Image is Everything
The cheeky camera commercial that nearly ruined Andre Agassi
Andre Agassi never wanted to be a Tennis player.
As a kid, his father would make him hit 2,500 balls a day on their homemade court, battling the searing Nevada heat and a suped-up ball machine called ‘The Dragon’ for hours on end.
Screaming at him to improve his groundstrokes, or force him to return balls flatter and faster than anything humanly possible, Agassi’s father was out to create a superstar, and never suffered anything as simple as unwillingness on his son’s part.
So, after hitting millions of balls (literally) before he hit puberty, Andre became nothing short of a prodigy.
By 9, he was hustling at country clubs. His father would wager the tips he made as a casino manager on unsuspecting patrons, and Andre would empty their pockets with exacting prejudice. At one point, he even took Jim Brown — then considered the greatest player in NFL history — for $500. (The original wager was $10,000, but Brown moved the goalposts after going down two sets to none).
From then on, Agassi continued to blossom. At 12, he won a national championship in doubles, and at 13 was whisked away to a tennis academy until he turned pro at 16.
By the end of 1986, his first full year on the ATP Tour, Agassi had risen from 618th in the world to 91st, and after the 1987 season, moved up to No. 25. After just 43 tournament appearances, Agassi crossed $1 million in career earnings — setting a record as the fastest player to do so in the open-era — and in 1988, at 18, he ended the year as the No. 3 tennis player in the world.
By all accounts, Agassi was as talented a player as professional tennis had ever seen, but he was more than just a player on the rise — he was an icon, too.
Gracing the court with a frosted mullet and acid-washed jean shorts, Agassi was a punk rock sore thumb in the fist of world tennis. Unlike his contemporaries, Agassi didn’t abide by many of the ideals which pervaded the sport, and knowingly cultivated a presence that, for better or worse, was all his own.
He grunted loudly after hitting huge groundstrokes (a rarity back then), threw his sweat-soaked shirts into crowds after matches, and refused to play at events like Wimbledon because of their dress code.
Combined with an aggressive style of play — centred on hitting powerful shots early to win points — Agassi was the full picture of an entertaining and controversial phenom. Tennis purists, especially those in the media, loathed his flouting of the traditionalism that the sport was steeped in, but even those who hated him couldn’t deny: Agassi made for good TV, and the tour was a more entertaining place because of him.
So, in the summer of 1989, when Canon asked Agassi to be the face of its new ‘Rebel’ camera, he agreed, thinking it was nothing more than another small gig served up by one of the many corporate sponsors who now vied for his attention.
Unfortunately for him, it turned out to be anything but.
Commerical Appeal
See, when Canon approached Agassi, his image as an up-and-coming tennis player had largely dissipated.
Young as he still was, in 1989, Agassi had been drawing eyeballs for nearly three years as a professional tennis player, and with his meteoric rise in the rankings, he was now saddled with real expectations. American tennis had established a winning tradition decades before he arrived on the scene, and with historic greats like John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors on the back end of their respective careers, Andre was penned as the next great American tennis player.
So, in May 1989, after Agassi was bounced in the third round of the French Open — despite reaching the semifinals just the year before — perception surrounding him started to shift.
Applause for his rapid ascent in the rankings all but disappeared, and many fed into the notion that Agassi cared more about courting attention than he did about getting results. To make matters worse, one of his countrymen, Michael Chang, won that same French Open by upsetting the No. 1 player in the world at the tender age of 17 — stealing Andre’s thunder and setting several records in the process.
Despite all this, sponsors still drooled over Agassi, and although he was becoming increasingly more closed off to the public, when Canon slated the commercial to be filmed in and around Las Vegas — his hometown — he wasn’t wary of participating.
Taking cues from Agassi’s roots, the production was awash with all the extravagance characteristic of Sin City. The commercial’s director had a tennis court built in the desert just to get shots of Agassi hitting balls, and rented a Lamborghini to match the white-on-black suit that Andre wore at the end of the commercial — even though it didn’t make an appearance in the final cut.
Interspersed with shots of Agassi sweating it out in the desert and lounging poolside are snippets of the camera and its features. Laden with cheesy narration — “What is the image of a rebel?” — and nauseating visual effects, the ad is standard fare for the late 80s, but the commercial’s dying seconds would make it one of a kind.
