MONDAY

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• About Open
• Andre Agassi Foundation for Education
• Athletes for Hope
• Mr. Agassi's bio

E-mail a friend

Tennis great explains how his lack of formal education as a child left him with limited choices. (1:15)
 

Full Interview (23:28)
 

Tavis: Pleased and honored to welcome Andre Agassi to this program. The owner of more than 60 men's singles tennis titles, including eight Grand Slam championships, out now with a critically acclaimed new memoir called "Open."

In addition to strong reviews the book is now a national best seller. As I mentioned at the top he's also the founder of the Andre Agassi Foundation and a very successful charter school that bears his name in his home town of Las Vegas. Get this - this past June, every single senior from the first class to graduate from his school, every one of them, on their way to college. Quite an achievement. Andre, glad to have you on the program.

Andre Agassi: Tavis, it's my pleasure. Tennis.

Tavis: (Laughs) That's good stuff, man. That's good stuff. I want to start there, because with all due respect, for all that you've achieved on the tennis court, for me it's reveling in the humanity that you see in these kids that means the most to me, and I know that you gave the commencement, as you should have, at the graduation. What did you say to the kids? I want to know what you said.

Agassi: Well, listen, I did my best to contain my emotions and I felt like I just communicated to them just what they're in for. I said, "Nothing but a hot wind ever blew away from this desert because there was nothing there years ago," but now they're all flying away and I just prayed for them, that they come back to this community and when their lives are successful, because they're going to have a life of their choosing, to come back and remember the next generation.

Tavis: Of all the things that you could have put your name on, of all the things that you could have been and quite frankly I suspect are passionate about, why did this get the focus of your attention?

Agassi: Well, I started my foundation early on and I focused on kids because who doesn't really care about kids? They're our future. But I realize that we're always late to these problems. This is the campus you're looking at now. We're always chasing our tail and the only way to really make systemic change is to educate.

I've felt the lack of formal education in my life and as a result of that lack of education I didn't have choice, and I found myself waking up in a life that I found myself in and I didn't know who I was, I didn't know what I wanted for myself. The thought of a child not having a future of their choosing was really a horrifying thought for me.

Tavis: Tell me more about how the lack of an education impacted you in the way you've just suggested, because people watching this right now, like, you're one of the greatest tennis players ever. You're wealthy; you've got choice in life. How did not having an education in any way hinder you?

Agassi: Well, I do have a choice in life now, but when I was young and my father pushed me pretty hard into the game and he was hard on himself as well, he was just a driven man from the old country, as he calls it, Iran, and he pushed tennis on me and I internalized a lot as a little boy, a lot of pressure on my shoulders.

He used to introduce me as the future number one player in the world and I felt like I had to do it for my family. I got sent away at 13 to a tennis academy which I kind of call a glorified prison camp, and growing up away from home I really started to rebel because there was no adult supervision. It was like "Lord of the Rings" with four hands there, with teenagers raising themselves.

So not having an education, not having an environment that gave me the chance - education is about giving these kids all these light switches and you flip them and you flip them and you flip them, and all of a sudden one goes off, that child knows who they are. That one thing motivates them, they get turned on to it, they pour themselves into it, and they move towards their life.

Tavis: Let me jump back, then I'll go forward again. You said a few minutes ago when I asked you about the commencement speech at your charter school there that you worked to contain your emotions. You did that that day. Is that something you've tried to do throughout your entire career, and have you had difficulty doing that?

Agassi: I've had a lot of difficulty doing that, I think, and I had difficulty doing that - writing this book over three years. One of the things you have to do as an athlete, a lot of times you have to remove the emotion. There is a job at hand; there is a task at hand. You have a finish line you've got to get across, and any time you allow emotion into it, unless you're utilizing it in a real positive way it's taking you away, it's detouring you from what your objective is.

Tavis: So if it's not the emotion that drives you when you're down in a match, what is it, then?

Agassi: It's a determination. I walk on the court with a set goal and my goal is to drive as hard as I can and get across that finish line. We don't have the luxury in tennis of building a lead and then running out the clock. You have to get across that tape and that's something that's hard to do. You don't really stop pushing until it's over, and then you look up at the scoreboard and go, "Okay, I did it."

