Agassi: Why my children won’t play tennis
As his autobiography is published, Andre Agassi talks to Hannah Stephenson about the backlash surrounding the revelations that he took drugs. He also discusses life with his second wife, Steffi Graf, following his doomed first marriage to Brooke Shields
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FORMER Wimbledon champion Andre Agassi, one-time pin-up boy of tennis and winner of eight Grand Slams, has courted controversy for much of his life, but never more so than now.
The publication of his autobiography, Open, in which he admits snorting the drug, crystal meth, in 1997, and then lying to the tennis authorities to avoid a ban, has opened up a whole new can of worms.
Speaking to me from Las Vegas, where he lives with his wife, former tennis champion Steffi Graf, and their children, Jaden, 8, and six-year-old Jaz, Andre, 39, is unrepentant about his revelations, even though critics have accused him of sending out the wrong messages to children and tarnishing the name of tennis.
“When we deal with drugs and the message of drugs to kids, we have to start with the truth. Drugs are tempting for very specific reasons,” he says.
“It would be wrong to suggest to a child that a drug doesn’t make you feel good at first, and it would be wrong not to communicate the devastation and destruction that it does. A child needs to be armed to understand the temptations of it.”
All the brouhaha over the drugs, however, will no doubt help to sell his book, along with the snippets about his love life, anecdotes about his rivalry with other players and details of how he wore a wig in the 1990s.
It has been a long and rocky road for the brash kid with the thundering return who became the maverick of Centre Court, a born-again Christian, a player who applauded his opponents’ shots and, at the end, an experienced old hand who bowed to the crowd and could win Grand Slam titles after many of his contemporaries had retired.
From the early days of his mullet hairstyle, the “hot-lava look” and teenage groupies to his off-court liaisons with Barbra Streisand, doomed first marriage to actress Brooke Shields and second marriage to German tennis star Steffi Graf, he has never been far from the headlines.
These days, he spends much of his time at the school in Las Vegas he founded for underprivileged children.
“This summer, 100% of the kids graduated – it was way better than winning a Grand Slam,” he reflects.
While tennis and its accompanying lucrative endorsements with Nike and others have given him vast wealth, he says he hated tennis for a long time, and he and Steffi have vowed that their children will not play tennis.
“We have lived it our whole lives and we know it too well. One of the joys with children is to experience life through their eyes. We’d see the difficulties, the pitfalls and the pain.
“The truth is, you don’t succeed in this sport unless you give everything to it every day, starting from a very young age.”
Today, he has metamorphosed from rebel without a cause to mellow family man, although there are days when he will go for a run in the desert under the blazing sun to sort out his thoughts.
“I think I am shy. In many ways, I spent so many of my early years being who I wasn’t, that rebellious character. I’ve grown more comfortable with myself. A simple life has been very enjoyable to me, working quietly with my school and being with my kids.”
He retired in 2006, at 36, and felt liberated, he says.
“I felt like I had finished the race. There was no void, quite the opposite. It has been very fulfilling to live without some of those dramas. It’s over.”
These days, unless he is playing in a charity exhibition match, he hardly plays at all.
“People ask if I have a love-hate relationship with tennis and I say, no, I have a hate-love relationship with tennis. No one ever asked me if I wanted to play tennis, let alone make it my life. I didn’t really love the game until I took ownership of my life and made my choice to play the game.”
You have to remember that Agassi was a child pushed into tennis when he was barely old enough to hold a racket by his violent, obsessive father, Mike Agassi, a tough Armenian who represented Iran in boxing at the 1948 and 1952 Olympics before emigrating to the US.
He had put Andre’s three older siblings through the same gruelling scenario, but none of them showed Andre’s potential.
So he would bully, yell, punish and rage at his son day in, day out, dragging out the “dragon”, a ball machine he had modified to fire out balls at 110mph.
At 13, Andre was packed off to the Nick Bollettieri tennis academy in Florida, which was also like a prison camp, he recalls. But his talent was such that Bollettieri allowed him to ditch regular school (which they attended in the morning) at 14 to practise his tennis. He turned pro in 1986 and reached his first major final at the French Open in 1990.
His Day-Glo shirts, denim shorts and long hair kept him in the papers, along with his doomed two-year marriage to actress and model Brooke Shields, with whom, unsurprisingly, he had nothing in common.
The uneducated hard-hitter from dusty Vegas was like a fish out of water with her thespian friends, while Shields was unable to provide the support he needed on the tennis circuit. She couldn’t take his lengthy moods following the losses or understand why he couldn’t embrace her world.
His first marriage was a lavish affair in Monterey, with four helicopters full of paparazzi circling overhead. His second was in jeans in Las Vegas with his heavily pregnant fiancee, Steffi, three days before she gave birth to their son, with few witnesses. Neither her father nor his was invited.
“My dad had walked out of my first wedding. He’d told me and Brooke that unless she quit acting we weren’t right for each other. Stefanie and me getting married was just a formality. I was always deeply curious about her. When I met her, I was taken by how understated she was, by her perceptiveness and her desire to understand, learn and care. She’s a generous spirit.”
Apart from tennis, they had much in common, he reflects, including a love of children.
“We wanted to make our life about something bigger than us. While she chose tennis more than I did, she so clearly understood the pressures and the pains which go with it.”
Despite his constant self-analysis in Open, Agassi has retained his sense of humour.
Has there been any particular highlight of his illustrious career?
“Hiding a toupee for all the years I did,” he says, without a pause.
“I don’t know how anybody can pull that off.”
Open: An Autobiography, by Andre Agassi, is published in hardback by HarperCollins, priced £20.
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