I've Got Your Back Part 3

Brad Gilbert

Every coach loves to talk about his big successes. I want to tell you what it's like in the trenches.

A player-coach relationship is a little bit like a marriage, and as every husband knows, every marriage has its ups and downs. Andre Agassi and I had an amazing working relationship from 1994 to 2002; and we have a close friendship that continues to this day. And I think we'd both agree that while our friendship has been rock solid the entire way, the greatest tests to our work together came in 1997 and the first half of 1999.

In the spring of 1997, Andre married Brooke Shields. Just as he was trying to get his new marriage on its feet, he found himself in the crosshairs of the world's telephoto lens on a daily basis. Something had to give, and what gave first was his tennis game.

Tennis seemed to be just about the last thing on Andre's mind in 1997. He didn't play the Australian Open in January; he skipped the French Open and Wimbledon. He basically began playing that summer, and he was out of shape physically and mentally—overweight and under-motivated. In the U.S. Open that September, he played Patrick Rafter in the round of 16, and even though Rafter started cramping in the fourth set, Andre wasn't in shape to take advantage of it.

He lost the match (and Rafter wound up winning the Open), and we took a month off. Then I thought, "Maybe we should start to build from here." His first tourney back was the Eurocard Open in Stuttgart.

Andre's ranking had fallen so low that he had to be 'Wild-carded into Stuttgart that October. His opponent in the first round was Todd Martin. And Andre walked onto that court and proceeded to play one of the most uninspired matches I had ever seen him play. Martin beat him 6-4, 6-4, but it really wasn't even that close. Andre was an absolute shadow of himself out there. After that match was over, Andre Agassi was officially number 141 in the world.

One hundred forty-one! This was a guy who was born to be one of the all-time greats, a guy who had already won Wimbledon and, during our tenure together since 1994, the U.S. Open and the Australian. This was a guy who, at age twenty-seven, I firmly felt, still had greatness in him. And after walking off that court in Stuttgart, Andre looked me in the eye and asked me if I thought he ought to hang it up.

Now, I'd love to be able to give you a Knute Rockne moment here—but I'm going to have to give you a Brad Gilbert moment instead. Because the truth is that my 1997 with Andre had bummed me out. Had made me feel helpless. What does a coach do when his guy is struggling?

Some coaches—the kind who say "we won" but "he lost"—split when the chips are down. Some might try to do a little motivational bullying. Neither one is my style.

My coach Tom Chivington taught me to be positive in every fiber of my being: If there's anything I want to accomplish in this article, it's to demonstrate that fact to you, to tell you how all-important positivity is, to show you what it's done for my players and me, and to tell you how I came to be that way.

My job as a coach, my religion as a coach, is never, ever, to pass along my bad moods (whatever they happen to be about) to my player. My faith as a coach is to take any situation, no matter how bad it is, and find some positive spin for it. There's no quicker route to crashing and burning than for both player and coach to be down.

And so when Andre looked me in the eye and asked me if I thought it was all over for him, I gave him a little tough love. I said, "You're 141 in the world for no other reason than that you've lost your love for tennis. The game hasn't passed you by. If you put your nose to the grindstone and work your ass off, you can get back to number 1. It's all about dedicating yourself to training, playing, and having a plan. You can't play tennis part-time and be great."

And Andre said, "Well, what should we do?"

I told him. Step one, we had to pull him out of the Paris Indoor and all the other tournaments for the rest of the year. He simply wasn't ready to play them, physically or mentally. Step two, he had to go home to Las Vegas and train his ass off—run hills and lift weights under the guidance of his superb trainer Gil Reyes, hit twenty thousand tennis balls with me. Step three, I felt he had to get back into competitive tennis, when he got back in, on a lower level.