Tavis: This may be an impossible question, but I want to go here because of what you just said. Impossible in part because you've not played at the professional level every sport that one could play, but when you say that tennis does not allow you the luxury of building up a lead and running out the clock, how, then, do you rate the difficulty of being tops in tennis versus tops in another sport?

Agassi: Yeah, it is hard to answer because I think they demand different things. But I will say this, is I can confidently say that tennis is the loneliest sport that exists. You're out there, you can't talk to anybody, you can't pass the ball, there are no time-outs. There's no coaching, you don't have to be good, you have to be better than one person and that one person is on the other side of the net.

It's like you're on an island. It's not like boxing where we're leaning on each other and you can feel each other. If you look at a tennis player it's like solitary confinement out there, and what happens in solitary confinement? It always leads to self-talk.

You have those Lincoln-Douglas debates with yourself. You talk to yourself and you answer yourself and you tell me if you've ever seen another sport where an athlete talks to themselves as much as they do in tennis.

Tavis: All different kinds of champions, male and female, then. To your point, given that it's the loneliest sport in all of sport, what then does the nature of that loneliness demand out of anyone who would be a champion at it? What kind of person - what's the profile, then? What do you have to have to deal with that loneliness?

Agassi: You have to have a serious resolve, you have to have an ability to adjust, an ability to learn and to move forward. You have to - you learn a quality that really works in life - the most important point is the next one. In life you're faced with a lot of curves and it's given me a lot of life skills, but that's it right there in a nutshell. You have to be willing, whether good or bad, what it is you just went through, put it behind you and get back to the business at hand. It makes you a very disciplined person.

Tavis: You intimated this earlier in the conversation, Andre, that tennis really was your father's dream for you more than it ever was your dream for yourself. Take me back to the beginning and tell me more about that.

Agassi: My dad, like I said, was intense. He was a fighter; he was violent by nature in the sense that anger kind of ruled him. As a little boy he used to get in a lot of fights. His mother used to make him wear hand-me-down girls' clothes to school as punishment sometimes and he'd get in a fight in the streets.

He put it to his formal fighting where he became a boxer, boxed in two Olympics, two Golden Gloves. Tennis was what we were going to do. It was the quickest road to the American dream for my father and all three siblings before me, I was the youngest of four, failed at it. Tennis interfered with their relationship with my father and ultimately their relationship with themselves.

It was a learning curve for all of us and I watched it unfold and I watched the pressure sort of shift in the house. My dad loved us unquestionably, he was fiercely loyal. Sometimes I just wish his love was a little software, but it was thousands of balls a day on a ball machine, desert sun, pounding it with this fire-breathing machine he built, this ball machine that would just launch balls at me at about 110 miles an hour.

He's a man of math and geometry, and he believes if you hit thousands of balls a day you're going hit a million balls a year, nobody's going to beat a kid who hits a million tennis balls a year.

Tavis: Well, he's right about that, ultimately. (Laughter)

Agassi: Well, I've found a few people who could beat that kid. (Laughter)

Tavis: What do you say now, particularly given that you are a parent with two kids, what do you say now to parents who push their dreams on their kids, now that you've successfully navigated, because there are others, as you mentioned, who have not. What's your takeaway from that?

Agassi: Well, here's what I say. It's what I say and it's what I believe as a parent. The first thing you have to do as a parent is decide and define what success is for your child and what success is for you as a parent. I think if you don't answer that question right I don't think you really position yourself to answer many questions right.

So if you think success for a child means the money they make or being the best in the world at something, then you're going to follow that up with a lot of decisions that ultimately interfere with your relationship with them and you won't give them what they need to address their own issues in life.

That won't give them the problem-solving skills, it won't give them the - so I say define success by your child's peace of heart. That's what I tried to do, and if they're going to do something they should see it through, but it should be something they choose and through that I think they discover themselves and they learn empathy, the ability to see life through other people's eyes. It's a powerful, powerful thing.

