I've Got Your Back Part 2

I wanted to make sure the friendship stayed alive.

I'm an early starter. I believe in the beginning of the day. Your mind is clearer then. Things don't get a chance to fester if you start out early. What's more, I wanted to establish discipline with Andre who claimed he never practiced before 2pm.

That's why I set our first practice for 11am. I was not going for dominance.

After all, Andre was the boss—he could fire me if he wanted. But I wanted to forge a new kind of professional relationship.

At the same time, Andre and I were friends, and I wanted to make sure the friendship stayed alive. Some coaches need to keep the lines clear. When work is over, they go their separate ways. When Chris Mullin first started playing for Golden State, he'd say, "On our team, we have five guys, five cabs."

To me, that sounded like the root of all evil. I knew I could never work with somebody unless we could hang out all the time: joke together, relax together, watch some ball on TV. Positiveness is all-important, and relaxation is a huge part of positiveness. Chris had so many coaches in the NBA who would scream at their players—they might've been right, but it didn't work. The message got lost.

Still, you can also be too meek. You have to be adaptable—watch your player carefully, work the angles. Be assertive sometimes, lay back other times. I can't say this often enough: every day is a different day. Paying attention to the changes, and being flexible about them, can make or break a coaching relationship.

Even so, I needed to make clear to Andre that we were going to put nothing less than an all-out effort into our work together. If we were going to be in this thing together, we had to be a team. And a lot of the time, I'd have to be the one calling the shots.

AA had always been advised just to play his game—he could go right through most people that way. But beating most people doesn't take you to the top, it only gets you near the top. And especially now, when his ranking was down and his confidence wasn't all it could be, he had to be extra careful about hungry up-and-comers.

It's a cliché that on the men's pro tennis tour, anybody, even number 450 in the world, can beat anybody else, even number 1, on a given day. It happens all the time.

Mark Petchey: a British serve and volleyer Brad knew well.

But the last thing you want, especially if you're trying to climb back up the ladder, is to be on the wrong end of an upset. The best way to avoid it is not to leave anything to chance.

Andre's first opponent at Key Biscayne that year was a Brit named Mark Petchey. You've never heard of him. Andre had heard of him, but didn't know his game that well. But I did. I'd seen him play. He was around 100 in the world, and I knew Andre could beat him, but I also knew it wouldn't be a cakewalk, and I told him exactly why.

I said, "All right, Andre. This guy is going to serve-and-volley on everything, and he's going to chip and charge when he has a chance." I gave him a ton of input. Andre couldn't believe how much I knew about Mark Petchey.

And it paid off. Andre ended up winning a very tough three-setter against Petchey, a match made all the more difficult by the fact that Andre did not play well that day.

We've all had it happen. You wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and nothing you do for the rest of the day feels exactly right. It's unpredictable, and it happens to the greats, too. And you have to be ready for it. It's easy to imagine the result of Agassi-Petchey having gone the other way—especially if Andre had known less about his opponent than he did.

The pro tennis tour is a lonely grind, and a touring pro quickly learns one thing: Look Out for Number One. Self-absorption is a survival skill on the tour. If you start thinking about other people's feelings, you might start thinking about the feelings of the guy on the other side of the net from you—who is essentially out to take money from your kids' college funds. You're out there to win, not to be sensitive.

And the more you win, unfortunately, the less sensitive you're inclined to get. Successful tennis pros are showered with money and all kinds of other perks, along with so much conditional love from so many people that you quickly grow dependent on the coddling even as you feel suspicious of it. The result, for a player, is a very reasonable level of skepticism about people's motives, and an even deeper level of self-absorption.

None of this is exactly conducive to good manners. To my everlasting regret, I—like many other players—could be a bit of a jerk when I was on the tour. A lot of people who work behind the scenes at tournaments are volunteers, eager to be close to the action, excited to be around the stars. Most tournament workers aren't going to bat an eyelash when you tell (not ask) them to get you some practice balls or a few towels.

