Agassi's comeback blueprint inspires Raducanu's tennis revival

Emma Raducanu is reading Andre Agassi's autobiography these days, the one he published in 2009, looking for a map back to the top of tennis. Five years have passed since she won the US Open at eighteen, becoming the first qualifier in the Open era to claim a Grand Slam title. Now, at twenty-three, she sits at ninety-eighth in the world rankings, down from a career high of tenth in July 2022, and the path forward feels less certain.

Agassi was a prodigy too. He won his first major at Wimbledon in 1992, aged twenty-two, and went on to claim eight Grand Slam singles titles. But between those peaks, he fell hard. For four years he won nothing, and his ranking plummeted to 141st. In his book, he wrote about clawing his way back in the late 1990s, about building his own training regimen, about finding his way home to the sport. Raducanu told Uniqlo that passage spoke to her directly. "A lot of it was so relatable," she said.

Agassi's hope, when he wrote the book, was simple: that someone reading it might feel less alone, might find tools to understand their own struggle, might figure out how to get to a healthier place without directing their anger at the game itself. Seventeen years later, he got word that it was working. "It's wonderful to hear that anybody can relate," he told BBC Breakfast. "Hearing that 17 years later it can still impact somebody, especially in this game, it does make me feel good."

Raducanu's injuries have been relentless. A stress fracture in her lower right leg kept her from the US Open. Before that, a foot injury disrupted her pre-season training. Then came two and a half months off court with a post-viral illness. The body has become the obstacle. Yet in June, at Queen's Club, she reached her biggest final since New York, a week that reminded her what she was capable of.

When asked what he would tell Raducanu now, Agassi offered something counterintuitive. Don't chase one hundred percent, he said. Learn to be one hundred percent of whatever percent you actually are. Be comfortable in your own identity, not in what people say about you. Back in his day, he could put down the newspaper and ignore the noise. Now, he said, it's harder for young players to escape it. The pressure comes through screens, through feeds, through voices that never stop.

Agassi's own childhood was shaped by pressure of a different kind. His father introduced him to people as a future number one, as if it were already written. That created fear. Agassi played with fear for years, until he fell so far that the fear became pointless. Only then did he reconnect with the sport itself. Only then did he start winning again, more than he ever had before. "I had more success from that point forward than I did playing out of fear," he said.

He offered parents a thought: it's not their life, it's their child's. Raise a child in your way and they'll never depart from it. The job is to find out what their way is. For Raducanu, the work now is to find her own way back, not the way the rankings demand or the way the narrative of her US Open victory insists she should follow. Agassi will be in London this week, captaining Team USA at the Laver Cup against Team Europe. He called it an incredible event, one that pulls players back into the calendar even when they're exhausted. The crowd will see spectacular tennis, he promised. What they'll really be watching is whether the game still has room for comebacks, for players who fall and find their way home.