Father's House Blog

I have never been a fan of tennis, I’ll be honest, but even I can appreciate a great tennis player when I see one and one of the finest of all was the American champion, Andre Agassi. Agassi was at one time number one in the world. He won eight grand slam titles (including a Wimbledon title) and a gold medal in the Olympic Games. Born in Las Vegas in 1970, he turned professional at the age of sixteen and by the end of his first year was already ranked no 91 in the world. He ended his second year ranked no 25 after having won his first major title. By the end of the following year he was ranked no 3 in the world, behind Ivan Lendl and Mats Wilander. In 1992 he won his first grand slam title at Wimbledon, beating Goran Ivanisevic in a thrilling five set final. In April 1995 – a year in which he won 73 matches - Agassi was ranked the world’s number one player for the first time in his career. He subsequently won many tournaments before retiring in 2006 after suffering serious back pain brought on by sciatica. He won over 30 million dollars in prize money and was respected by all his peers for his unparalleled ability to return serve and his amazing capacity to dominate play from the base line. Married to another multiple grand slam tennis champion – Steffi Graf – Agassi remains to this day one of the most entertaining figures in modern tennis.

In spite of all this success, Andre Agassi has very recently admitted to hating tennis. The very sport that made him so rich and famous was actually something he detested. Why did Agassi live in the tension of such a glaring paradox? The answer lies in his relationship with his father, Iranian born Michael Agassi. Andre Agassi’s recent autobiography Open gives us some profound insights into this troubled relationship. Mike Agassi regarded his son Andre as the means by which he could fulfil his own frustrated desire for great wealth. He aimed to do this by turning his boy into a world famous tennis champion. From the very beginning of his life, Andre was consequently subjected to an intensive regime of practice in the tennis court that his father had built in the backyard of the family home in Las Vegas. Even while Andre was lying as a baby in a crib, he had tennis balls hanging in a makeshift mobile over his head. As he was later to say, “My dad was convinced that if my eyes were going to move around as a baby, I might as well be looking at a tennis ball”. His father was later to provide his own rationale for this and other extraordinary measures during his son’s infancy and childhood: “I believed I could hardwire Andre’s body to swing a racket to make contact with a secondary object, and in doing so boost his hand-eye co-ordination.” Andre was just six months old when this process of disciplined training started. By the age of two he was running round his backyard with a tennis racket that had been taped by his father to his arm. Andre was truly being groomed for greatness.
    
Michael Agassi’s dream was that his son would be the world’s number one and as far as he was concerned the end justified the means. And the means were harsh. Later he would answer his critics by saying, “People say I pushed my kids too hard, and I nearly destroyed them. And you know what? They’re right. I was too hard on them. I made them feel like what they did was never good enough. But after the childhood I had, fighting for every scrap in Iran, I was determined to give my kids a better life.” To push his son further and harder, Mike Agassi now bought a machine called ‘the dragon’ which propelled a tennis ball at the speed of 110 mph. Andre said that he flinched every time he heard the dragon roaring. He would add, “My father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each day, I’ll hit 17,500 balls each week, and at the end of one year I’ll have hit nearly one million balls. He believes in maths. Numbers, he says, don’t lie. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable.”
   
There is little doubt that Mike Agassi’s bullying succeeded. His son Andre did indeed become the world’s best tennis player. But it all came at a cost – a permanently broken relationship between father and son. Perhaps the most telling moment of all came when Andre won the Wimbledon grand slam event. His father wasn’t even there. When Andre phoned him to break the news of his astounding success, all his dad could say was that he shouldn’t have lost the fourth set. No wonder Andre Agassi once said, “I hate tennis, hate it with all my heart, and still I keep playing, keep hitting all morning, and all afternoon, because I have no choice.”   
     
Andre Agassi’s recent comments highlight one of the most devastating consequences of what we call the orphan heart condition - striving. Striving is the drive to earn love and value through performance. It is the no 1 symptom and sign of the orphan heart and those who are inside the church – Christian believers – are by no means exempt from it. It is amazing how easy it is to start living a driven life based on performance rather than a joyful life based on position. The Bible calls this state ‘slavery’ and we are told to avoid it like the plague. The apostle Paul makes this very clear in Galatians 4.6-7 when he says:

Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, "Abba, Father." So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.

Paul was writing to people who were being deceived by a group of Jewish believers who were arguing for a return to a works or performance mentality. In other words, they were trying to seduce others into thinking that they had to earn the Father’s love through striving. Paul counters this by calling that kind of behaviour ‘slavery’. He clearly states that we have been saved for sonship not slavery. We are not to live in the constant fear of God’s disapproval and punishment but we are to live under the Father’s smile, knowing that he is our Daddy and that he loves us with amazing grace, with unmerited but extreme love.

I know of only one antidote to the slavery mindset and that is an encounter with the Father’s love. Those who are caught in the performance trap will only be set free by what Paul speaks about in Galatians 4.4-7, an experience of the Spirit of adoption which leads to the Abba, Daddy cry of worship from our hearts. Those who are imprisoned in a life of striving need to hear the Father’s tender words of love and affection. Only an experience of the loving Spirit of adoption will break us free from the kind of slavery we might call the Agassi syndrome.