Reacting to Andre Agassi's recent autobiography, entitled Open, a reporter in one of the British nationals wrote of his distaste for the 'cold' Agassi and his legend, once again (...and again and again) citing Sampras as the gentlemanly antidote to Agassi's theatricals.
In his imperious day, Pete Sampras was the predictable stodge of tennis columns the world over, though this had more to do with the stodgy limitations of those who've made a career of platitudes.
I recall taking one of my tennis kids to watch Pete Sampras play at a Wimbledon warm up tournament, at the Northern Lawn Tennis Club in Manchester. With autograph book in hand, he approached Sampras as he prepared to play an early round match.
'Can I have your autograph please?' he squeaked shyly.
No. Come back later!
The fact that there wasn't another person in sight was irrelevant. An autograph would've took two seconds of silent endeavour, which hardly qualifies as a distraction or require a woman's multi-tasking skills.
I was livid.

Sampras' snub of a youngster recalled a similar scene from my childhood. As a boy of about seven I was taken to Harper Green playing fields in Farnworth, where Everton and England footballer Alan Ball was making an appearance. Having queued up to get his autograph, I passed him my pen and autograph book and he scribbled his name. He then realised I hadn't pushed the button on top of the pen to release the ball point tip, causing him to scratch at the paper and he scorched me with the withering look of an egomaniac. Ball then made a point of showing me (and everyone else) how the pen should've been handed to him.
My cheeks fired up and it was all I could do to slide away without bursting into tears.

I've always been unsure as to how I would've reacted, should I have met Alan Ball in adulthood...but I doubt reason would have prevailed and Sampras' snub of Simon made me want to crush his Alan Balls.
I'd previously arranged to do an interview with the young Sampras that same day, for what was then Tennis magazine in the UK, and as we sat down in the club house later I had the same simmering impulse, which owed more to Bally than the indifferent, self-possessed tennis player before me.
I did my best to ask those inane questions, which pander to both the ego and the marketplace (and which rightly made tennis magazines irrelevant and subsequently extinct), but I had a chip on my shoulder and was itching for a fight. I held back my rage, but couldn't resist telling him what a good kid Simon was... the one who asked you for your autograph before your match.
Happily, Simon wasn't as sensitive as his coach and he wasn't put out in the least: he toddled off again after the match to get his scribble.

Andre Agassi's autobiography was a cracking read and the first half of the book is a kind of wholesome revenge on those who turned him into something he NEVER had any say in: a tennis player. Andre's father, Mike Agassi, should serve as a pantomime stereotype of the tyrannical tennis father. Not for the edification of tyrannical tennis dads, who are rarely put off by anything, even child-maiming, and are blinded by their own shortcomings: The cautionary tale would be made better use of by rebellious mothers and tennis kids themselves, in the hope that the next Dickens or Chopin doesn't end up becoming one more failed tennis player, broken on the blind back of paternal ambition.

In their obsessive zeal, tyrannical parents often unearth the very essence of how to hit a tennis ball, and in employing specially adapted ball machines to get the young Agassi to beat the net and crunch the ball early, is spot-on drilling. One of the more bizarre episodes in Agassi's book (if not his life!) is when Steffi Graff's father turns up in Las Vegas, and he is keen to meet Mike Agassi and see the famous 'dragon' ball machine. Not surprisingly, the two cold-as-iron egos are too much alike to get on.

Over the years, when studying photos of Agassi's ground strokes, the hi-speed sequences of Andre always seemed to be missing a frame, as if his racket head were travelling faster, over a given distance, than everyone else's, and I would've loved to have put this theory to the test (in the days when such things seemed to matter). Mike Agassi's insistence that Andre take an ever-shorter backswing, whilst powering his ground strokes ever-harder and earlier against ever-more power from the 'dragon' ball machine, was always going to result in serious injury...or the fastest travelling racket head in the history of tennis ground strokes. The sad thing is there's nothing to suggest that Agassi would not have fulfilled his gift and achieved the same ends, by means other than the lonely, loveless grind that he highlights in his book, and which is the enforced diet of many a child of affluence the world over.

Someone else who doesn't shine too brightly from the pages of Agassi's autobiography is Nick Bollettieri. Whenever photographers were shooting photos on the practice courts (when Nick was 'coaching'), 'Nick the Dick' would appear from the shadows of his so-called 'pupils', and quickly position himself behind the lens' line of fire: with arms folded, he'd muscle in on any available photo op and angle for some PR.
'I ask some of the older boys, some of the veterans, about Nick. Who is he? What makes him tick? They say he's a hustler, a guy who makes a very nice living off tennis, but he doesn't love the game or even know it all that well.'
As the pages progress, I got to like Nick Bollettieri a little more than I had previously... if only for his accidental transparency and lack of malice, which amounts to a greater honesty than many people in tennis possess... and anyone Jeremy Bates doesn't like can't be all bad.
It remains, however, that tennis boot camps have produced too many failed players at the expense of the person. For youngsters less talented than Agassi—those who cannot use the skills they've acquired under duress to rise above this shallow court of no appeal—the dream is most often the recurring nightmare of the terminally unfulfilled.

