Open

by Andre Agassi

It’s no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love,

Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it’s all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point.

I’ll have to beat the younger version of myself if I am

to keep the older version going. I close my eyes and say: Control what you can control.

What you feel doesn’t matter in the end; it’s what you do that makes you brave.

Tennis is about degrees of aggression. You want to be aggressive enough to control a point, not so aggressive that you sacrifice control and expose yourself to unnecessary risk.

Enjoy, savor, take it all in, notice each fleeting detail, because this could be it, and even though you hate tennis, you might just miss it after tonight.

He plays with desperation, a more powerful drug than cortisone. He starts to live in the now. He takes risks, and every risk pays off. The ball now disobeys me and conspires with him. It consistently bounces his way, which gives him confidence. I see the confidence shining from his eyes. His initial despair has turned to hope.

More than anything else, it’s a wrenching, thrilling, horrible, astonishing whirl. It even exerts a faint centrifugal

want to stop, I don’t. I keep begging myself to stop, and I keep playing, and this gap, this contradiction between what I want to do and what I actually do, feels like the core of my life.

My father has a special name for this contrarian strategy. He calls it putting a blister on the other guy’s brain. With this strategy, this brutal philosophy, he stamps me for life.