Interview: Andre Agassi, tennis star

Published on Sunday 20 December 2009 16:18

ANDRE AGASSI has remarkable eyes. Deep, gentle brown eyes that seem to hold a permanent pleading in them – for what? – yet focused too. He was a killer on the tennis court, world number one and the only man ever to win all four Grand Slams plus an Olympic Gold medal. But with those Bambi peepers, the effect was a bit like facing a hitman who is about to take you out while all the while begging you not to make him do it. Bang!

Now the gun smoke has cleared, he wants us to see what really happened out there. The coloured Mohawk and acid jeans were merely a faade to hide behind. (The fact that the Mohawk was actually a hairpiece is a good metaphor as well as a literal fact.) The later incarnation of the clean-cut sportsman was equally illusory. Agassi was depressed, lonely and confused, secretly turning briefly to drugs because, above all, above everything in his life, he hated tennis. Hated it.

Agassi's autobiography, Open, was published earlier this year in the United States, and immediately hit world news pages. Headlines reduced it to a wig, some crystal meth and the lie Agassi told the sports governing body to explain how traces of the drug ended up in his system. (He wrote a letter claiming his drink was spiked, and the authorities believed him. Or chose to believe him.) But none of that does justice to Open. It's a remarkable book, a classy, beautifully written, fascinating insight into a complicated personality that took three years of Agassi's life, working with Pulitzer prize-winner JR Moehringer, to produce. The effect is like Agassi unzipping his skull and telling the world, "Go right ahead. Have a good old rummage around."

And now here he is in London, a polite, softly spoken figure, sipping Diet Coke and talking in Britain for the first time about the book that has fuelled anger and disapproval around the world. Why didn't he keep his sordid little secret to himself, his critics have asked. Because the squeaky-clean lie his adulation was based on is not nearly as inspiring as the dirty truth. You can – probably if you haven't read his book – reduce his story to the degradation of an elite sportsman who took recreational drugs and lied about it. On one level you'd be right. But this is also about atonement. It's about making a mistake and seizing another chance and, above all, being grateful for that second chance. It's about a man who was in the wrong life and the wrong marriage, who thought everything was meaningless until he made it have meaning. It's about a man who fell from number one in the world to number 141, then clawed his way back to the top at an age when most tennis players are thinking of retiring; who made the motivation for that mountainous ascent the building of a school for disadvantaged children. How you look at Agassi depends on how you look at life.

The most interesting moral dilemmas are those where it becomes difficult to impose black and white imperatives. Taking crystal meth, a stimulant that induces exhilaration, detracts from, rather than enhances, an athlete's performance, but still Agassi knows it was wrong. That's the easy bit. Then he lied to get himself out of trouble. Wrong again. "The lie was much worse than the drug itself," he says. "That was harder for me than any of it. I have been carrying it around for a long time."

Yet the guilt that lie induced was an incredibly powerful motivator that helped turn his life around – and that of the children in the school his charitable foundation built. Would he have achieved it if he hadn't lied? "I don't know," he admits. So can he truly regret the lie? "Every day. If I could go back in time with the luxury of who I am today, I would change it. There would have been a penalty but maybe it would have freed me in a way." He has become the person he is today almost despite himself, he says. "I am proud of what I have come through and how I have used the difficulties in my life but I am not proud of what I did. So do I have regret? Yes, a lot of regret." But if Agassi could go back in time and change things, he wouldn't actually stop at the lie. He would go back so much further.

THE MONSTER is black. Long neck, narrow head. It sucks and shrieks and roars, and the speed of it, the sickening sound of it, terrify the child. He calls it "the dragon", and every day the seven-year-old faces it across a net. It's a ball machine modified by his obsessive father, Mike, to fire balls at 110 miles an hour. When Agassi was a baby, Mike taped a ping pong bat to his hand to hit out at a mobile of tennis balls above his head. Mike is from Iran and a former boxer. He wants the American dream for his four children. He tries turning every one of them into a tennis champ, and with Andre he hits the bullseye. He makes him hit 2,500 balls a day because that's nearly a million a year. A kid who hits a million balls will be unbeatable. "Hit earlier," Mike screams as the dragon fires. No wonder Agassi becomes the best returner of serve in the game.

