Miguel A. Herguedas
Updated Wednesday, February 21, 2024-18:19
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On April 30, 1986, just one day after turning 16 and becoming a professional tennis player,
Andre Agassi
closed his first business deal with Nike at the Rusty Pelican restaurant in Newport Beach (California).
That day, the only adult accompanying him was his brother
Philip
, 23, who had to urgently phone his father before accepting the conditions: $20,000 for the first year and $25,000 for the next.
Just a few months later,
Tinker Hatfield
took a flight to Las Vegas to meet that teenager.
Phil Knight
, the founder of Nike, had personally delivered an ambitious project to his best designer.
Hatfield would call it
the Air Tech Challenge
.
Neither he nor Agassi suspected then that this assignment was going to forever change the way of understanding tennis.
Before beginning the first sketches, Hatfield scribbled three words at the top of the paper:
Anti-Country Club
.
That was the idea under which he would develop everything.
That was the definitive reading of him after numerous conversations with that boy, whom he considered the perfect vehicle to turn tennis into something different.
Nike needed a nemesis for
Michael Chang
, recently signed by Reebok.
And Hatfield wanted to banish the image of a sport anchored in clubs and academies, with so many good children walking their white polo in the shade of the pergolas.
After reviewing Nike's previous collections, he realized that they were not even remotely close to those of basketball or
running
.
Agassi, with his quirky
mullet
and his anti-establishment pose, was the perfect piece to fit the puzzle.
Provided, of course, that that piece did not break.
"They say that what I want is to attract attention, to stand out from the rest. In fact - like with my Mohican crest - what I try is to hide. They say that I intend to change the customs of the game, when in reality what I try is for the game does not change me. They call me a rebel, but I have no intention of being one, and I only participate in a normal and ordinary adolescent rebellion. (...) I behave the same as when I lived at the Bollettieri Academy: I resist to authority, I experiment with identity, I send messages to my father, I rebel against the lack of freedom of choice in my life.
This is how Agassi remembers those days in
Open
(AKA Publishing, 2009), one of the best books on sports - thanks to
JR Moehringer
- ever published.
The one that summarizes the contradictions of the champion of eight Grand Slam tournaments.
"I hate tennis, I hate it with all my soul, and yet I keep playing, I keep hitting the ball all morning and all afternoon, because I have no alternative."
"The image is everything"
Agassi's conflict was embodied in The Dragon, a ball-throwing machine modified by
Mike
, his father, which spit out hundreds of balls in each training session.
That nightmare would never leave him.
Nor during the 1989-1991 three-year period, the one established by Nike to consecrate Andre on the media altar.
The
hot lava
of their Air Tech Challenge - halfway between basketball and tennis - rose, inch by inch, until it flooded the lycra of their tights, the
jean
tones of their famous acid-washed pants, the gradients of their t-shirts. fluorescents.
His head, in short, was boiling like a volcano.
Somehow he felt imprisoned by that phrase ("Image is everything") with which in 1989 he had finished off an advertisement while driving a Lamborghini.
"They say that this slogan shows that I am nothing more than a charlatan, that I trade on my fame, that I only care about money, not tennis. I find that omnipresent slogan and the wave of hostility, criticism and sarcasm that it provokes, atrocious to me. "I feel betrayed by the advertising agency, by the Canon executives, by the sports journalists, by the fans. I feel abandoned," he recalled in
Open
.
How far could I continue down that path?
"At that time he felt very manipulated, seeing that they were doing business with his identity. When they pressure you, you can rebel through an image, like that famous wig he used to hide his incipient baldness,"
mental coach
Vicente Cuairán
explains to this newspaper. , with more than a decade of experience on the circuit.
Cuairán refers to that Roland Garros of 1990, when Agassi had to face too many questions from journalists about his clothes.
"It amazes me that they care so much. And it amazes me that I care so much that they write it down correctly. But in reality, what happens to me is that I prefer them to write about the color of my pants than about my character defects," he recalls. , with Moehringer's hypnotic prose.
After seeing the clay of Paris stained with those Air Tech Challenge II, the president of the French Federation (FFT) threatened with a dress code similar to that of Wimbledon.
Agassi, in a 1991 Nike advertisement.
Agassi felt devoured by his own image, the one he himself had hoped to shape during so many meetings with Nike's senior staff.
Hatfield, the genius in charge of the Air Jordan since 1988, was accompanied by
Wilson Smith
,
Devon Burt
and
Tom Andrich
.
