A few days ago, a friend told about an article that I needed to read in Sports Illustrated. I’ve been a subscriber to the magazine for a few years, but I don’t always flip through every issue. Knowing that I’m an Andre Agassi fan, my friend pointed me to an article that appeared in the July 17th issue about Agassi that was entitled “Coming Into Focus.”
I’m currently working my way through the article. I say “working my way” because it’s about 8,000 words long and because I’m reading slowly—savoring every page. As I’ve written here recently, Agassi is about to play in his last major tournament—the U.S. Open. I count myself as an Andre Agassi fan, but not because he’s won a lot of tournaments. But rather, because of the way he learned to conduct himself on the court and for the person he’s become off the court—the man who started an academy for poor children who wouldn’t have had a chance otherwise.
But beyond his charity work, and his statesmanship, and his tenaciousness on the court, the things that make Andre Agassi tick are relatively unknown. At least until now. Gary Smith, the writer who wrote the article for Sports Illustrated did an unbelievable job of unpacking Agassi’s personality. Not too far into the article, he quotes Agassi as saying this:
“I can’t see anything objectively or in context,” he said. “I wish I could. It drives me crazy. It causes a lot of problems. Show me a drop of water, and I’m fine. I’ll learn everything about it. But don’t show me the ocean. Don't show me the whole forest. Every time I try to see the big picture, I’m finished, I’m lost....”
I reread this quote several times. And then I looked up something I wrote just last Friday on this blog: “I’ve always been the type who likes to experience the complete story. I hate to stop reading a book part way through, even if it is poorly written. I like to listen to entire albums, including the filler songs, because if I don’t, I somehow feel like I didn’t get the complete context of the artist’s message. And I refuse to just catch bits and pieces of a television show or movie because I will have missed too much to understand what’s really going on. A little compulsive? Yeah, maybe. But, I like to think of it as, ‘living life in context.’”
Agassi doesn’t want to see the big picture because he can’t find the context in it. I must see the big picture or I can’t find the context. Two completely different routes to the same path—context. Why does such a thing matter so much? To some level, day to day life must make sense for me to put my entire being into it. All of the pieces don’t need to fit neatly together, but if I can’t see the context, at least at some level, I drift. I allow myself to lose my way.
Later in the article, Agassi said something else that made me do a double-take: “I’m bound and determined to eat experience,” he says. “If you give me an option to cut a corner, I take more than I should. But if I make it hard, if I face it at its worst, then I stay focused and driven and it only gets better from there. I need to be in the thick of process. So I can’t let myself have shortcuts.”
By “eating experience,” he means reveling in it, learning from it, and ultimately, growing from it. He needs to be “in the thick of process” to excel in life. That’s exactly what I was trying to say in my initial post about context. I need context. I crave it. And when I get it, I can stay focused.
This article is full of fantastic introspection, and I may just continue on with my comments tomorrow about additional gems in the article. If you get a chance, I’d highly recommend that you read it online if you don’t have access to the July 17th issue of Sports Illustrated. Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber to read the online version, but in my opinion, this one article is worth the subscription price.
