I Got Your Back: Part 3

Every coach loves to talk about his big successes. I want to tell you what it’s like in the trenches.

A player-coach relationship is a little bit like a marriage, and as every husband knows, every marriage has its ups and downs. Andre Agassi and I had an amazing working relationship from 1994 to 2002; and we have a close friendship that continues to this day. And I think we’d both agree that while our friendship has been rock solid the entire way, the greatest tests to our work together came in 1997 and the first half of 1999.

In the spring of 1997, Andre married Brooke Shields. Just as he was trying to get his new marriage on its feet, he found himself in the crosshairs of the world’s telephoto lens on a daily basis. Something had to give, and what gave first was his tennis game.

Tennis seemed to be just about the last thing on Andre’s mind in 1997. He didn’t play the Australian Open in January; he skipped the French Open and Wimbledon. He basically began playing that summer, and he was out of shape physically and mentally—overweight and under-motivated. In the U.S. Open that September,…