Keeping His Eye on the Ball

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After a year blighted by loss of form and injury, the comeback king is ready to do it all again. As he prepares for what could be his last season, Andre Agassi talks about why he's still doing the thing he was " born to do".

In a hotel in Lyon, he is looking back on a year that has been made all the more difficult by the extraordinarily triumphant one which preceded it. For a variety of reasons, he says, he " has lost his focus", and the literal implication of that cliché seems to trouble him; he has taken his eye off the ball, and for Agassi, these days, that inattention has an almost sacrilegious quality. " It's been a year that has been physically impairing and draining and that takes you down a level; it's tough, emotionally, mentally and physically, and as a result I feel very far off where I was, " he says, a little wearily. " Your experience helps speed up the process of recovery, but because you're older you end up asking yourself: do I still have the ability to do it? "

This time last year Andre Agassi was doing it better than ever, at the peak of an extraordinary resurgence unprecedented in modern tennis. Having slipped at one time to 141st in the world, and on the verge of quitting, he bad rebuilt his game to reach the final of three Grand Slams, winning two, finishing the season as world No. 1 with faultless, instinctive tennis. John McEnroe watching him practise was awed by how hard he was hitting the ball; no one, he observed, had ever struck it earlier, or more sweetly.

But such perfection, as Agassi knows better than most, can only ever be fleeting. A couple of days later, after he had won a match, he was doubled over and washed-up, vomiting into a flowerpot at courtside. He went home under medical supervision, and his confidence, fitness and game, he insists, have still not quite recovered.

Throughout his career, Agassi has dealt only in extremes. He says, " I go hard, but that intensity extracts a toll." Agassi puts his body under absolute strain when he competes. And the vulnerability of his highly-strung frame is more than matched by his apparent emotional rawness. Agassi's dip in form this time around has been exacerbated not only by a succession of injuries but also by the devastating news that his mother and sister were both suffering from breast cancer.

There are few sports that so relentlessly expose the individual to psychological scrutiny as tennis, and Andre Agassi's personal rites of passage over the 15 years have been the most vivid of its spectacles. He refers to the game, more often than not, in abstract terms, presumably because it has always meant so much more to him than simply hitting balls. " You don't know anything else when you start playing, " he explains of his growing up on court. " I did not know life away from it. There are times when you don't imagine ever doing anything different."

It is the presentation of this internal drama that has made Agassi among the most compelling of all sports stars, an archetypal figure for our neurotic and solipsistic times. No tennis player has seemed so at odds with his gifts or so questioning of his purpose. Even now, having achieved much of what he set out to achieve, when he talks about tennis, it is as if you are listening to Hamlet quibble with mortality. " At the end of the day I need to do it or not to do it; that has always been the question for me."

As a younger man, he seemed sometimes to be intent on squandering his talent, the prodigy who could not grow up. He turned professional in a blaze of hype at 16, but by the age of 21 he seemed already strung out, eating badly, losing games for fun, his ever changing appearance apparently reflecting his fragile self-esteem. Looking back on that time, he reflects: " Maybe I was rewarded too quickly. I came at a time when tennis needed somebody. I had so much notoriety before I had really accomplished anything great. I was doing commercials, but I had never won a Grand Slam. That left me feeling all image and no substance."

When the time comes for him to step away from the game, does he think he will know the right moment for that? " I hope so, " he says, " Certainly I'm more afraid about how it is at the end right now than what happens after. I've concentrated all my efforts on tennis, but as soon as I start thinking about how it is going to end then I guess it's over. In thinking about the end, the end is already there. What I hope is that it happens in a way I am proud of." In the meantime, all Andre Agassi wants to focus his attention on is the next ball, then the one after that.

1. Which of the following does the opening paragraph of the text NOT imply about Andre Agassi?

4. As shown in paragraph 7, Agassi's overall attitude towards tennis seems to be one of

Завідувач кафедри __________ Т.І. Крехно Викладачi _______________І.С. Лученцова