I didn't know what tennis was until I was a fully-formed school kid in well-lived skin, and what for Agassi was a chore very quickly became for me a healthy obsession, which kept my head out of a veritable trough of less healthy delights...and worse substances that Andre had flirted with.
The same year that Agassi started playing The Lipton in Key Biscayne, I did everything I could to blag a photographer's credential to the tournament. In my search for knowledge about the game (and hi-speed sequence photos of the best and most quirky of players), I'd scrape together whatever money I could, fly out to Miami and bed down in some cheap, cockroach-ridden dump on Indian Creek, or the buzzing (and always over-subscribed) youth hostel called the Clay Hotel on Miami Beach.

In those days, the Key Biscayne tournament had Grand Slam pretensions: it was keen to attract and impress, and a sizeable fleet of courtesy rides were made available to press as well as players. I was uneasy amongst the cut-throat careerists and agency wallahs on the photographer's bench, and I had no time for the networking and posturing in the press room. I was also deeply ashamed of the places I got to stay in (and I couldn't drive a car), so each day I chose to catch buses to and from the tournament site on Key Biscayne, via the bus station in downtown Miami.

Owing to his extreme popularity (which is played down in the book), Agassi was a good night match draw. So I'd pack away my cameras (I couldn't afford the more expensive fast film to shoot under floodlights) and sit on the empty photographers bench and watch, mesmerised by Agassi's thumping talent.
The downside of such a privileged perch for the night matches was that by the time I changed buses in Miami, heading back to the Beach, Liberty City's night crew had made their way onto the streets and there were some pretty ugly characters lingering downtown...even for a Farnworth lad!
To avoid looking like prey worth mugging, I got into the habit of not shaving for the duration of the tournament (no wonder Mary Joe looked uneasy in my presence!) and I carried my cameras around in a battered ex-army back pack.

One of the book's gems takes the form of Brad Gilbert. Andre looks to Brad for help, in the midst of a miserable on-court performance, and Gilbert's advice is 'Stop missing!'
Out of the mouths of babes and Brads!
Gilbert's take on Boris Becker is also pure diamond:
'Brad has never cared for Becker. Brad has always called him B. B. Socrates, because he thinks Becker tries to come off as an intellectual, when he's just an overgrown farm boy.'
Aouch!

Much of Agassi's recurring ire is reserved for media commentators and sports journalists, but he takes this mass of instantly forgettable text too personally and WAY too seriously. Unless you are Muggeridge, Alistair Cooke or Montaigne, who can see beyond the bullshit game and turn out sentences with their own intrinsic value, the only hope a journalist has of one of his sentences outliving him, is in relation to lasting achievements like Agassi's, and Andre makes sure a New York journalist called Lupica is named and remembered... for stating that Andre 'simply isn't a Champion' in the run up to him winning the U.S. Open.
Sweet. It was a long time coming, but, like much in his book, it's another perfectly timed return.

Agassi's crystal meth blip leaves me largely unmoved, because if I throw a stone in any direction from where I now sit, I'll hit scores of people who are doing or who have done much worse: this doesn't make it right, but it does make it human.
The predictable, sanctimonious drivel that spewed forth reminded me, to a lesser degree, of Jennifer Capriati's fall from media grace. She was another test tube tennis player, raised for the general consumption of pulp and the false world of PR, then slaughtered in her prime by the same bunch of cowardly, nodding donkeys that wouldn't think twice about buying a ticket to a rock concert, by a performer who is celebrated for living nights of pharmaceutical stupor.
Few are the judges who lead us to a higher place, for redemption is an other-worldly process that works from the inside out. And those eager to cast stones do so for the basest of motives.

Andre Agassi's book will make sense of different things for different people. Personally, I'm glad he cleared up the story behind that wretched, empty slogan, Image is Everything, coined to sell Canon cameras. At the time of it's conception, I was disappointed that Agassi adopted such a phoney statement, but it turns out that it was 'hung' on him by ad men without his knowledge. The irony is not wasted on Agassi that, having been tarnished with this slogan, his trade-mark hair starts to fall out in clumps. The tale of him playing the French Open final against Andres Gomez, whilst fretting over whether his hair piece will fall off, has to be one of the strangest stories in the history of sport.
Agassi comes off these pages as powerfully frail, omnipotently weak and brazenly fearful. He is, therefore, neither more nor less human than the rest of us, and his humanness is his rebounding strength.
He survived his father.
He survived the 'centrifugal force of this f****d up tennis life'.
Up to now, he's survived fame and celebrity pretty well.
He survived the accompanying cacophony of fools and made a statement that will outlive all of theirs.
And he survived having enough money to do what he bloody-well pleases, and grew to start a school for those who would otherwise have little or no opportunity, to escape the tyranny of ignorance.
'This is the reason for everything. How many times must I be shown? This is why we're here... when possible, to relieve the pain of others.'
I'm sure, therefore, we can allow him a few blown kisses and a penchant for dodgy, sentimental lyrics.

