relationship with tennis, not a ‘love-hate’ relationship. I went from resenting a life that was chosen for me to, at 27 years old, after being No. 1 and falling to No. 141, choosing to take ownership of my life and to find reason to do what it is I do. That’s when I started my school. All of a sudden tennis felt like a team sport. I felt like I was connected to something, but I was also playing for something much larger than myself. It then gave me my life’s meaning, my purpose. It then gave me my wife. As a result, I’m so grateful for where I find myself.”
Does that mean that, in order to become a champion, an athlete needs the same brand of tough-love force behind them that often left Andre Agassi yearning for the “normal” childhood he would never have?
“I can’t honestly say that you need to go through all that,” Agassi said. “When you look at other people’s experiences, I don’t know how transparent they are. You look at a [Roger] Federer, who looks to be so comfortable in his own skin, and to do things so gracefully and so easily, and hopefully he had a healthy upbringing in the game. My father made a lot of decisions that I wouldn’t make — unquestionably. I represented him not as abusive, but I represented him as very intense. Along with that intensity came intense love, intense generosity, intense us-against-the-world and intense pride. There’s something very profound about a young man feeling like his dad is proud of him, and I always felt that. He used to introduce me as the future No. 1 player in the world. So there was a lot that I represented about him. I think it was a loving, honest portrayal. But do I think you need to make the decisions he made to succeed? Absolutely not. You need nature and you need nurture. You need to be born with a gift. No question. It’s too competitive to be the best in the world at anything to NOT be born with a certain gift. But you also need nurturing, so that gift can flourish. In my dad’s case, nurturing meant thousands of tennis balls and intensity.”
The last snapshot of Agassi that many of us still carry in our minds is one of a proud but humbled champion, felled by Father Time and fighting back the tears on a sunny September afternoon in Ashe Stadium. Agassi had just played his final professional match, and with Gehrigian grace, he addressed his fans one last time. On July 9, 2011, he’ll have an opportunity to connect with those fans again, on the lawns of the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport.
“They were connected to me and I was, quite frankly, thankful that I wasn’t the only one feeling that way,” said Agassi of his farewell speech at the ’06 U.S. Open. “In Rhode Island, I don’t know what to expect. You’re probably doing yourself a disservice to expect anything one way or the other. I’ve seen others go through it [including his wife, Steffi Graf], and it never ceases to amaze me how surprised they are by the occasion. Probably, for one of the rare times in my life, I’ll just allow myself to be surprised. But I will put a lot of thought behind it. I will make my best attempt to communicate what tennis has meant to me.”
Agassi is the sole inductee for 2011 in the Recent Player Category. The Hall of Fame will announce an additional inductee in the Contributor’s Category on Jan. 27 from Melbourne, Australia.
