Do you believe Andre Agassi really "hates" tennis?

[Marley23]

@Mahaloth

I wish his book had contained more about his changing feelings of tennis in his later career.

I think if you re-read parts of the book, you’ll find that it does.

[R.P.McMurphy]

@astorian

Bruce Willis groaned on a set “I hate acting!” And at that moment, each man was probably in earnest. After calming down, they’d probably explain, “Okay, it’s not the music/cooking/movies that I hate, it’s all the stuff that comes with it.

In tennis or in any sport or any field of show biz, there’s a lot of unpleasant stuff that has to be endured, just so that you can enjoy the brief time in which you really get to perform.

I get your point but the analogy is a bit galling. Agassi could play tennis at a high level. Willis’ acting is/was minor league stupid and incompetent at its best. I’m not alone in saying, “I will not see that movie because Willis is in it.”

All that being said, the sport of tennis, on a spectator level is easy to hate. The dimensions of the game, it’s confinement and it’s predictability make it a really boring and an absurd sport to watch. It’s a great sport for fun and exercise but as a major sport it is a real snooze. Yes, they are fine athletes but the game itself never gives you anything that you haven’t seen a thousand times before. Actually, table tennis is much more impressive.

The way that tennis players are cultivated, much like figure skaters, as pawns for parents that are mental cases, it’s no wonder that some of the successful ones hate the game. If you want to see some real whack-jobs go to a figure skating competition for kids in the 12 to 15 age bracket. It borders on child abuse. Same with tennis where there are no referees, the kids are suppose to referee themselves and the cheating gets crazy.

Flashback: Jimmy Piersall in “Fear Strikes Out”. That was the premonition of what parents do to kids when they want their kid to compensate for their own failures and the end result.

[Marley23]

@R.P.McMurphy

All that being said, the sport of tennis, on a spectator level is easy to hate.

I don’t think people are interested in why you hate tennis.

The way that tennis players are cultivated, much like figure skaters, as pawns for parents that are mental cases, it’s no wonder that some of the successful ones hate the game.

This is true for some of the players (and seems to be especially prevalent on the WTA), but not all of them. Agassi’s father was awful but unfortunately he was not the worst tennis parent out there.

[R.P.McMurphy]

@Marley23

I don’t think people are interested in why you hate tennis.
This is true for some of the players (and seems to be especially prevalent on the WTA), but not all of them. Agassi’s father was awful but unfortunately he was not the worst tennis parent out there.

I’m certainly entitled to my opinion. The board is full of personal observations and individual preferences.

Stick with team sports for kids. As crazy as the parents are they tend to moderate each other to a degree when there is a team. In the individual sports there are too many parents that are transferring their neurosis to kids who can’t make sense of it and can’t fight back.

[DragonAsh]

Agassi isn’t just a perfectionist: He makes your average, run-of-the-mill perfectionist seem downright careless. Everything has to be just so, or it completely throws him off. Now combine that with a life that, until he was in his late 20s, he felt trapped by, a life he felt his dad had forced him into with no other opportunity to do anything else, a career that he hadn’t necessarily chosen for himself, so while his ridiculous natural talent made him ‘good’, it didn’t make him ‘great’, and he didn’t have the natural love of the game to practice enough to get over the hump. People forget that he was in the top 4 in the world years before he won his first grand slam, and lost the first 3 grand slam finals before finally winning Wimbledon.

It was only when he took ownership of his own life, of his own career, that he came to love tennis. He’s actually spoken about how he thinks tennis is great for kids in that it is just one-on-one, learning how to problem-solve on your own (no timeouts for a coach to help, you can’t run out the clock, etc).

R.P. Murphy, having coached and been a ref for kid’s team sports, let me tell you that I would far, far prefer my kid play an individual sport like chess, tennis, golf etc - mainly because so many -other- parents out there are monsters. At least in an individual sport my son only has to worry about me…

[Marley23]

@R.P.McMurphy

I’m certainly entitled to my opinion. The board is full of personal observations and individual preferences.

I am attempting to advise you, in a friendly rather than official way, that you’re coming close to threadshitting. You don’t have to like tennis, but your preference is not related to anything Agassi wrote about.

[R.P.McMurphy]

@Marley23

I am attempting to advise you, in a friendly rather than official way, that you’re coming close to threadshitting. You don’t have to like tennis, but your preference is not related to anything Agassi wrote about.

I’m sorry, and I’m not being sarcastic. I’ve been trying to behave myself.

Maybe Agassi got sick of batting the ball over the net endless thousands of times only to have somebody with parents as psycho as his send it back to him.

It’s a bit of a raw nerve to me because I have a psychopathic ex-brother-in-law who thought he could turn his kids into tennis professionals. The kids were good and had talent but the end result was that they both had to undergo a lot of counseling to regain some control of their lives. They are great kids. Their dad is a sicko.

Again, my apologies.