His father is difficult, aggressive, so Agassi can't tell him how he feels. Mike gets into altercations while driving, knocking one man unconscious, pointing a gun at another. Don't tell your mother, he says. Agassi doesn't understand that, because what would his mother do? Betty is as calm as Mike is volatile. All Agassi's gentleness comes from her. Even when he is forced away from home in Las Vegas, aged just 13, to a tennis boot camp in Florida run by Nick Bollettieri, Betty doesn't object. Didn't he want her to? "Well, my father's relationship with my older siblings was very tough. He lost his relationship with his older daughter and didn't regain it until years later. My older brother struggled with him. So I think my mom felt like, difficult as it was, it was probably healthier for me to be out. There was so much pressure. It was who my dad is. He wasn't abusive. He was just very intense." Agassi sees his parents almost every weekend, but his father won't read his book. Mike says he was there, what does he need to read it for? He would do everything the same except he wouldn't let his son play tennis. It would be golf or baseball. Agassi smiles. "You can play longer and make more money."

Bollettieri's academy sounds like the tennis equivalent of Dickens's Dotheboys Hall. "The worst thing was the sense of abandonment, just being there. It would have to have been paradise to make up for that, and I would probably still have struggled, but it was a boot camp, a glorified prison camp." Much of the time, the boys were unsupervised. "I call it Lord Of The Flies with forehand. Kids fighting to establish pecking order… these are real formative things in life."

What emotions does he associate most with childhood? "Just fear and isolation. Fear of failure. I didn't feel like anybody could understand what I was going through, and I internalised a lot. I was different. And then I went away at 13, and my childhood was over."

He has a genuinely rebellious streak but says the wild haircuts and garish clothes of his early years were immature attempts to exercise choice in a life that felt forced upon him. "All that was just to hide. That's what rebellion is. You are too scared to deal with your real feelings so you choose to fight everything rather than understand it." He dropped out of school, cutting a deal with Bollettieri that the camp director would get him into tournaments instead. Later, Agassi's rivalry with Pete Sampras would dominate a generation of tennis, but on court Agassi was fighting his own demons as much as his opponent. He had not chosen this life. His father had. Inside, he loathed the game but he still feared losing. Tennis was the only identity he had.

Interestingly, the boy who lost his family so early in childhood created a surrogate family in adulthood. Team Andre. He started out travelling with his brother Philly, but as he became successful the entourage grew. The truth was, the gladiatorial nature of tennis made him feel lonely. He would have preferred a team sport. So there was an emptiness at his core that he continually tried to fill by surrounding himself with people. Gil, the trainer who became his substitute dad. Brad, his coach. JP, the former preacher who became his friend. Perry, the best friend he'd known since childhood; and, surprisingly, Nick, who ran the tennis camp. As a teenager, Agassi had hated Nick but he grew to respect him, and one of the dominating features of Agassi's personality is loyalty. "I get very comfortable with people," he admits.

He wanted his own family but struggled to find the right woman. He was too messed up to be lucky in love. His marriage to actress Brooke Shields, who had as strange an upbringing as his, was disastrous. They were drawn to one another but couldn't properly connect. Agassi had always been generous with his time and money but Shields told him his team, with the exception of Gil, was bleeding him dry. He doesn't mention it in his book, but he later fell out with Perry over business interests. So was Shields right? "No, she wasn't. It took me a long time to figure it out, to be sure for myself. But I think we didn't understand each other's worlds. I didn't understand her world and friends and she didn't understand my travelling team, the teachers in my life. We were just wrong for each other."

In fact, he knew that before they married. Why did he go through with it? "But nothing in my life felt like what I wanted to do. This feeling was very familiar to me. It would be like a poor child at my school. They have an abscessed tooth and we finally see it when we give them dental care. And you wonder, how do they live with this pain every day? The child thinks it's normal. It hurts, but that's what they think teeth do. For me, that's what it was like. My life was a constant search for truth, and I felt like maybe the way to get there was to keep pushing through. Obviously not the right decision for me or her."

Some people are attracted to confidence and ability. Others are drawn to vulnerability. Before he met Shields, Agassi had a relationship with singer Barbra Streisand, a woman with a strangely fractured relationship with fame. Later, he would pursue and marry the woman he'd had a secret crush on for years, tennis champion Steffi Graf, with whom he now has two children. Graf, like Agassi, had a pushy tennis dad, so understood his issues. Early on, Agassi confessed his secret. "I hate tennis," he told her. Her reply astonished him. "Don't we all?" she said. It was like coming home.

But is there a pattern – is he drawn to the broken part of people? "I reach out to people for something that I either connect with emotionally or something I am looking to learn. With Barbra, it was the first time I'd met someone who was great at something they hated. I don't know if I was even conscious of how important understanding that was at the time, but I didn't feel so alone, so foreign. With Brooke, I think we each had a lot of empathy towards the other one. She had grown up with a tough stage mom and I had a tough tennis dad."

