#411 Tortured Into Greatness: The Life of Andre Agassi

**David Senra** (0:00)
I open my eyes and I don't know where I am or who I am. Not all that unusual, I've spent half my life not knowing. Still, this feels different. This confusion is more frightening, more total. I look up, I'm lying on the floor beside the bed. I remember now, I moved from the bed to the floor in the middle of the night. I do that most nights, better for my back. I count to three, then start the long, difficult process of standing. With a cough, a groan, I roll on to my side, then curl into the fetal position, then flip over on to my stomach. I'm a young man, relatively speaking, thirty-six, but I wake as if I'm ninety-six. After three decades of sprinting, stopping on a dime, jumping high and landing hard, my body no longer feels like my body, especially in the morning. Consequently, my mind doesn't feel like my mind. Upon opening my eyes, I'm a stranger to myself. I run quickly through the basic facts. My name is Andre Agassi. My wife's name is Steffi Graf. We have two children, a son and a daughter, five and three. We live in Las Vegas, Nevada, but currently reside in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City because I'm playing in the 2006 US Open, my last US Open. In fact, my last tournament ever. I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis. Hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have. As this last piece of identity falls into place, I slide to my knees and in a whisper, I say, please let this be over. Then I say, I'm not ready for it to be over. Hate brings me to my knees. Love gets me on my feet. Gil, my trainer, my friend, my surrogate father, explains it this way. Your body is saying that it doesn't want to do this anymore. My body has been saying that for a long time, I tell Gil, almost as long as I've been saying it. My body doesn't want to retire. My body has already retired. My body has moved to Florida and bought a condo. So I've been negotiating with my body, asking it to come out of retirement for a few hours here and a few hours there. Much of this negotiation revolves around a cortisone shot that temporarily dulls the pain. Before the shot works, however, it causes its own torments. I got one yesterday so I could play tonight. It was the third shot this year, the thirteenth of my career, and by far the most alarming. The burning sensation made me bite my lip. Then came the pressure. The tiny space in my spine where the nerves are housed began to feel vacuum packed. The pressure built until I thought my back would burst. Pressure is how you know everything's working, the doctor said. Words to live by, doc. I limp out to the living room of our suite. My son Jaden and my daughter Jazz see me and scream, Daddy, Daddy. They jump up and down and want to leap on me. They stop just before leaping because they know Daddy is delicate these days. Daddy will shatter if you touch him too hard. Jaden asks if today is the day. Yes. You're playing? Yes.
And then after today, you retire? Not if I win, son. If I win tonight, I keep playing. He hopes Daddy loses, hopes Daddy experiences the disappointment that surpasses all others. He doesn't understand. And how will I ever be able to explain it to him? The pain of losing, the pain of playing. It has taken me nearly 30 years to understand it myself, to solve the calculus of my own psyche.
I sit quietly at the table, looking around the suite. It's like every other hotel suite I've ever had, only more so. Clean, chic, comfortable. It's lovely, but it's still just another version of what I call not home. The nonplace that we exist as athletes. I go to the bathroom and look in the mirror. I stare at my face, a face totally different from the one with which I started, but also different from the one I saw last year in this same mirror. Whoever I might be, I'm not the boy who started this odyssey, and I'm not even the man who announced three months ago that the odyssey was coming to an end. I'm like a tennis racket on which I've replaced the grip four times and the strings seven times. Is it accurate to call it the same racket? Somewhere in those eyes, however, I can still vaguely see the boy who didn't want to play tennis in the first place. The boy who wanted to quit, the boy who did quit many times. I see that golden haired boy who hated tennis, and I wonder how he would view this bald man who still hates tennis and yet still plays. Would he be shocked, amused? Would he be proud? Please let this be over. I'm not ready for it to be over. That is an excerpt from the book that we talked about today, which is open, The Autobiography of Andre Agassi. This is the book that over the years has been the most requested book for me to cover on the podcast. I had a hard time putting it down. It turns out it is as good as everybody told me that it was. I want to get right to the central point of the book, which is Andre's relationship with his father. But before I jump into that, there's just a lot of great random ideas in this first chapter that I think are also related to athletics and entrepreneurship. So he talks about tennis is the sport in which you talk to yourself. Tennis players talk to themselves and answer. In the heat of a match, tennis players look like lunatics in a public square, ranting and swearing and conducting debates with their alter egos. Why? Because tennis is so damn lonely. The amount of founders that have told me that they talk to themselves out loud, they answer themselves, they're constantly negotiating with their own psyche I've lost count of, and then they also talk about how it's so damn lonely. And one of the interesting byproducts of all this self-talk and talking to yourself is actually you come up with a lot of good ideas this way. And for Agassi, it was no different. For him, a lot of this self-talk also happens in the shower. He says, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement, which inevitably leads to