Just 12 months after his Olympic hurrah, Andre Agassi had developed an aversion to playing Tennis.
For someone who had already topped the rankings in her career to fall to 140 and to have to be a wild-card entrant in the tournaments and to be getting eliminated by far younger players, Agassi says it was a point he had really lost all the interest in the game.
Though Agassi was still able to put bums on the chair and people were coming to watch him, he says he did not know how to win matches of Tennis again.
According to Agassi, you love something you get as a choice. But, in his case, Tennis was not something he had chosen himself to have a career in. His dad had put him into it and he had just followed his orders and since, he was put into it and had not gotten into it by his will, he did not find himself loving it at any stage.
It turned out that he had the potential for the sport, he even stood to that potential, he won titles, got respect because of it, even after that, Tennis remained more of a job, more of a duty for him and he was fed up of his job in 1997.
However, it was not the decline of Agassi. He hung in and in the following season, clinched 5 trophies (none was a slam though) and improved his ranking by more than 100 places, breaking all the past records.
He found emotional peace too as he entered his second marriage a couple of years later with soul-mate Steffi Graf and life got better. He won slams again, but, even now when someone talks to him, he insists Tennis wasn’t his love.