Beyond his fall, Andre Agassi rises from the Slough of Despond and does his penance in lowly 'challenger' tournaments, in Las Vegas and Burbank.
'How the mighty have fallen! Image is Everything, eh buddy?...Sports writers say I'm humbled. They love saying this. They couldn't be more wrong. I was humbled in the hotel room with Brad. I was humbled smoking meth with Slim. Now I'm just glad to be out here....It took me twenty-two years to discover my talent, to win my fist Slam—and only two years to lose it'.

Although the sentences and sentiments have been ghosted into shape by author J.R. Moehringer, Agassi's book is very funny and he has a great eye for detail and the ridiculous. The Spuds Mackenzie dog, which trotted onto the court in the midst of Agassi's disqualification from a tournament to pee on the net, is a great example of the absurdity of the faux serious and it is not wasted on him.
'Part of my discomfort with tennis has always been a nagging discomfort that it is meaningless.'
You and me both, fella. But at least you made it pay!The following few sentences make a devastating observation... belatedly acted upon.
'Brooke and I buy a house in Pacific Palisades. It's not the house I wanted. I had my heart set on a big rambling farm house with a family room off the kitchen. But she loved this one, so here we are, living in a multi level French knock-off set against the side of a cliff. It has no flow and it feels sterile, the ideal house for a childless couple who plan to spend lots of time in different rooms. '

Agassi's fellow tennis players are synopsised to perfection, and delivered to the page with efficient crispness.
'Pete can play a lousy 38 minutes, then one lights-out minute and win the set, whereas Rafter plays well all the time. He's six foot two, with a low center of gravity, and he can change direction like a sports car. He's one of the hardest guys of the tour to pass, and even harder to dislike. He's all class, win or lose...'
His memories of Sampras, too, are surprisingly gracious and they almost make me like him... I said almost!

You have to be in and around something (a certain world or fishbowl) to fully see through it, and Agassi has no time for the 'fakery' of television and its participants (the Friends and the friends of Friends), along with the non-contact art of acting, which often spills off stage or screen and poisons the living with it's ersatz lifeblood. The constant need for novelty, which characterises those who becomes slaves to surface and the passing moment, is keenly observed in Brooke Shields.
'After the initial fun of introducing me to Frankie, she's cool about him, indifferent, as if he's played his part and it's time for him to move offstage. This follows a precedent, a pattern that repeats itself with many people and places...Just as I start to enjoy something, to learn from it, she casts it aside...'
'How could you get so involved?' (asketh the ACTOR)
'How could I not?' (answers the PERSON)
In fact Brooke Shields is the one person who comes over as expected: someone trapped inside a fantasy, where the stage matters (beyond any meaning the script might harbour, and furnishing the faux lives of those cast upon it) and playing dress-up amounts to some kind of living.

I watched Agassi a lot in the 80's and 90's, and rarely missed an opportunity to shoot film of his strokes. Put plainly, Andre Agassi was possibly the most gifted groundstroke hitter of a tennis ball I've ever seen in the men's game, and I'm with Gilbert in believing he was far more talented than Pete Sampras. I was therefore puzzled why he didn't turn this gift into total domination of the game at an early age. But it turns out Andre has always hated tennis, was racked with self-doubt (unlike Sampras) and void of the full-time tunnel vision that sits many top athletes at the bottom of the personality rankings.
Even so, at his best (and at the same age), I would still back Agassi's groundstroke power-game against any player in the history of tennis, including Roger Federer.
But we'll never know if I'd win my bet.

The fact that Agassi achieved what he did on court is owed in large part to Gil Reyes; a debt that is fully acknowledged in Andre's book. Gil Reyes is a man who no doubt has many good stories of his own to tell and he reminds me of an old friend, who was driven into the school weights room by a rough childhood: there, he proceeded to turn himself into a formidable weapon, which could 'control the things he could control' and was not to be messed with.
When you hear Reyes speak in interview, you realise how much he has learned about tennis from his years with Agassi, and in the book he comes across as the diametrical opposite of Nick Bollettieri: intelligent, faithful...and he isn't on the make. So those of us who got much enjoyment from the Agassi years are also indebted to Gil, as well as Brad Gilbert, for facilitating the summer of a sporting gift that was nurtured in a cold desert winter.
I liked Agassi from the first.
I like him a lot more now he's said his lasting piece.
Qué lindo es sonar despierto, truly.

Open, An Autobiography, is published by HarperCollins and is now available in paperback.