Tavis: Is it possible, Andre, that your two kids could feel the same kind of looming pressure given who their parents are, Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf? Is it possible they could feel the same kind of looming pressure that you felt as active pressure from your father, given what other people's expectations of them might be, again, given who their parents are.

Agassi: Yeah, and those are the skill sets you want to teach, not to let anybody define for you what you should be. I think that's what we're hopefully teaching them.

My hope is that as much as we might impact - they might have a vision of us as what it is we've achieved, I think we're going to be more larger than life as just parents, because we care about them deeply and we're deeply involved, and it's a real nurturing, healthy thing. You can't lead unless you're willing to learn. You can't teach unless you're willing to learn, and they teach me a lot every day.

Tavis: When did, then, in this journey, when did your father's dream then become your own?

Agassi: I was 27 years old. I had been through a pretty dark time in my life and I was 141 in the world and my coach says, "You're going to change everything or you're going to quit because you're too good, you still have game left, and you're too good of a person to put yourself through this."

And I sat there in a hotel room in Stuttgart, Germany, and I said to myself I play this game for a lot of reasons, never mine. I played it for a lot of other people, never did it because I chose it. And I looked up the street in Stuttgart, Germany, I saw so many people in these cars. I remember this epiphany moment where I said, "How many people are going to a job that they hate but they found reason, they found something they can connect to," and that's what happened for me.

I made a decision that night to find new meanings to old tasks, and I said, what if I can - what if my school can be the team that I play for? I always felt like I would be better off on a team than an individual sport. What if I had something I was connected to but was far larger than me? I started to choose to do this and I made a decision that day that I'm going to choose tennis for the first time in my life.

I think that speaks to why the second half of my career, why I won more Grand Slams after 29 than I did before, because I think I started to find peace with it. I have a hate-love relationship with tennis. I started by hating it because it took from me and I wasn't connected to it. Then I chose it; then I loved it.

Tavis: Given what a great and iconic champion you are at an individual sport, help me understand then why you thought you would be better as a member of a team.

Agassi: Because like I was just saying, you're connected to something that is you, that you're part of, but is larger than you. Not one person is more important than the team. I always needed inspiration when I played and the lack of inspiration at times took me to some pretty low points.

On a team I just felt like I would have got out of my own way because I wouldn't have been focused on me and I would have been inspired on a daily level trying to come through for others. It's my spirit, it's my - I feel that in my bones.

Tavis: So since you didn't have that team in those low points that you referenced a moment ago, the inspiration was what? Was it the same all the way through? Did it change?

Agassi: Yeah, it changed when I finally took ownership of it, but I found myself in a life I didn't choose, I found myself in a marriage I didn't want to be in, I found myself depressed. Depression hits two out of three people. They have one bout of it at least in their life. It's a serious thing and it doesn't discriminate. It doesn't discriminate based on your bank account; it doesn't discriminate based on how many titles you've won or where you sit in the world.

When you've lost meaning in your own life, when you don't know yourself, when you're not at peace, you're going to wrestle regardless of where you are. And the fact that I had this life that appeared to be what anybody would want also added to my angst that that particular time.

Tavis: Let me follow you in that direction, then, since you went there. I remember very vividly, and you'll appreciate this, I remember vividly being in the barbershop, where I am often, with all the brothers down in the hood, getting my hair cut or waiting, as we do in the barbershop, the Black barbershop, waiting to get your hair cut. Pull a number; you sit for two hours waiting for your slot, Marcel.

Anyway, I'm in the barbershop, Andre, waiting to get my hair cut, and a conversation breaks out - I remember this vividly - breaks out about you and Brooke Shields breaking up. You know how brothers are; brothers are like, "What the heck is it about Andre that makes him unhappy with Brooke Shields? How could you be unhappy with Brooke Shields?"

And I raise this not to cast aspersion on Brooke. You talk about it in the book; you said a moment ago that you were in a marriage you weren't happy in. So for all those brothers and others who were like how could you not be happy with Brooke Shields, the answer to that is what?

Agassi: For a relationship to work, two people need to know themselves deeply. You need to know what it is - who it is you are, what it is you want for yourself, what it is you can compromise on, how it is you go about your life. I didn't know myself. I couldn't have been married to anybody, and that includes my current wife, who's Steffi Graf, who I'm madly in love with.