Standing in front of a casino at sunset, Agassi looks straight at the camera, pulls his sunglasses down to the bridge of his nose, and smirkingly utters, “Image… is everything”
Following the ad’s initial run, the tennis world erupted. For many, ‘Image is Everything’ was Agassi all but admitting to what his critics had long panned him for — caring more about fame than anything related to tennis. Seemingly overnight, tennis’ biggest icon became its most ridiculed figure, and Andre bore the ire of sportswriters and fans everywhere.
The only problem? It was all a fluke.
As unbelievable as it is, when they filmed the scene, Agassi had just noticed that an old flame had shown up on set. Eager to reconnect with her, he distractedly heard the director’s instructions for the take, did a few versions of it, and then took off (lady in tow), thinking it was nothing more than a silly line about a camera — which, effectively, it was.
Naturally, Agassi came to regret his shortsidedness. Fans and media taunted him with the line relentlessly, especially after his Grand Slam drought continued to drag on. Worst of all, the backlash from the commercial sent him into a spiral of resentment and self-loathing. Agassi began acting out, lending even more credence to the dialogue about his poor character.
It became a vicious cycle. Burdened by the negative perceptions of him, Agassi played below his level, and the frustration at his poor play manifested in behaviour that made those negative perceptions even worse.
Sadly, at the heart of it all was just a guy who was stuck in a life he didn’t want.
See, while Agassi had always represented an anti-establishment figure in Tennis, few people knew how truly fraught his relationship was with the sport. As he was eager to tell anyone at the time, Agassi didn’t dislike tennis — he genuinely hated it — because unlike his siblings, he had just enough talent that his father’s autocratic tutelage came to pass. He did become the tennis star his dad had always dreamed of, the only cost was his sense of agency.
As far as Agassi was concerned, he was living a life that he didn’t choose, and as a high-school dropout without any other skills or interests, tennis was simultaneously the source of all his problems and his sole source of self-preservation.
For lack of a better word, Agassi was stuck. Caught in a maelstrom of criticism and existential dread, it seemed like the last possible outcome was success at the next level.
But then he met Gil.
Fast Friends
Shortly after the run of the ‘Image is Everything’ commercial, Agassi met Gil Reyes, a trainer at UNLV. At the time, Andre was looking to beef up his conditioning, but it wasn’t long before Reyes became a rock in Agassi’s personal life.
Shortly after they began working together, Agassi started joining Gil and his young family for dinner at their house, thankful for a space where tennis wasn’t a topic of discussion. One evening, questioning why the 19 year-old Agassi wanted to spend most of his free time with a family of five, Andre told Gil that he alone made him feel as if he’d belonged somewhere for the first time in his life.
It was the beginning of an incredible friendship.
While Agassi’s conditioning drastically improved after working with Gil, his mentality improved considerably, too. Though he suffered some more crushing defeats over the following year and a half — particularly in two consecutive French Open finals — his interior life became more stable, and it wasn’t long before it showed on the court.
In 1992, after a rocky start saw him drop out of the top-ten for the first time since 1987, Agassi was seeded 12th at Wimbledon. Despite being known for his presence on clay and hard courts, surprisingly, Agassi cut his way through the field, beating Boris Becker and John McEnroe — two players with five combined Wimbledon titles between them — en route to the final.
Facing off against Goran Ivanisevic, a 6’4” serving machine, Agassi dropped the first set, but came back to win the next two. After conceding the fourth, Agassi ground out a 6-4 tally to win the fifth set, the match, and end the Grand Slam drought that had long plagued his resume.
Once the symbol of everything that Agassi rebuked about tennis, Wimbledon became the source of Agassi’s greatest redemption.
Takeaways
In his book, This I know: Marketing Lessons from Under the Influence, Terry O’Reilly explores an interesting anecdote involving 70s-era Honda.
At the time, fuel prices were on the rise, and Honda’s line of fuel-efficient vehicles were the perfect car for consumers everywhere. The company experienced an unprecedented level of success because of this, and decided to use the hype as a launch pad for their new line of motorcycles, which they expected to sell like gangbusters.
