On deciding how the sport should be – I think I prefer tennis to function based on its own internal logic and values rather than perceptions about external appeal, which is like trying to build a pyramid from the top down.
In fact, I suspect one of the more accurate ways of predicting whether a tennis initiative is going to be a success might be simply to look at whether it's organic or artificial.
Take the US Open Series. There are some gimmicky and expendable parts to it, but there's nothing revolutionary about the concept: we've always thought of these tournaments as a kind of collective – the North American hardcourt warm-ups. What the USTA did was put a name to it and sell that to TV. It was simple yet effective, and – perhaps not coincidentally – it reflected reality.
The WTA, meanwhile, has gone and drawn up a tour structure and is now trying to rearrange the whole landscape to make it fit Roadmap 90210. It's easy to sympathize with the tour's problems, but it's not surprising that the grand redesign is getting resistance from those in line to be bulldozed.
Or contrast Davis Cup, an authentic creation with natural roots, to Fed Cup, which was a much more artificial construct.
The thing is, a bar of soap is just a bar of soap until you attach attributes to it -- transparent, original and 99 44/100% pure, leaves you zestfully clean and happens to be 1/4 moisturizing cream... Tennis is more like an organism -- dynamic, evolving, and capable of interacting with its surroundings.
It's not the same as trying to sell soap, and behaving as if there's no difference is self-defeating. For example, Sports Illustrated's choice for Sportsman of the Year was a hot topic earlier this month, but to me the problem wasn't so much that it passed over Roger Federer, but that two of the biggest reasons cited were a) Federer wouldn't be able to attend the awards ceremony, and b) his face on the cover wouldn't sell a lot of copies.
So SI's Sportsman of the Year isn't the person SI thinks is the sportsman of the year, but the person SI thinks everyone else thinks is the sportsman of the year? (And if the only problem with Federer was that he's not well-known enough, doesn't that say something about how well SI is doing its job of – oh yeah – informing the public about sports?)
Eventually, this becomes the sort of obsequious exercise that leads to Time picking "You" as the Person of the Year. Not only that, but only once in the last five years has Time's person of the year actually been a person. Last year, it was the somewhat strained combo of "Good Samaritans" Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono (when everyone knows all along it should have been "Mother Nature") and 2003 was even vaguer: The American Soldier. Maybe next year, they'll just hand over the decision to us, the People of the Year...
Er – where were we? Oh, right – Mike Agassi. I'm helpfully reminded by the picture at top right, taken at the Mike Agassi "No Quit" junior event in Vegas and nicely sent to me for this chapter of the book club, along with a little sidebar on the namesake:
The positive: "still so dedicated that he's helping fund kids to come to his annual "NO QUIT" tournament... 'When Andre was young it was very hard for us to afford tennis, and now I want to make it easier for parents. This is why we had free breakfast, lunch, and water every day at each site.'"
The negative: "when all is said and done, was a more successful casino greeter than he was a parent."
Let's ponder that for a while.
Your summary of the book was right on – the best parts are Mike Agassi telling the story of his life -- the childhood in Iran, boxing in the Olympics, carving out a life in the U.S. When the Agassi story shifts from Mike to Andre, it becomes a third-person account and a somewhat impersonal one at that.
Off the top of my head, however, this is the only book I can think of by a bona fide 'tennis parent', which also makes its descriptions of the Agassi kids' early years interesting. These types of accounts aren't the places to go for definitive historical accounts or evenhanded truth, but what they do do is help fill in one perspective – admissions, sanitizations, rationalizations and all. How's this for a little glimpse into growing up in the Agassi hothouse:
*So my goal wasn't just to teach Rita, to teach all my kids, the fundamentals of the game as it stood in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, I mean to teach my kids the game of the future.
Moreover, I intended to shape that future... My answer was to teach the kids to hit the ball early and hard -- and hard as their little bodies allowed – precision be damned. Once they had that down, they honed their accuracy through practice. And by practice, I mean hitting thousands of balls a week.
I figured you had to do it every day, and each day better than the one before; otherwise, you were wasting your time. My first three kids hit somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 balls a week; Andre hit almost twice that number. Once, I sat down and did the math: That's nearly a million balls a year.
...The fact is, I ruined tennis for Rita – ruined her life, really – by pushing her too hard. I made sure it was all tennis all the time. When Rita's friends were at the movies, out having a good time, Rita was on the tennis court – always.*
What do you make of this kind of parental drive, Steve? Stefano Capriati once said that he'd made Jennifer secure for life, so when he went to bed, he slept very well. But is the price worth the success? And what if you don't succeed? Mike Agassi's four kids run quite the gamut of outcomes, after all – burnout (Rita), college (Phillip), just for fun (Tami), superstar (Andre).
He ends the book with his conclusion: "All of us, our lives are better because of Andre. And maybe, just maybe, Andre's life and the lives of all my children are good, at least in part, because of me."
Kamakshi
