Agassi chose to call his autobiography Open. When I had heard the title of the
book, the year it came out, I wondered whether he was talking about opening up
to his fans or he meant to talk about the open era of tennis. Having spent five years of my early teens as a
keen viewer of cricket and tennis on TV, I had my favourite players in both
those games and Agassi is among the top of the list. Although, it took me the
next decade to spot a copy that I could borrow, even as I read it, I knew I
would be blogging about it.
Agassi was a sensation in the tennis world
through my childhood and early youth. This was also the time I was absolutely
fascinated by Steffi Graf and to this day I strongly believe she was the best
tennis player from the 1980s to date. Friends would find it amusing that I
follow sports or have personal favourites among cricketers and tennis players,
for no one has ever seen me play any sport with any aptitude or ability.
However, the early years of live telecast of sports coincided with my
TV-viewing years as a child and pre-teen. Having been introduced to the joys of
watching sports on TV through the Benson and Hedges World Cricket Championship
of 1984/85 as a young child, one of the few things I have truly enjoyed watching
on TV is sports.
I must have watched more hours of sports on TV
in 1988 than I did ever before or after. One evening in 1988, a friend of my
parents, a university professor of Physics, noticed me keenly watching a tennis
match on an old Black and White TV set in our living room. The match was between
a young man with long light-coloured hair, wearing some dark cycling trunks
under a pair of very short denim tennis shorts and an older player who clearly seemed
more in control of the situation. I was silently rooting for the young man.
This friend wondered why I was watching the game with such fascination and
asked me what I knew about the game and why that particular match interested me.
I had no intelligent answers to give. He then asked which of the two players I
was backing. Upon being told that I was backing the younger player, my interest
was dismissed as a pre-teen’s passing fascination with a young and attractive
sportsman. I neither knew the game well nor could I actually pronounce the
names of the two players.
This was a match between Andre Agassi and
Miloslav Mecir and as a young child in a small town in India, I truly didn’t
know the correct pronunciation of either of those names.
However, my best friend and I had, by then,
spent each morning of an entire school year watching half an hour of badminton
practice that my school’s sports teachers put the badminton champs of the
school through before the day’s schedule began. Additionally, I had rather
unsuccessfully tried to put into practice some of my observations from the
early morning sports ‘class’ during our evening playtime, on a strip of grass
in front of our building. I am reasonably sure that even now if someone gets me
to go onto a badminton court and ties a net in front of me, my serve would not
go above the net. I am probably confessing to being a spectacular failure at
learning to play a sport even after focused watching of training for many
hours. But that did work as a negative catalyst to my watching badminton on TV—the
rare exception was the spectacular one between Sindhu and Carolina Mari
recently.
Why then do I enjoy watching sports on TV?
It is not the love of sports or any interest in
watching any live event from the comforts of home or even a typical couch
potato’s escape into reveries of alternate realities through TV. I love
watching sports because it leads me into thinking about the amazing ability of
the human body and human mind to reach unimagined heights. Watching it shows
how will, grit, discipline and creativity can be put to good use to turn the
dream of achieving a goal into a reality.
While that young man there in that tennis match
was being dismissed as an undisciplined teenager, on account of his hairstyle
and unusual tennis outfit, by two middle-aged successful men, I knew why I was
rooting for him. He was displaying grit and was clearly determined to do his
best to not let the Olympic champion give him a thorough routing. The match
went on and on for 5 sets and the younger guy was clearly making the older champion
sweat it out. Beneath that American teenager’s demeanour was a young person
playing to prove that he had it in him to be a champion, if not now, then soon.
Obviously I could not explain all of this to
the two men who were quizzing me. In 1988, neither did I have the cognitive
ability to process my thoughts this clearly nor the articulation to explain it
to the grown-ups who seemed intent on dismissing the young man. All I knew was
that I wasn’t watching the game because it was a young and attractive man
playing an older but also attractive man. I was watching it because I wanted
the young man to win. I wanted the grown-ups to understand that beneath the projection
of teenage rebellion there was someone who was trying to put his training and
knowledge to win a match in his own way. The late teen’s struggles spoke to the
atypical pre-teen I was. Here was someone who was not towing the line but was
successful enough to be right there with the biggies—playing in the
professional circuit. Over the course of the next 5 years of watching a few matches,
mostly the big matches during the US Open and French Open, I could sense that
he was hardly the enfant terrible the
newspapers described him to be. Only upon reading Agassi’s autobiography, all
these decades later, I realized that the long hair and denim shorts were just
his ways of saying that he will be disciplined and determined on the tennis
court because that’s his day job but he will do it as Andre Agassi, not as a
replaceable ideal called the tennis champion of the year or the decade or the epoch.
He was an original.
On that day in 1988, when I turned an Agassi
fan, I didn’t know that he would go on to win the Golden Slam and don’t yet have
the technical knowledge to say whether he was the best player of his times. As
a completely uninformed tennis spectator, all I can say is that I have admired
the unique way in which he held his own in each match I had watched, no matter whether
he finally won or lost that match.
As it turned out, he managed to pull an Agassi
with his autobiography too.
Not only did he begin the book at the moment
where he ended his professional career but also completed a full circle of a
life spent as a professional tennis player by ending it with the same match.
This might seem like he talked only about tennis throughout his autobiography.
He did and he didn’t. Although the book didn’t make me more informed about the
technicalities of tennis, I got to see the human being who worked as a
professional tennis player, became the number one player in the world, created
a few stunning records in the game, grew into a responsible young man who remained
close to his natal family, found love and made a stable family of his own with
the best tennis player in the world, chose to remain a professional tennis
player as long as his body let him and finally found his vocation in running a
school that facilitates under-privileged children to aspire to a college
education.
Reading his autobiography was like watching him
play—being unique but with a single-minded focus on his goal to make the best
of everything that was coming his way. During his tennis matches he would use
his years of training and discipline to engage his opponents in long and
involved games whose outcome he definitely didn’t always have control over.
Similarly, in his book, he draws his reader into his life by opening his
thoughts and emotions and bravely putting them out there to get his reader to
realize that the man put his sweat and blood to become a contented person.
Here is a unique tennis champion who seems
prouder of his educational institution that helps under-privileged children
complete school than of the world records he made in the sport he devoted his
childhood and youth to and reached the pinnacle in it.
Doesn’t it make sense that someone who never
hit a tennis ball in her life but has watched at least two dozen tennis matches
would thoroughly enjoy Andre Agassi’s Open
(2009) and would want to write about it?