But the sales never came.
Surprised, Honda looked into the problem. After doing countless focus groups, they discovered that, overwhelmingly, customers liked everything about their bikes — their looks, performance, even their price — but they simply didn’t want to buy them.
It was a strange situation, so Honda looked deeper. They asked focus-group participants what bike they would choose if price wasn’t an object, and almost always, Kawasaki came out as the winner. This was also perplexing, because Kawasaki’s bikes weren’t that different from Honda’s.
So, as the story goes, one of the focus group mediators followed up with a brilliant question: “If Kawasaki bikes were a celebrity, who would they be?”
Clint Eastwood.
“What about Honda bikes?”
Ron Howard — AKA Richie Cunningham, the baby-faced teenager from the sitcom Happy Days.
Right then, Honda realized something: they could build the best motorcycle in the world, but if they didn’t cultivate the right perception about their product, it wouldn’t sell.
It was a classic case study in the power of brand imagery.
Now, like Honda, Andre Agassi also suffered from an image problem.
As a wily youth who’d been forced into a sport he deeply resented, Agassi’s angst manifested in the typical teenage fashion: long hair, wild outfits, and blind rebellion against authority figures (i.e. the tennis establishment). Unlike most teenagers, however, Agassi was a professional tennis player, and his rebellion was broadcasted on the world stage.
While Agassi was never a saint, it’s plain that his iconic status and the criticism he came to face were almost always related to one thing — his exterior, and the overarching perception surrounding it.
Had the world been able to peek through Agassi’s closely guarded persona, they’d have seen that his behaviour and appearance weren’t the reflection of a vapid, attention-hungry malcontent motivated by money. Rather, a confused and anxious kid looking for some semblance of control in his life.
For much longer than he deserved, Agassi’s life and career reflected the sad and ironic notion that image truly is everything — that what you’re perceived to be is largely who you are.
But here’s the thing about perception: though powerful, it can change.
Just as Honda was able to alter the image surrounding its motorcycles, Andre Agassi was able to shed the widely-held view that he was all-style-and-no-substance.
While his personal metamorphosis took years — punctuated with some of his most difficult moments yet — Agassi eventually reconciled his complicated relationship with tennis, and simultaneously established a presence that was not only authentic, but widely-beloved, and accomplished.
When he retired in 2006, Agassi had 8 Grand Slams and 52 other single titles to his credit. As of this writing, he is the last American man to win both the French Open and Australian Open, and he is still the only man in tennis history to record a Career Super Slam — wins at each Grand Slam, the Davis Cup, the ATP World Tour Finals, and a gold medal at the Olympics.
As per-usual, however, Agassi’s hall-of-fame resume is only part of the story.
Over the course of his decades-long career, Agassi would be sponsored by (or collaborate with) the likes of Nike, Donnay, DuPont, Mazda, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, Ray-Ban, Shick, Oakley, Head, American Express, Estée Lauder, and more.
At one point, it was speculated that Agassi was making nearly $25 million per year in endorsments deals. Not bad considering his career prize money totaled just $31 million.
See, while ‘Image is Everything’ was a definitive part of his career, it didn’t define Agassi himself — at least, not in the way people thought it would. Rather than marking his decline, it proved to be just a interesting chapter in his journey toward becoming a tennis legend and the man who the ATP Tour itself considers the most widely marketed player of all time.
If there was ever any doubt about that fact, perhaps a recent Uber commercial might put that notion to rest:
Almost 40 years later, Andre Agassi’s still got it — even if it isn’t a mullet.
That’s it for this edition of Ballsy Branding!
First off, I’d like to give a special shoutout to Andre Agassi and his autobiography, Open, which served as the basis for most of this story’s material. It’s a fantastic read, and a much better representation of Agassi’s life and times than anything I could put to paper. If you found this article worthwhile, I highly recommend giving it a look!
If you like Tennis, consider reading one of my earlier articles, The Ballad of Blue Clay — a story involving another controversial figure in the tennis world, albeit one with a bit less style.
Finally, if you enjoyed this article, consider giving it a like, subscribing to Ballsy Branding (if you haven’t already), or sharing it with somebody who you think might find it interesting.
Till next time!