SPORTS MEMOIRS are the books making news these times. X Factoris not half as exciting as reading about the secret lives of sports heroes – or as much of their secret lives as they are prepared to sell you. Last week it was Dónal Óg Cusack talking about hurling and homosexuality. This week it is Andre Agassi talking about taking drugs and tennis, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
Just as it was Dónal Óg’s addiction to hurling that was much more interesting than his coming out as a gay man, so it is Andre Agassi’s miserable childhood that is much more shocking than the news that he took crystal meth. There are those of us who are not altogether sure what crystal meth actually is. Crystal methylene, apparently. You snort it and feel inspired, according to Agassi. Who cares?
Here is an interesting sentence: “I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.”
Now we sports memoir junkies realise that there comes a point in every sports autobiography – and indeed it is usually pretty near the start – where our hero and his ghost writer come over all Raymond Chandler. This, combined with a narrative line that can only be described as spiral, seems to be the mark of quite a few of the books written by the lads. I mean, it is the challenge of the sports hero and of his ghost writer (I have never read a sports memoir by a female) to look back at a very well-reported career and try and drag out something that is news.
And the fact that Andre Agassi hates tennis blooming well is news, so full marks on that one. It is interesting that a man who hates tennis so much has won eight grand slams and made millions and millions of dollars out of it, but we’ll let that pass. Sports stars are heroes. They are filled with self-pity (in fact, Dónal Óg is the exception to this) so that other men don’t have to be. No one writes books about their struggle to support a family by working for no thanks at all at a job they don’t like in an economy that went down the toilet this time last year. Therefore sports memoirs contain all publishable masculine suffering.
And the pushy, sports-mad father is a most masculine burden. Certainly girl children are pushed ruthlessly by their psychotically ambitious, sports-mad parents, but there is something uniquely male about the father-son dynamic as the male parent drives the son to achievement.
This is palpably obvious in both Dónal Óg and Andre Agassi’s memoirs. Dónal Óg’s father seems a more benign type of dad, even when he is shooting balls at his diminutive sons in order to give them vital hurling experience (they were at primary school at the time). Andre Agassi’s father built a machine that he called the Dragon, to shoot balls at Andre, who was seven. Mike Agassi explained to Andre that if he hit 2,500 balls every single day that would be one million balls per year, and he was sure to win Wimbledon.
It was towards this noble aim that Mike Agassi had raised the net six inches above standard height, so that the seven year old would have to hit high. In response to this the young Andre works out how to hit a ball out of the backyard using the wood of his racquet. When his father hears the ball hitting wood he assumes the shot is a mistake, so the seven-year-old gets a four- minute break, with no abuse.
Mike Agassi does sound like a fascinating character. An Armenian who was born in Iran, he brought his anger everywhere. He used to carry salt and pepper in his pockets, in case he got in a streetfight and needed “to blind someone”. Agassi snr fits the stereotype of many pushy tennis parents. He was violent and pretty bonkers. He shoots hawks because they prey on defenceless mice. He pulls guns in road rage incidents. He was a foreigner in the tennis establishment. He only differed from the other tennis parents in that his son won so much.
But Agassi is not such a foreigner when we think about it. The tennis, riding, swimming and sailing parents over here can be pretty terrifying. Two years ago, on the remedial slopes of the ski-run of Kilternan I heard an angry, middle-class voice dressing down what I assumed to be a junior executive. “You never push yourself,” the angry man was saying. I looked over the hedge to the bigger slope fully expecting to see a young colleague in one of those management assessment things that some companies insist on performing in the outdoors. Instead I was looking straight at an adult man with a boy of about six. “You never push yourself,” the man was saying to the boy.
It was a strangely chilling moment. I have always regretted not telling the little boy that not all parents were such plonkers, but I kept my mouth shut and the moment was gone. It is truly amazing what parents will do to children, particularly in pursuit of sporting glory. They escape censure altogether for what is, essentially, child abuse. Mike Agassi should have been in jail instead of in the stands at Wimbledon, but until the sports authorities get serious about protecting children, he and parents like him will just be in the books instead.