Blog

So I loved the book, admired the heck out of the craft. But there were two things I would have pushed if I were editing it. One of the central themes of the book, demonstrated beautifully, was that in spite of being one of the best in the world, Agassi HATED tennis. Really hated it. If I were Moehringer, I would have pushed him harder on that: Clearly he hated the pressure of expectations. He hated the toll it took on his body. He hated the loneliness and isolation, the endless repetition and the way it consumed his life. But did he hate the way it felt when his body executed a virtuoso maneuver, when he was able to leap from the court, swing perfectly, meet the ball at the sweetest possible spot and drive it over 100 miles per hour to the exact square inch of the court he’d chosen? When he was able to do that over and over again? Did he hate the challenge of the intricate chess match? The way tennis forces you to live in the moment, experience the primal fullness of battle without severed limbs and rotting corpses?

In addition, he discusses all the ways in which he rebelled, hoping that he’d get him tossed out of the Florida tennis academy which felt like a prison to him. But Moehringer needed to make him address why it was that he didn’t do the one thing he could have done to insure getting tossed out. Play badly, lose consistently, stop getting better. If he hated tennis so much, that would have seemed like the easy, obvious way out, yet he couldn’t do it.

Whenever you have an apparent contradiction in a set of facts, that’s exactly where you should concentrate your questioning, and where the answers will prove the most revealing.

The related issue is: Agassi never addresses what it was that made him, someone who hated what he was doing, stand out above all the other driven and pushed prodigies in the game. What was it that made him special, even among the tennis elite? He never even tries to address that, which would have been fascinating.

Open by Andre Agassi (and perhaps more relevantly for the purposes of this post, J.R. Moehringer) is a master class in how to engage readers by creating a story arc. Especially in biographies/autobiographies, there is a deadly tendency to include huge laundry lists of events and facts about a life just because, well, it’s a biography. Open includes plenty of facts that might have been groaningly boring, down to the minutiae of long ago and long forgotten sequences of strokes on an obscure  tennis court somewhere. But every single one of them is included only if it makes a point in the larger argument of the story.

It’s an axiom among tennis players that the surest sign of amateur play is hitting strokes with no purpose in mind beyond getting the ball over the net, or hitting it hard. Any expert player is trying to accomplish something very specific, something that itself fits into the frame of a larger game plan, with every swing of the racquet. The same is true of writing. The real pros are loath to waste a single word that doesn’t add to the larger meaning of the piece as a whole.

But how is it possible to tell a fairly complete tale of a life history in a random world without throwing in random facts? That’s where having vision comes in. Agassi wasn’t just writing a book because his famous career could command a seven-figure advance, he was writing it because he’d come to see his life as a desperate search for meaning, meaning that he ultimately found. His arc begins in a hell on earth, under the tonnage of his father’s thumb and the heat of his rage, then ascends through the central paradox of his life – that in order to save himself, he must learn to love the very instrument of his torture — to a hard won wisdom.

Agassi had a story to tell, and Moehringer was expert enough to help him tell it in the most riveting way.

Perhaps the greatest verbal and narrative genius currently in operation is the PR team guiding Tiger’s damage control. The wording of his statements has been pure poetry. And the overall strategy is unerring. His statement today about taking “indefinite leave” from golf is the latest tour de force of PR thinking. His team realized the damage was so severe, they could never spin out of it. They had to create an entirely new narrative: The Resurrection and Return. So first, Tiger had to go away, disappear, die, in a sense. Only then could he reemerge after some “indefinite” amount of time (to be determined by his PR team taking the national temperature), at which point the story would be no more about Tiger the Hound, the Big Disappointment, but the New, Chastened, Rededicated and Refocused Tiger. The Comeback Kid.

I had this great encounter with Pete, the uber-personal trainer at the Y. He’s a guy you might take for a stereotypical jock.  He’s normally all about new ways to stress your core, but the other day he’d just read a book — a BOOK! — that had bowled him over, and he couldn’t stop talking about it. It was like someone newly (and gaggingly) in love who can’t stop going on about his beloved. And they say narrative is dead. Before we write the obit, we’ve got to account for Pete.

We did a small personality piece on Pete in The Washington Post Magazine, and in talking with him about that, it became apparent he didn’t read the magazine, or even the newspaper much. So his passion for the book, Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield about the battle of Thermopylae, doubly surprised me.

“When I started getting near the end, I began to slow down because I didn’t want it to stop. And then when I read the last page, I almost began to cry,” he said.

Yes, the book, which is really about the culture of the Spartan warrior, does feature some rather extreme training methods (and by extreme I mean frequently  fatal). So clearly, that got Pete’s professional attention. But it’s not what made him want to cry when he ran out of pages.

Pressfield does a great job of immersing his readers in an alien world, featuring unspeakable brutality, yet full engagement in the real stuff of life (which always includes the proximity of  death). And he’s a master at building a narrative, creating characters you care about and constantly putting them in situations of high suspense.  He also deeply understands the technique of leaving key storylines hovering  in the background while he forges ahead with another high-action sequence. The unresolved issues, usually emotional ones, make the characters much more highly charged as they face the physical and tactical challenges of battle. The tension and excitement in the foreground effortlessly takes on a third dimension because of what you know about the emotional challenges pushed out of sight, but not forgotten.

Also, there is an oddly romantic appeal, especially to guys like Pete, of a life that is immediate, physical, close to the elements, purged of the falseness of modernity. A movie might also move Pete, but movies happen to you. You don’t feel like you are a participant, up inside the screen with all the characters. The power of written narrative is it brings the reader inside the pages, allows him to live there in his imagination. The “END” on the final page was a rude eviction notice, one worth crying over.

“I’m just waiting long enough to forget some of it,” Pete said, “then I’m going to read it again.”