If he had met Graf earlier, he says, it wouldn't have worked. There was so much learning to do first. In 1992, he wins Wimbledon, his first Slam. Relief. Then a dirty little secret. Winning changes nothing. In 1994 he wins the US Open, and in 1995 beats Sampras in the final of the Australian Open, going on to topple him from the number one ranking. But inside, Agassi feels nothing. It's downhill after that. His sense of frustration, his struggle to find meaning in winning, leads to confusion and eventually to dabbling with crystal meth. At 27, he is all washed up.

The pivotal moment comes in Stuttgart. He has just crashed out in the first round. Coach Brad takes him into a hotel room and says he has a decision to make. They're not leaving this room until he makes it. Either Agassi commits now or he quits. But here's the key: Brad says Agassi can still do it if he chooses. "I just couldn't believe he still believed in me when I didn't believe in myself."

Agassi had never chosen before. Up to now, life had been imposed. "I remember looking out the window at the traffic and I was asking myself how many people are out doing something they hate, going to a life they didn't choose? Yet they find reasons. Maybe it's time I stop excusing where I am and take ownership of it. I was at rock bottom. But in one moment I made a decision, an epiphany of a decision, and I just thought I had to choose it for myself and figure out what my reasons could be to attach new meaning to old stuff."

LIFE doesn't change in the moment you decide it will. It changes in the slog that follows. A few weeks after Stuttgart comes the life-changing call that tells Agassi his drug test is positive. He lies. He's clean. Then he makes that lie the truth. He's ranked number 141 in the world. He's slow. Heavy. Weak. But the big thing is, he's disgusted with himself. He takes that disgust and turns it into energy. He runs, trains, lifts weight. He changes his diet. He plays the lowest-runged tournaments, where the crowds are smaller than a playground fight and you have to be your own ball boy. The thing is, the former world number one isn't demeaned. This is his life now. His choice.

Diving to 141 in the world, then clawing back to number one at the age of 27, is quite simply a breathtaking feat in the highly competitive world of men's tennis. In 1999, four years after his last Slam victory, Agassi wins the French Open, the one that always eluded him. Then the US Open in New York. He finishes the year by toppling Sampras to regain the world number one ranking. The new resolve shows in his private life, and he finally gets together with Graf. "She's the heroine," he says. The one who cemented everything. "She is a stronger person than me, a clearer person. When I met her, I was moved by the way she lived her values. She was the person I was trying to be."

On the way to number one he also became tennis's number one philanthropist. No surprise that he chose to help children: the voiceless and powerless. He established a shelter for abused and neglected children, then opened a school in the poorest part of Las Vegas, where it would have most impact. "Kids not having education means they're not going to have choice. They are going to find themselves in lives where desperation really exists. That is a horrifying thought to me."

The school became his motivator. "I found reasons to play, to push myself through the difficulties. It got easier. I believed in myself more. I was more comfortable in my own skin." Three more Australian Open titles followed. For so long, tennis had seemed meaningless. "Then I started the school and realised my celebrity, my money, my success, could be used for something very fulfilling. When I started my school, it gave me meaning, reason. I focused on the kids, and when I did, tennis became a whole different thing to me. I stopped judging it."

What does he feel now, walking into the school? "Pride and fear. Fear that I am charged with raising the money to keep it going. It's work and commitment, and it never goes away. It's like raising a child. It will always be yours. It fulfils you in a very deep way but it also scares the life out of you."

He retired in 2006, aged 36, giving one of sport's most emotional retirement speeches at the US Open. Physically, it was the right time. Born with a back condition called spondylolisthesis, he was almost crippled in the mornings. But emotionally, he was scared. How would he cope? He had grown to love as well as hate the game. "Then when it ended, I knew it was right. It was over. I used to think I was a moody person but I realised tennis is moody." He has business interests and his foundation to look after but the book has taken up the last three years. Away from tennis, he no longer suffers depression. "It's liberating."

That look in Agassi's eyes – maybe the pleading was always for understanding. He demands no more than he gives. Someone who has known Agassi since he was 15 sums him up to me by saying that he has always been a kind person. There are so many stories about him: sitting in hospitals to support friends with sick children; arranging air ambulances to get them the best medical care; setting up shares for someone in one of his favourite restaurants so they can pay for their children's education. How can you get so involved, Shields once asked him. But Agassi sniffs out vulnerability because he knows so well what it smells like. Now he wants people to understand his, to be inspired by his endurance rather than disappointed by his weakness.

"I hope my book gives them power," he says. "I hope that if they are in a life they haven't chosen, they will have the tools and the belief to know they can choose their tomorrow." p

Open: An Autobiography, by Andre Agassi, is published by HarperCollins (20)

This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on December 20