Inside the Mind of a Champion

Andre Agassi is a tennis champion. He broke records. Is one of the rare few tennis players to achieve a Career Grand Slam. Won gold at the Olympics. Fought long battles out on court. Faced injuries and setbacks. Turned from rebel to saviour. Rejected to rejuvenated to adored. His story has it all. But his unbelievably successful life in tennis came from a place you wouldn’t expect. And the ideas and practices that made him the champion he is, will surprise you.

A Hatred for Tennis

“No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.” Andre Agassi

Agassi had a tennis racquet in his hand at the age of three months. It didn’t take long before he was hitting daily on a court in his back garden, in the dusty deserts of Las Vegas. His dad believed in him to the point where it was irrational. The many years before he ever stepped on a professional court, his father knew he would be number one in the world. It was just a matter of time.

But Agassi had other ideas. In fact, he despised the sport. Not in an ironic way, he hated tennis with a passion. Not the other way round. Tennis was a gruelling exercise simply to keep his Father happy. And he had no alternative option. It was tennis or nothing.

Yet he was dedicated. He went on the court and gave it everything he had. For one reason or another pleasing his father was a game. And he preferred that to the game of tennis.

Throughout the hundreds of encounters in his life, he would always return the same phrase: ‘I hate tennis.’ To which people would respond ‘Sure, but you don’t really hate it.’ Agassi always said ‘No, I really hate it.’

And so Agassi became a world professional tennis player whilst hating the sport. The very thing that made him who he was. That gave him the money, life, success, appearance was the very thing he hated.

It wasn’t until the end of his career. When talks were circulating about him retiring and leaving the game, that he realised he kept playing because he chose to keep playing. ‘Even if it’s not your ideal life, you can always choose it’ he said. And this choice made all the difference. Where Agassi chose to like it. Open his heart to the game. With all the rules, legacy and tradition of the game. This time it was a choice. A choice he was making. Not a choice that was handed to him before he could even talk. Maybe even before he was born.

The choice he made, changed everything. We all have that choice.

Playing Consistently

“Few of us are granted the grace to know ourselves, and until we do, maybe the best we can do is be consistent.” Andre Agassi

His father, standing behind him at the back of the court used to scream ‘Hit harder.’ It was a voice that lodged firmly in his head. Agassi played to hit winners. To win. But this stopped him from winning. It wasn’t about hitting winners, or being the best ever tennis player. It was about the man across the court from him. That’s the only person in the world he had to beat.

One evening over drinks, Agassi met Brad, with the intention of bringing him onboard to be his coach. Brad took an enormous swallow of beer and commences a careful, thorough, brutal-as-advertised summary of all Agassi’s flaws as a tennis player.

"Brad says my overall problem, the problem that threatens to end my career prematurely—the problem that feels like my father's legacy—is perfectionism. You always try to be perfect, he says, and you always fall short. Your confidence is shot, and perfectionism is the reason. You try to hit a winner on every ball, when just being steady, consistent, meat and potatoes, would be enough to win ninety percent of the time.”

"Quit going for the knockout, he says. All you have to be is solid. Stop thinking about yourself, and your own game, and remember that the guy on the other side of the net has weaknesses. Attack his weaknesses. You don't have to be the best in the world every time you go out there. You just have to be better than one guy. Instead of you succeeding, make him fail. Better yet, let him fail. It's all about odds and percentages.”

"Right now, by trying for a perfect shot with every ball, you're stacking the odds against yourself. You're assuming too much risk. You don't need to assume so much risk. Just keep the ball moving. Back and forth. Nice and easy. Solid. Be like gravity, man. When you chase perfection, when you make perfection the ultimate goal, do you know what you're doing? You're chasing something that doesn't exist. You're making everyone around you miserable. You're making yourself miserable. Perfection? There's about five times a year you wake up perfect, when you can't lose to anybody, but it's not those five times a year that make a tennis player. Or a human being, for that matter. It's the other times. It's all about your head, man. With your talent, if you're fifty percent game-wise, but ninety-five percent head-wise, you're going to win. But if you're ninety-five percent game-wise and fifty percent head-wise, you're going to lose, lose, lose."

It wasn’t about hitting winners, it was all about keeping the ball moving.

Dealing with Image

Andre Agassi was soon to be known for an infamous three-word slogan shouted at him by fans in the summer of 1989. The problem was, that slogan was his own. Agassi was on set in the Neveda desert for a commercial shoot for a new Canon camera. He had been instructed to step out of a white Lamborghini, lower his sunglasses, and utter the words, “Image is everything.”

“Image is everything?” Agassi asked the director.

“Yes. Image is everything.”

Agassi shrugged and did as he was told. He had other things on his mind that day, anyway. Those words would remain with Agassi for years. Those seemingly innocent words would come to represent his public life.

By the summer of ’89, they sounded like a confession. Image, according to the media and many fans, really was everything to the kid from Las Vegas. Three years earlier, Agassi had burst onto the tennis scene—this is one case where that cliché is justified—sporting acid-washed jean shorts and heavy-metal hair, and hitting his forehand, as John McEnroe would say, harder than anyone, ever. It seemed only a matter of time, a short time, before he would be No. 1 in the world and winning Grand Slams.

Agassi’s attitude and outfits only became more outrageous. He replaced his jean shorts with pink spandex. Even the hair, we know now, went from real to fake.

But the substance below the style failed to materialise. By ’89, Agassi, tired of being asked when he would win a major, found himself on the verge of burnout. His “image” problem only seemed to sum up his career to that point.

Andre says “The slogan becomes synonymous with me. Sportswriters liken this slogan to my inner nature, my essential being. They say it’s my philosophy, my religion, and they predict it’s going to be my epitaph.”

As for Andre the man, the storm that those three words had caused was raging all around him. “Come on Andre—image is everything!” fans screamed at him from the stands, whether he won or lost. The words hurt, Agassi confessed later, and they didn’t go away; it would be three years before he won his first major, at Wimbledon, and forced his critics to admit that there might be some substance to the man after all.

The rebel turned into a champion, and made the world forget all about his image.

The Dissatisfaction with Winning

“Now that I've won a slam, I know something very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn't feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn't last long as the bad. Not even close.”

When Andre describes becoming number one, he says that he feels nothing. Even when he wins some important games, he describes the feeling as only lasting a short time. At points, he gave up wanting to win. This freed from the thoughts of winning and he instantly play better. He stopped thinking, start feeling. His shots become a half-second quicker, his decisions become the product of instinct rather than logic.

As he lifted the trophy, on the glamorous court, he addressed the trophy and the warped reflection: All the pain and suffering that it’s caused him.

It wasn’t about winning, it never was.

Final Thoughts

I just finished reading the intimate four hundred page book, Open, breaking down Andre Agassi’s every thought and movement. I’ve read countless books on life, meaning and philosophies and yet I don’t think a book has delved deeper into the depths of life than this one. I was left with a million questions. An overwhelming sense of emotion about this mans life. About being a champion. About everything. I wanted to write a post about the impact it had on me. A free flowing set of ideas of everything that stood out upon reflecting the themes in the book. The book in many ways, opened me. Opened me to a life I never realised I needed to hear. Opened my mind to a different world.