quantumofsport.com

The winning mind by Sebastian Coe

This explicitly dual genre book, marketed under business/sport, came out in paperback last month and was first published in April 2009. The premise is that winning in the sporting arena has parallels with winning the hearts and minds of the populace in politics (Coe was elected MP for Falmouth and Camborne in 1992 and later worked as William Hague’s chief of staff) and winning the contracts in the business world, the case study being Coe’s spectacular achievement in spearheading the long-time unfancied London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympics.
 
The chapter titles tell you immediately that this is going to be a corny old ride: Creating the vision; Setting the goals; The starting gun; Staying the course; Increasing momentum; The final lap; Bringing home the flame. The metaphor propagates within the chapters, in the sub-headings and the ‘take-home’ messages printed in bold type. Choosing three pages at random, we have as prompters for examples from the world of sport, politics and business:-

“There is no template for success.”
“Seize the day.”
“You have a finite amount of energy. Your physical and mental energy come from the same source. You’re taking both from the same well.”

You get the picture.

Coe is certainly well-intentioned but to the intelligent reader this approach comes across as vapid and platitudinous; moreover, it’s hard to see who this is really aimed at. I ended up tolerating the evangelism and concentrating on the sporting autobiography.

Open: An autobiography by André Agassi

In an age when average footballers in their mid-twenties can seemingly get away with bringing out their memoirs, it is refreshing to read about the formation and whole career of a world-class sportsman. The book caused a furore on its launch last November, when the revelation that Agassi had taken crystal meth gave rise to a lot of sententious nonsense that was only surpassed by the Tiger Woods débâcle a few weeks later.

The urgent present tense narrative starts at ‘The End’, with a tableau from Agassi’s swansong tournament, the 2006 US Open, where we learn, in the space of a couple of pages, that he is a virtual tennis cripple afflicted by chronic self-doubt and that...

‘I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.'

A great hook.

To see the reason behind this sentiment, we are transported back to Las Vegas in the 1970s, where the seven year-old Agassi with bowl haircut (hair is a recurring theme) is getting bawled at by his brutal monomaniacal father, an Iranian immigrant of Armenian descent (the family name is apparently an americanisation of ‘Aghassian’), on a DIY backyard court. Mike Agassi, we are told, was a boxer of some talent, who made Olympic Games appearances but didn’t cut it professionally. We are rather obviously impressed that he is living out a failed sporting dream through his youngest son. Agassi has to hit 2,500 balls per day, spewed at him relentlessly by a custom-built machine – ‘the dragon’; according to the juggernaut logic of his father:

‘A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable.’