When Agassi suggested a lime green color and a Z-shaped motif, he actually saw his dream car.
A transcript of the Corvette that was bought with the money from his first ATP title in Brazil.
The advertising slogan of the Air Tech Challenge was a very studied spit at the
establishment
: "Irreverence. Justified."
A few weeks after that Roland Garros with the hairpiece, when Agassi fell in the final against
Andrés Gómez
, President
George HW Bush
allowed himself to be photographed at Camp David with
Chris Evert
dressed in
hot lava
.
The record of the
majors
finally debuted at Wimbledon 1992. By then, Agassi was no longer only the best returner on the circuit and the great hope of American tennis, but a symbol of genuine transgression.
However, his game did not exactly arouse the consensus of critics.
It is enough to rescue a few lines from
David Foster Wallace
in
String Theory
, his famous essay published in
Esquire
(1996).
"One of the reasons why public interest has waned in recent years is that the dominant style, based on power, lacks pretensions. Look at Agassi once: such a small man and such a big player lack delicacy and his movements are more like those of a
heavy metal
musician than those of an athlete.
"I tell myself: if I win this game, I retire. And if I lose it, I retire. I lose. And I don't retire"
Andre Agassi, in
Open
.
The rivalry with
Pete Sampras
, exploited to the point of exhaustion by the press, and the overwhelming legacy of
John McEnroe
complicated things even more.
"There may be some case, very remote, that this level of tension is good for a player, but the normal thing is that this demand ends with symptoms of anxiety, depression or behavioral problems. Agassi's key was located in his point of demand, which was not directed in the right direction. The focus had to be on how to respond to adversity, to the level of errors that could be allowed in a sport where one was going to make mistakes, at least, 15 times in a single match. Or learn to understand it as part of the process or it was impossible for him to be able to play in a satisfactory way," explains Cuairán.
One of the most delirious moments came in October 1995, during the first round in Stuttgart, where he had to finish the match with a shoe that was lent to him from the stands.
"I feel emotionally exhausted and I wonder why I just don't stop. Why don't I get out of there. Why don't I quit? What drives me to keep going? (...) I tell myself: if I win this match, I retire. And if I lose it, I retire. I lose. And I don't retire."
A textbook cognitive dissonance, in Cuairán's opinion: "The desire to retire was faced with the reality of not knowing what to do, because you have spent your entire life playing. Those two imps, those two contradictory thoughts, were talking in his head."
Almost a year later, after Olympic gold in Atlanta, he finally hung up his racket for a season to focus on his relationship with
Brooke Shields
.
Meanwhile, Hatfield settled on the throne of design.
"With the Air Tech Challenge II, it was no longer just tennis players who bought the shoes, but they became part of street culture," he proclaimed.
After that collection, starting in 1991 he continued to amaze with the Huarache, the model that
Will Smith
wore in
The Fresh Prince of Bel Air
.
Even from Adidas or Reebok he was recognized as a visionary, as the creator of the never seen.
In tennis he had already achieved it even before meeting Agassi.
The precedent of the Air Trainer
It was in 1986, during a flight back from Tokyo.
A moment of enlightenment from which the Air Trainer was born, the best hybrid ever conceived for the feet.
An amalgamation between
running
, basketball boots and footwear that anyone could wear to the gym, but that was never designed for competition.
It was simply the
coolest
thing at the moment.
When McEnroe took the first prototype sent by Hatfield out of the box, it was clear to him that he would hit the track with it.
Its impact was so brutal that Nike did not hesitate to pay $500,000 for the
Beatlenian
rights to
Revolution
, the soundtrack of an ad for the ages.
However, despite that decade of wine and roses with the most select of world sports, Hatfield also had to take a break.
He was burned by success.
The bar, even for a former pole vaulter like him, is sometimes unapproachable.
In the second chapter of the documentary series
Abstract: The Art of Design
, the genius outlines his own figure with total transparency.
His words resonate with countless hours of exhausting work alongside Agassi, Jordan, Sampras and
Roger Federer
.
"My job, as a provocateur, is to think much further ahead, into the future. You have to look at the big picture of the world and say: I'm going to solve some problems, I'm going to bring design features, I'm going to combine everything, I'm going to take risks, I'm going to take on "I'll take the risk and I'll integrate it all. This always involves risks. But if in the end people don't love or hate your creations it means you haven't contributed much."
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