As an eight-time Grand Slam champion, American tennis legend Andre Agassi learned throughout his career to live in the present in order to thrive in high-pressure situations.
“Tennis teaches you to be very present. You can’t afford not to be. It’s not like you can protect a lead and run down a clock,” he told the Pendulum Summit, a two-day business and leadership event at Convention Centre Dublin.
“You end up realising that the best way to get past that finishing line is to only care about now.”
When he feels pressure, it’s “the red flag for me that I’m not fully present”, he explained.
“Either I’m not clear intellectually in what I’m trying to accomplish or I’m not surrendering to it.”
Tennis taught him to trust his instincts: “I’d rather have the wrong game and totally commit to it, then have the right game plan, but hesitate or doubt it, because that’s when things go wrong.”
Having had the sport foisted upon him by his father – as recalled with raw anguish in his bestselling post-retirement memoir Open – Agassi’s life work became taking ownership of his own destiny.
At first, this meant rebelling against rules, such as those set by the Florida academy run by late tennis coach Nick Bollettieri – “Lord of the Flies with forehands and backhands” – as well as some of the stuffier customs imposed by tennis authorities.
When he first emerged in the late 1980s as a mullet-haired teenager from Las Vegas, Agassi manifested as a flashier character on the court. This anti-establishment streak ironically made him gold dust for advertisers, an appeal encapsulated by his starring role in a Canon marketing campaign that bore the tagline “image is everything”.
It was easy to go along with this at the time, Agassi told the Pendulum audience. His thinking then was: “None of this I want. None of this is who I am. Nobody knows who I am. Everyone is sticking a mic in my face and wanting me to tell the world who I am, and I don’t even know myself.”
So he “just leaned into it”.
Winning his first Grand Slam title at Wimbledon in 1992 – having refused to play the tournament between 1988 and 1990 in protest at its all-white clothing policy – let him in on the “dirty little secret that winning changes nothing”.
After reaching the world number one ranking in 1995, Agassi’s struggle shifted to staying at the top. But it was during a mid-career plummet, just as he was giving himself permission to quit the sport, that he started thinking about what the future might look like for children in educationally underserved parts of his home city.
“At my lowest point, I took out a personal mortgage of $40 million and decided to build my own charter school in the most economically challenged area of Las Vegas,” he said.
“My goal was to prove we fail children, they don’t fail us. And in doing so I had to play. There’s not a sleeping pill in the world that can help you with a $40 million mortgage.”
Agassi later reclaimed the top ranking. In 2001, he married 22-time Grand Slam champion Steffi Graf, and the couple – tennis royalty – now live in Las Vegas. They have two children: Jaden (23) and Jaz (21). Meanwhile, the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education has raised over $185 million to support underserved communities.
He learned more from defeats than victories, he suggested. There was another lesson, too, that remains relevant with the Australian Open, which he won four times, poised to begin in Melbourne.
“Everything that happens on a tennis court is really a metaphor for life.”
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