不同的網球高手，不同的網球老爸

一點點有關大明星的童年往事。還有麥克

阿嘉西是如何訓練孩子的。
From Tennis Magazine @ 2003 By Miller Sports Group LLC.

PETE and ANDRE; ANDRE and PETE

They are what tennis needs more of: grown men. Over the years, the public has developed a relationship with them, a continuous connection that it doesn't have with any other players. Maybe one day we'll know Lleyton Hewitt and Andy Roddick this well, but for now they are superficial characters, rude bashers with sticky hair.

Agassi and Sampras have known each other for two-thirds of their lives. We have known them for half.

They start as two small boys, Sampras 8 years old, Agassi 9 or 10, and they are on a court in Northridge, California, about to play each other for the first time. Agassi, if you can believe it, is the bigger of the two, recalling years later that Sampras "comes up to about my chin." But Agassi has no real ground strokes yet, and Sampras remembers saying of him, "He's all trick shots." Then again, Sampras has no serve, and with his two-handed backhand he's a tiny baseline grinder.

They could not be more different, and the same will be said of the way they will go about things from this point on. Sampras will worship tradition and study the greats and attain a pure classicism. Agassi will become a work of junk fiction and then mature into an artist.

Neither can remember who won that first match.

We cannot remember, or imagine, the game without them.

ANDRE

"How old do you have to be before people forgive you for your past?" Agassi wanted to know.

This was a couple of years ago, after he had finished an exhaustive interview in Las Vegas in which ESPN's Roy Firestone had brought up all the old bad-boy episodes, the blurted insults and the tantrums and the tanks and the weird haircuts. Agassi answered the questions, but afterwards, as he left the studio and climbed into his SUV to drive home, the conversation still bothered him. "At what point do people let you move past your childhood?" he wondered. "Is that ever going to happen?"

Agassi drove through Vegas at a sedate speed. Against all odds, he had made a man out of himself and he took pride in that. He wanted a little credit for that. He pointed to the left while passing the Andre Agassi Boys & Girls Club, established to benefit at-risk kids. His foundation also had funded a shelter for abused children and a charter school, the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy. Agassi liked to say of the school, "It's not the first two words that matter, it's the last three."

Agassi, himself, did not grow up as a normal kid taking college-prep classes. His childhood had been surrendered to the obsessive desire of his father, Mike, to make a tennis champion. Andre was a certified prodigy — on the junior circuit at 7, shipped off to Florida to train with Nick Bollettieri at 13, and by the time he was 18 the No. 3 player the world. In that taxing process, he also had become his own biggest opponent.

Later that afternoon in Vegas the question of the past came up again, in a meeting with Nike over the design of new sneakers. Andre wasn't pleased with the cartoon-like shape and colours of the shoes. He was stripped down now, to a basic and unpretentious adult. "Look what they're trying to take me back to," he lamented mockingly. He wanted a design that reflected the lean, clean lines of his adulthood, not the thrashings and yowlings of his adolescence.

Still, Andre knew that much had been given as well as taken by the singular way Mike Agassi taught tennis. Other kids had the schooled strokes grooved by country-club teachers, $25-an-hour backhands with proper mechanics and racquet-back preparation. Not Agassi. He stood at mid-court while his father stood at the net and fired balls at him as hard and fast as possible. Shot after, the boy would whip his racquet around more tightly, shortening his swing and picking the ball up earlier and earlier, until he was almost volleying his ground strokes. Then Mike would order his son, "Faster!"

As Rita Agassi, Andre's older sister, once said of the way Mike taught tennis, of the kind of man he was, "My father was a sober drunk."

But if Mike was drunk on tennis, he was also inspired. His methods were based on his intuitive grasp of velocity and speed-to-power ratios. Several years ago, Mike privately expounded on the theory underlying Andre's strokes. Standing in his Vegas living room, with a tennis court and desert dunes visible beyond the picture window, he held up a gauzy cotton handkerchief and waved it around. "See," he said, "is that going to hurt anyone?"

Then he twirled the handkerchief around and around until it formed a tightly wound whip. He snapped it in the air and said, "Now that will hurt someone."

Mike stared out the window, at the court with the ball machine at the far end. It mostly went unused now that Andre was grown, had a home of his own, and rarely played at his father's.

"I wish there were some little ones to teach," Mike said sadly.

But maybe it's just as well Mike didn't put his mark on any more children. Agassi remembers being paraded around on a tennis court at the Tropicana in Las Vegas, his father advertising his prodigy to visiting pros. Once, when Agassi lost a junior tournament, Mike took the runner-up trophy and hurled it into a nearby garbage can.

In that moment, a lifelong mutineer was born. "You know what?" Agassi has grown fond of saying. "I'd rather feel I missed out on some good tennis than some good living."

PETE

He always has been a great killer of momentum, all but his own.

He abbreviated so many points, squelched so many hopes, with that great blast of a serve. He lulled opponents and audiences alike with the trancelike rhythm of his game and the monotony with which he acquired titles and records. But Sampras played complete and deeply realised tennis, too; he never bored the connoisseurs or those who understood that beneath the seeming indifference lay a craving for the game so powerful that he twice vomited on the court and once even wept on it. As his former coach Paul Annacone said, "Pete makes it look too easy. People watch him win and think, `That doesn't look too hard.'"

The ease of his game did Sampras a disservice: It obscured his supreme professionalism, no common commodity these days. We thought Sampras would always be there. He's been more than just great; he's been dependably, reliably great. For more than a decade, we could count on him: 64 singles titles, while the lurkers and bangers and transients came and went. He never really changed.

Sampras won the U.S. Open as a 19-year-old in 1990 with a thoroughly unaffected manner and a quirky sense of humour. When told the President might call him, he smiled, grimaced shyly, and said, "The phone's off the hook."

Asked to describe himself at the time, he said, "I'm a normal 19-year-old with a very unusual job, doing very unusual things."

But that was only partly right. He was a fragile, touchy creature, too. Before he became an invincible champion, he was all lethargy and sensitivity, not a good player in the heat, or in the mornings, and not yet insensitive to pressure, either. Two years would pass before he won his second major, and of them he says, "I had to learn how to play tennis. I was the greenhorn, the kid who had to do it all by himself, learn it all by himself. Nobody told him anything."

Sampras has always felt this curious sense of isolation, almost as if he were orphaned on the court. And if Pete and Andre seem different, what about Mike Agassi and Sam Sampras? What of the way Sam would drop little Pete off at junior tournaments and then simply turn and leave? Pete remembers being abandoned, the sight of Sam's back, moving away. Sam was too nervous to watch, sure. But he also wasn't certain he approved of this whole costly and troublesome junior circuit. Sampras would stand on the court, watching his father retreat, and years later he said, "I still remember feeling alone."

Sam made a self-sufficient player of him, and a self-effacing one, too. On the afternoon Sampras had a big win and was interviewed by the press for the first time, his father cautioned him: "just tell them you were lucky."

The next day Sampras lost. As he sat there, brooding, his father tapped him on the shoulder, pointing to the winner — and new darling of the press.

"See that?" he said. "That's what happens."