It dawns on me now, too—might as well get it all out—that I was also guilty of acting this way. There were plenty of times, whether it was my morning coffee I wanted, or my laundry done, or my practice court booked, when I would simply say to my coach Tom Chivington, "Can you do this for me?"—leaving out one very important word. Looking back, I wish I'd been more thankful in general. Because what I realize now is that both Chiv and his wife Georgie did everything I asked so willingly. So gracefully.

They weren't doing it for thanks, but because they loved it. They loved me. And they were devoted to a single goal: helping me succeed on the pro tour. And I could've given them much more back.

Old habits die hard, and when I started working with Andre, I didn't change my ways. I still had plenty of ego from my recent playing career, and now, after all, I was an important part of an important team. And one day, Andre took notice of the way I was acting, and caught me up short.

It happened at a tournament, very early on in our time together. I'd given yet another curt "request" to yet another volunteer worker, and Andre took me aside and told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had to change my ways. "Anything that you do for me is a reflection of me," he said. "When you ask for balls, you say please and thank you."

"When you ask for a car, be grateful that you got one. Because you're not Brad Gilbert, the tennis player. You're Brad Gilbert coaching Andre Agassi, and you're here with me. And I don't want it coming back to me that you're being rude to people. Get it right. Right now."

My first reaction? Defensive, of course. Thoughts like, "What's he talking about?" And, "Where does he come off?" Well, on count one I immediately saw I didn't have a leg to stand on—the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a jerk I'd been.

As for count two, it now struck me with blunt force that Andre Agassi was the politest guy I had ever met. A lot of people don't buy it.

They see him kissing his templed fingers after he wins a match and bowing to the crowd, and think, "Phony." They see him in a press conference being thoughtful and considerate, and think, "Fake." It's all too easy, in our cynical time, to believe that this is just another star trying to manipulate his image.

Andre's dad was an Olympic boxer in Iran.

I'm here to tell you, it's no image. AA's dad, Mike, a former Olympic boxer who immigrated here from Iran in 1952, has worked in Las Vegas for Kirk Kerkorian since 1959, as a maître d' and casino manager.

Mike Agassi's life has been all about service, and he believes in it deeply—for both practical and emotional reasons. Andre told me that when he was a kid, his dad would come home with a whole pocketful of cash from tips, and that money would make the family's life better. So there's one very direct result of superb behavior.

But Andre also observed Mike walking the walk—being genuinely nice to waiters and waitresses, not just to high rollers. Mike truly believed in the Golden Rule.

He felt that whatever elevated the people you were dealing with elevated you, too. And that whatever seemed to elevate you while putting down the people you were dealing with really demeaned you.

The lesson sank in. Andre's manners are impeccable. And they're not phony, they come from the heart. It drives him crazy, at tennis tournaments, when players throw their old grips and sweaty clothes and dirty towels all over the court, or the locker room floor. Somebody is going to have to pick that stuff up, he thinks.

It makes him nuts when people with money boss waiters and waitresses around. And he honed in right away on me, the Poster Child for Behavior Improvement. "I cannot believe you don't pull the chair out for your wife," he told me. "I cannot believe you don't stand up every time she gets up from the table."

Our work together put Andre into hyperdrive in 1994. He wound up winning five titles, including the U.S. Open, where he was the first unseeded player to win since 1966. He was also the first player, ever, to move from outside the top 30 to number 2 at the end of the year.

I had taught him a few things. He had taught me a few things. But I still had a lot to learn.

All right, I got over myself. Okay, Andre made me get over myself.

Yet day by day, I was also growing a little older and more mature. My college coach Chiv had taught me how to be a team player in an individual sport.

Andre was teaching me how to be a team leader in an individual sport. He had so much wisdom about tennis, and life, that it was tempting, sometimes, to sit back and learn from him.

But he had hired me to be his coach. And I knew that the main purpose of a coach was to see things about his player that the player couldn't see. Or had forgotten to see. Or, in the heat of battle and the day-to-day grind of the tour, had just plain lost sight of.

The more I worked with Andre, the more I realized that even a guy as brilliant as he is—and I mean intellectually as well as in terms of his tennis—could drift off into unproductive territory sometimes. The longer I hung around this strange individual sport of ours, the better I understood that even the greatest need someone to help them hold on to their greatness.