Should Agassi Be Stripped of His Accomplishments?
Nov 13th, 2009 | By Dan | Category: Featured Story, UncategorizedI’m not a big Tennis fan, but when I did watch it, back when McEnroe, Conners played and into the Agassi years, it was sparingly. This past week I watched an interview Agassi given to CBS on his book, Open, that is out now. In it he reveals his use of crystal meth, his father’s controlling ways growing up, his marriage to Brooke Shields and a litany of other childhood and tennis tales.
What most people are taking from the book is his addiction and use of crystal meth during his playing days. What I mostly took from it was his father’s controlling ways and how parents try to live through their children. As a toddler Agassi’s father taped ping pong paddles to his hands. Agassi is forced to play tennis by his father. Agassi’s father is so determined to make his son a tennis star that when Andre wins a trophy for sportsmanship his father smashes it to pieces, because it was short of winning. Agassi grew to hate tennis and claims he still does to this day. Confessing to his now wife, former tennis star, Steffi Graf, on their first date that he hated tennis. It boggles my mind how parents don’t see what they are doing. I’ve seen it in pro sports, including Tiger Wood’s father as well as on the little league fields and cheerleading tryouts. I’m not sure if parents are trying to relive their glory days or trying to make up for their failed glory days.
Should He Be Punished?
As I said before the part that most people took out of his book and the part that CBS decided to concentrate on was his use of crystal meth and subsequent addiction during his later playing days. Agassi was recovering from a wrist injury and was stressing over his upcoming marriage to Brooke Shields when his assistant offered him gack(crystal meth). He says, “You want to get high with me? On what? Gack. What the hell’s gack? Crystal meth. Why do they call it gack? Because that’s the sound you make when you’re high . Make you feel like Superman, dude.”
Agassi ends up failing a drug test and his excuse to the tennis governing body was he accidentally ingested the drug. The governing body bought it and it was never revealed. The problem I’m having is the way some tennis stars and former tennis stars are reacting. Navratilova being the harshest…comparing Agassi to Roger Clemens. See thats where I have a problem. Its not like he was taking steroids to enhance his performance. He was taking a drug that was disabling his performance. Yeah he lied to the governing body, but how many times have we seen a athlete tell the truth after testing positive for drug use? Rarely. A lot of tennis athletes have came to Agassi’s defense including Andy Roddick and Serena Williams.
Should Agassi be stripped of his past accomplishments? I don’t think so. He wasn’t taking a performance enhancing drug..he was a taking a drug that was inhibiting his performance. Lot of people been down that road..one hit during a tough time during their life and they become addicted. If anything this should be a story to the youth out there, not only those in tennis, but those in all walks of life.
It blows my mind when people want to strip athletes of their “titles” when it’s revealed they did a drug that would actually hinder their performance, not help it. Snowboarder doing pot losing his gold medal is just the most egregious of the known occurrences to date.
The tennis governing body had a choice to make back then, and they took the cowards way out, the enablers way out. It’s doubtful people on the board thought his excuse was legitimate, but they didn’t press the matter further, which is actually the crime here. Those boards are set up to ensure the well-being and fairness of all players, not to give people that they know and like a fair pass because of a plausible explanation. The more I think about it, the angrier I get, because with illicit drugs, he could have collapsed on that tennis court at any moment during his using days. It’s lucky that he didn’t, but that’s one reason for drug testing, or one reason drugs are so bad – they cause so much damage.
The thing is, this wasn’t even a speculation, not even a possibility in some people’s minds that Agassi could have been on drugs. The fact that he was so open and honest about it in his autobiography, tells me he should be commended for that, not punished.
As for parents – some of them just don’t get it. It’s not all about glory days… some of them never stop to ask their child, “what are YOUR dreams?” Some parents never step back and think that this tiny person is not a clone, but a living, breathing separate entity that may have some of the same interests, but not necessarily all of them, and may have some of the same talents, or possibly, far more and far different than the parents. Mostly, I think it is just a matter of never considering that this is a separate person, not a “mini-me”. It’s so tragic to see, especially in a case like this.
Where are the online excerpts?
Yeah the governing body knew EXACTLY what was up when they chose to ignore it. Who accidentally ingests crystal meth??