It was exactly the same as when a .340 hitter has to go down to Triple-A to regain his stroke a little bit. There are several tiers to the men's pro tennis tour, and somewhere near the bottom are the challenger events—small-money tournaments for wannabes who want to build up enough ATP points to qualify for the main tour. Andre hadn't played a challenger since his first year on the tour, at age sixteen. His first time back was a doozy.

The event was in his hometown, Vegas, in November. Andre won his first four rounds and made it to the final, where he faced one Christian Vinck, a young German who was number 202 in the world. And Vinck, no doubt psyched up for his big chance, played the match of his life. Andre didn't play as well as he could have; Vinck played out of his mind: end of story.

Vinck won, 6-4, 7-5. I have rarely seen Andre so ticked off. "How could I lose to this guy?" he said—among other things. There's one thing you have to understand about Andre Agassi: Despite his very real manners and humility, he has plenty of ego. You don't have the kind of gifts he has, and do what he's done, without it. If you're engaging in single combat, in very public circumstances, against some of the best athletes in the world, you need to have self-confidence bordering on cockiness to get you through.

At the same time, though, he really is an incredibly intelligent and sensitive man. And so I think his anger after that match had much more to do with disappointment at not living up to his enormous talent than with any kind of contempt for Christian Vinck.

After all, Andre was with the program: He never bitched for one second about playing in challengers. When he said, "How can I lose to this guy?" I knew exactly where he was coming from. "Dude, don't worry about it," I told him. "We got five matches in this week—let's go to Burbank next week and get after it." Burbank, of course, being the site of the next challenger tournament.

Andre couldn't believe that I could spin his loss in Vegas into a positive. (Sometimes I even surprise myself.) But what did he do next? He went to Burbank and won - counting the loss to Vinck, he wound up winning nine out of ten matches in two weeks. The minor leagues were working for him. At the end of 1997, he had raised his ranking to number 105 in the world—not spectacular, but a start. "Let's hit the ground running in 1998," I told him, "and get things going."

Now, the Knute Rockne version of the story would be if Andre started knocking off tournament after tournament in 1998—can't you just see the movie montage of him raising the champion's cups at the French, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open?

Life isn't a movie. Andre played very well in 1998—by the end of the year, his ranking had gone up 99 places to number 6—but for whatever reason, he didn't play well in the major tournaments. At the Australian Open, he lost a tough five-setter to Alberto Berasategui of Spain—the first time Andre had ever lost a match after being up two sets to none.

At the French, he lost another five-setter to an up-and-coming Russian genius named Marat Safin—just a bad first-round draw. At Wimbledon, he was tinkering with a different racquet. Tommy Haas sent him out in the second round. So Andre went back to his old stick, and raised his game all summer: won in Washington and L.A.; got to the semis in Montreal. Then he lost still another five-setter to Karol Kucera at the U.S. Open.

So much for Knute Rockne.

Well, you know what? I thought that in every one of those majors he lost, he was better than the guy he lost to—but I also didn't think it was the end of the world. When Andre and I talked about his 1998, we decided that he had to get back to doing well in the majors again. He had to do things differently.

But what?

All athletes play with pain. Most of the time you work through it—I spent most of my playing career working through it—but sometimes it stops you cold. And once you're sidelined, it's rough.

Not too many people care about you but yourself. I've always said the pro tennis tour is like a treadmill: If you fall off, it just keeps on going. And it's hard as hell to climb back on.

Andre's always been a guy who's in tune with his whole life, not just the tennis part—and when the non-tennis part got out of whack, his body did, too. Then he put his pride aside, went down to the minors, and made regaining his love for the game a priority. Admirable. He worked his ass off, and he got results. But his body still kept giving him trouble.

A huge part of my job is trying to see through my guy's eyes. A less-known part of the gig is being able to step back and see the guy in a way he can't see himself. When Andre's body and spirit were both so banged up that he felt he just had to stop playing for a while, I found myself (to my surprise) disagreeing with him. This had nothing to do with my pride, or his. It was all about reaching the goal we'd set out to attain together.