Every now and then, I am captured by a story in Sports Illustrated. I enjoy sports a lot, having played them in high school and college, as well as watched hours of sports with my dad and son. I particularly love the stories of champions. This specific story, however, was not so inspiring. It was an excerpt from Andre Agassi’s new book, and it reveals what happens when people center their whole lives on a sport—in this case, tennis.
I’m well acquainted with the emotions of this sport, having played it for forty-seven years, and still playing competitively. At times I have loved it. At other times, it takes everything in me to get on the court. But nothing in my emotions has ever approached the level of Agassi, who grew to hate it. As he put it, “I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.”
This hate grew out of an obsessed father, who forced Agassi at a very young age to face a ball machine and hit up to a million tennis balls a year. I grew up on a tennis court as well, but I was graced with a father who encouraged, but never forced me. My ball machine, as a kid, was a tennis coach by the name of Wilbur Folsom. Every Saturday, I would meet him at
Maybe I am impacted by Agassi’s story because I have played tennis for so many years. Maybe because I have met a number of parents like his, who have made the sport more about them and their own needs for accomplishment than their kid’s. Agassi’s story shows the ugliness of idols. His father’s idol was tennis, and he did what lots of idolaters do—sacrifice their children on the altar. Tennis ended up so consuming, defining Agassi, that, as he put it, he had no idea who he was. There is a melancholy in the story, the result of what happens when one takes some incomplete joy in this world and builds a whole life on it. It speaks powerfully to the nature of idols, their bloodthirstiness and impossibility to appease; hence, the tendency to ultimately hate. Even Agassi’s father came to the place of hating tennis just as Agassi was hanging it up.
In his latest book, Counterfeit Gods, Tim Keller speaks powerfully to all of this. How do we spot them? Keller says to look for what controls your thinking. Identify those thoughts you effortlessly go to when there is nothing else demanding attention. Take inventory of those things that take on a disproportionate size. All of us have gods who compete with the Living God, gods we go after and serve. For Tiger Woods, it is probably golf. For our culture today, it might be fame. One writer recently suggested 2009 will go down as the year we sold our souls to fame, what with Octomom, Balloon Boy, and WH Gate Crashers. For an increasing number, fame is not only everything—but the only thing. And when that happens, the heart is overcome with idolatry.