Andre Agassi: My mullet lost me the French Open

DailyTelegraph

FORMER Wimbledon champion Andre Agassi - famous as a young tennis star for his wild locks - has revealed wearing a lion-mane-style mullet wig during the 1990s to hide his baldness.



In his new book, the tennis legend admitted to taking crystal meth periodically for "a year or so" during his career, and also reveals that he wore a hairpiece that nearly fell off at the 1990 French Open - and he duly lost to Ecuador's Andres Gomez.



The tennis star's brother was sent running around Paris to find bobby pins to keep Agassi's disintegrating spiked-mullet weave from coming off his head before the 1990 match.



"Of course I could play without my hairpiece. But after months of derision, criticism, mockery, I'm too self-conscious," he wrote.



"Image is everything. What would they say if they knew? Win or lose, they wouldn't talk about my game. They'd only talk about my hair. I can close my eyes and almost hear it. And I know I can't take it."



Agassi talks about his struggle with baldness.



"Every morning I would get up and find another piece of my identity on the pillow, in the wash basin, down the plughole," he said. "I asked myself, 'You want to wear a toupee? On the tennis court?' I answered myself, 'What else could I do?"'



In the French Open in 1990 he reached the final, his first in a Grand Slam tournament.



"Then a fiasco happened," he said."The evening before the match I stood under the shower and felt my wig suddenly fall apart. Probably I used the wrong hair rinse. I panicked and called my brother Philly into the room.



"'It's a total disaster!' I said to him. He looked at it and said he could clamp it with hair clips.



"It took 20 clips. 'Do you think it will hold?' I asked. 'Just don't move so much,' he said.



"Of course I could have played without my hairpiece, but what would all the journalists have written if they knew that all the time I was really wearing a wig?



"During the warming-up training before play I prayed. Not for victory, but that my hairpiece would not fall off.



"With each leap, I imagine it falling into the sand. I imagine millions of spectators move closer to their TV sets, their eyes widening and, in dozens of dialects and languages, ask how Andre Agassi's hair has fallen from his head."



He only reveals the story of his wig folly in his autobiography, published in Germany this week.



It was actress Brooke Shields, who he married, who suggested he ditch the rug.



"She said I should shave my head," he said.



"It was like suggesting I should have all my teeth out.



"Nevertheless, I thought for a few days about it, about the agonies it caused me, the hypocrisy and lies."



It took him 11 minutes to become a chrome dome.



"A stranger stood before me in the mirror and smiled," he said. "My wig was like a chain and the ridiculously long strands in three colours like an iron ball which hung on it.'



The book reveals how Shields put a photo of Steffi Graf - now married to Agassi - on the fridge for motivation to get in better shape before their wedding.



"It's a photo of the perfect woman, she says," Agassi wrote.



"The perfect woman with the perfect legs: the legs Brooke wants."