I couldn't have been married to her when I was 27 years old because I didn't know who I was, and that's the scariest part. Brooke's a wonderful person and offered me a whole heck of a lot, and I probably disappointed her more than I even realized. But the truth is what was wrong with me is the right question. There was a lot wrong with me.

Tavis: You do credit her for a lot of things, as you did just a moment ago, and one of those things is you talk very open about in the book, the hair. That she was one of the ones that convinced you to let the hair thing go. Why did you feel - I think I understand it - why did you feel the need to even address the hair issue in the book, and what do you want us to take from what you lay out in the text?

Agassi: Well, this is a reduction of my life and all the formative parts, and hair was - or lack of hair - was a major factor. (Laughter) By the way, you shouldn't be going to a barbershop; you should be able to do that yourself. (Laughter)

Tavis: See, now Marcel's mad at you because you're cutting into his money now.

Agassi: I watched my brother lose it, it left a mark on him, it left an imprint on me. I was attached to it; I didn't know what people would think of me without it. I was living a lie, I was - when I dressed as wild as I did and did the hair the way I did, my goal wasn't t stand out. My goal was to hide my inner self. What better way to hide who you are than wearing a mullet, for crying out loud?

Tavis: Yeah, we got a bunch of colors (unintelligible).

Agassi: Yeah, it's very distracting. But I was also living a lie. It was just something I should have - so me getting rid of my hair was liberating, and it made me take a step closer. My life wasn't a lie; it was a constant pursuit for the truth. That was one intersection where I took a step in the right direction; I got closer to my truth. This is who I am.

Tavis: Tell me more about - I love this word, and I heard it loud and clear - that losing your hair for you was liberating. I ask now you to tell me more about that, because we live in a world where everybody - not everybody, but a whole lot of men, this is a billion-dollar industry, men trying to hold on to something who think that they are less than without it. Tell me more about how that liberated you.

Agassi: Well, you stop - you solve the problem when you face yourself and you're not shy about yourself. You should take pride in certainly how you appear, but it should be who it is that you are. That's the problem. The problem is not how hair looks or doesn't look; the problem is you feeling like you need to be something you're not.

That's a form of pain in somebody's life. I think when you look at drugs, for example, drugs are a problem, but it's needing the escape from your reality that's probably more the problem.

So when you've got a wig and you're trying to - you're not comfortable with who you really are, that's the hell you're living, that's the prison. It's liberating.

Tavis: You mentioned drugs. When you sat in this chair before we came on air here I asked you whether you were sick of answering all these questions as yet, and you said, "No, not really, it gives me a chance to tell my story." But I know from having written a few books myself that when you get on tour there are always one or two things that everybody grinds on that you get sick of talking about. You tired of talking about that issue?

Agassi: Not really. I think it's an important one, and it was a real pivotal point for me. I certainly have talked about it with people that haven't put it context in my life, but it's a shade and it's something I can't deny. It was formative, it was a pivotal point in my life.

So to have the opportunity to really talk about it and to really tell people what a problem this can be but what problem I really had that I even went there, and the fact that I can turn my back and start heading towards a life that I wanted and I can take ownership of my life.

This book is about the power of tomorrow. It's about the forgiveness of your parents, the forgiveness of yourself. It's about giving yourself the permission to be sure when it comes to love. It's about giving people the tools to avoid pitfalls that I've stepped in, give people the tools and inspirations to get out of the pitfalls that I've been in.

I had a second chance in life, and a lot of people don't get the second chance. But what would you do if you yourself could look back on your life and say, "I want a second chance at that?" That's how I felt the day that I didn't let the drugs get a hook in my life.

I had a second chance and I was going to atone for that every day, and I've continued to do that. It's still a constant pursuit of being the most I can be, and this book is an opportunity for people to understand not just what I've been through and understand me, but I really believe it gives them the opportunity to understand themselves better.

Tavis: You could have come to all of those conclusions without ever having to, pardon the pun, be so open with all the rest of us about it. Why the choice to be so open about it?