self-talk. And for me, the self-talk starts here in the afternoon shower. This is the most important sentence of this paragraph. This is when I began to say things to myself, crazy things over and over until I believe them. I have won 869 matches in my career, fifth on the all-time list, and many were won during the afternoon shower. And he tells us parts of the conversation he's having with himself, and I think a lot of this is just excellent advice. I give myself strict orders. Take it one point at a time. Make your opponent work for everything. No matter what happens, hold your head up. And for God's sake, enjoy it, or at least try to enjoy moments of it, even the pain, even the losing, if that's what's in store for you. I close my eyes and say, control what you can control, control what you can control. He repeats that line over and over again throughout the book. I say it again, aloud. Saying it aloud makes me feel brave. What you feel doesn't matter in the end. It's what you do that makes you brave. And then he ends the chapter trying to answer the question he gets asked all the time, like you have a very unusual life. What is this like? People often ask what it's like, this tennis life, and I can never think how to describe it. But this word comes closest. More than anything else, it's a wrenching, thrilling, horrible, astonishing world. And then I would say maybe the first fourth or the first third of the book is all about the relationship, this torturous relationship with his father. There's a line from the founder of NVIDIA, Jensen Wong. He said that he doesn't like to give up on people. He'd rather torture them into greatness. And when you read a book about Jensen, you realize he did the same for himself. I think Agassi, after reading and re-reading all these parts about his relationship with his dad, was tortured into greatness against his will. This is a very unusual autobiography, where you have somebody that literally becomes the person that's the best in the world at what he does. And he hates the thing that he does. And you could never possibly understand that unless you understand the relationship that he has with his father. I'm seven years old talking to myself because I'm scared. And because I'm the only person who listens to me. Under my breath, I whisper, just quit Andre, just give up, put down your racket and walk off this court right now. But I can't. Not only would my father chase me around the house with my racket, but something in my gut, some deep unseen muscle won't let me. I hate tennis. I hate it with all my heart. And I still keep playing. Keep hitting all morning and all afternoon, because I have no choice. No matter how much I want to stop, I don't. I keep begging myself to stop. And I keep playing. And this gap, this contradiction between what I want to do and what I actually do, feels like the core of my life. My father yells everything twice, sometimes three times, sometimes ten. Harder, he says, harder. Every ball I send across the net joins the thousands that already cover the court. Not hundreds, thousands. My father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each, each day, I'll hit 17,500 balls each week, and at the end of one year, I'll have hit nearly 1 million balls. He believes in math. Numbers, he says, don't lie. A child who hits 1 million balls each year will be unbeatable. He's yelling directly into my ear, day and night, yelling in my ear. He turns around, sees me watching. What the hell are you looking at? Keep hitting, keep hitting. My shoulder aches, I can't hit another ball, I hit another 3 I can't go on another minute, I go on another 10 He glares, what the fuck are you doing? Stop thinking, no fucking thinking. Thinking, my father believes, is the source of all bad things, because thinking is the opposite of doing. I often think about how I can stop thinking. I wonder if my father yells at me to stop thinking because he knows I'm a thinker by nature. And so let me pause right there, I think that's one of the benefits of reading this book. Andre is obviously a very introspective person, and it takes him decades of deep introspection to figure out who he is. And that takes him more than three and a half decades of life. And part of the reason it's taken him so long, even though he has very high levels of introspection, is because he had to suppress who he was and what he wanted his life to be because of this domineering father that tortured him into greatness. My father looks at this as a backyard tennis court. I look at it like a prison. No one ever asked me if I wanted to play tennis, let alone make it my life. My father decided long before I was born that I would be a professional tennis player. Violent by nature, my father is forever preparing for battle. He shadowboxes constantly. He keeps an axe handle in his car. He leaves the house with a handful of salt and pepper in each pocket in case he's in a street fight and needs to blind someone. And this is such a perfect line to describe somebody like this. Of course, some of his most vicious battles are with himself. So Andre is constantly telling the stories about the violent nature of his father, probably one of the reasons why he refused or maybe couldn't resist his father. And even though he hated what he was doing, felt the need and the deep need to please his father. It's obvious how confusing this is for Andre as a young boy. He has this deep love for his father, but he's deeply, deeply scared of him, and you would be scared of him too. Here's an example. They're in a car. He gets into a shouting match with another driver. My father stops his car, steps out, orders the man out of his. Because my father is wielding an axe, the man refuses. My father whips the axe into the man's headlights and taillights, sending sprays of glass everywhere. Another time, my father reaches across me and points his handgun at another driver. He holds the gun level with my nose. I stare straight ahead. I do not move.