Agassi: Because it beats the alternative, because the alternative wasn't an option to me. I'm not going to sit here at this time in my life when I lived many years saying image is everything and having that stuck on me. I'm not going to spend this time of my life, I'm almost 40 years old, and I got news for you - I don't care how old you are. Life's too short. It's too short to ignore the real power.

It's too short to ignore the real truth. If the downside of all this comes with a few cast judgments on me, if the down side is somebody jumping to conclusions or reacting instead of responding, that price for what I think this is going to mean to millions of people who I'll never meet, that price is a price I felt like I needed to pay.

Tavis: The flip side of those aspersions perhaps being cast on you by some who don't want to hear it or don't properly contextualize it, the flip side of that, to your latter point, is that millions will be helped by it. So if in fact that is the case, as it appears to be, you will feel what as a result of that?

Agassi: I'll feel better off. I'll feel better off. I'll feel more and more liberated every day as I watch it work in people's lives. It's going to live longer than me, and that's a good thing.

Tavis: Tell me about - Jonathan, put the cover of the book up for me. I'm always curious about these kinds of things, given how much I love books. Why this photo? What did you make of this photo when they chose this for the cover?

Agassi: They didn't choose it; I chose it.

Tavis: (Laughs) Okay. Excuse me, excuse me, Mr. Agassi.

Agassi: There's no "they."

Tavis: All right, excuse me, sir. Why did Mr. Agassi choose this photo?

Agassi: When I look at this cover now I see about 172 decisions, one of which is the photo. This photo, as I assess when this picture was taken in my life, was in 1997. I can't tell that by the two earrings, I can tell that by the lack of gray, I can tell that by the wrinkles, and I know that picture was right then.

That was at a time in my life when I had been through so much and it was a pretty darn low point, but it was still a time in my life where I had so much to go through, and I thought this picture here kind of speaks to that mystery. What had this guy been through, what is he trying to tell me? I felt like it fit the title, I felt like the title and the picture fit the content.

I believe that that picture in and of itself communicates a journey that has real meaning in people's lives.

Tavis: It got my attention, which is why I want to ask you how it got chosen, because it says a lot with those words, that big word, "Open," on top of it. It got my attention, obviously.

How do you - looking back on this now, because there's so many people who have had issues, yours truly included, who've had issues growing up with their parents at a certain stage in their lives, how do you contextualize that now, for all that you've talked about your father? How do you contextualize that, looking back now?

Agassi: Well, I've learned not to label kids especially, teenagers, not - don't label them. We're not finished products, and you can't stick a label on somebody and say, "This is who you are," because we're continually in process. I'm in process today.

Is it a lie to tell your first wife, "I do until death do us part?" Or is that actually something you believed? Is that something that you hoped to be true or something you committed the rest of your life to trying to make true?

We are continually learning and our trues change and grow, so my hope is that teenagers that feel stuck in a box could give themselves the freedom to break out and say you know what? I don't accept that.

Tavis: Before my time is up here in just a minute and a half or so, tell me anything, tell me something about your mama.

Agassi: (Laughs) She's the real deal. My dad disturbed the peace, and she kept it. (Laughter) She was strong, and I talk about her in a powerful moment towards the end of the book when she goes through breast cancer, and I came home and I lost early at the U.S. Open because I didn't want to be there.

I came home to be with her and she looked at me like as quiet as she's ever been in her whole life, as sometimes what appeared to be passive at times in her life. She looked at me like, "I deserve more respect than this. I've lived with your pops, I've helped raise four kids, I've worked every day of my life. I deserve a little credit for my strength. I'm fine. Get back out there and go do what you do." She's a wonderful lady.

Tavis: Perfect place to close a conversation if you have to close it. Sometimes no matter how great the guest is, and Andre Agassi's been a great guest, I still feel completely incompetent when it comes to doing justice to what this book really, really is, so let me highly recommend to you the new book by Andre Agassi, tennis great. It's called "Open: An Autobiography." Andre, I have enjoyed talking to you.

Agassi: You're a pleasure.

Tavis: Thank you so much, I appreciate it.