If there's anyone who's full of BS, it's Tarango.  He's making these allegations about continued drug use completely unfounded, and RP doesn't do any journalistic querying.  Just let's him run his mouth. Tarango has apparently no idea of what he's talking about - claiming Agassi cheated "all the players" he beat while taking drugs.  I saw on another board that his record was 12-12 in 1997 and full of dismal losses. No idea why his memory of what happened in juniors nearly 30 years ago would be more or less reliable than Agassi's - he doesn't convey any reliability here.  The wins he had while he would have been suspended for three months (quarter of 1977) were limited to two Challengers.  He appears not to have read the book as he disputes the "hates tennis" thing whereas the fuller clarification of that on CBS 60 minutes site today today shows the "I hate tennis" hook was foregrounded for impact by SI - what he actually ends up saying is that tennis has been a gift for him. (Why didn't SI include that?). Taranago is either ignoring that or is commenting prematurely.  And the story runs in the "news" feed.  Tarango seems (before this too...) one of the sourest sourpusses in tennis.  Maybe resentful he didn't do better?  Tennisweek, please find some perspective, and be a bit more judicious about what's posted as news.  Tarango can comment on any message board he likes....

So many of these player critiques are so ill informed.  Brughera said today he should get the gold medal for Atlanta wich was BEFORE Agassi was doing rec drugs. They are shouting their mouths off with no sense.  Ivanisevic too - should have been suspended for a year or two.  The penalty was three months then.

Of the responses so far, Federer's was the most balanced - sense of problem and sense of perspective.  Go Fed.  

Tarango aside - there's an interesting geographic divide here ie US players who have commented (Amer Delic, Roddick, Blake, Courier and Sampras etc) have been sympathetic. Murray aside, the overseas players have been critical.  I'm wondering if that's a reflection of a broader divide between players.

Texas:

  With all due respect: why are you so threatened by someone's opinion? I asked Tarango specifically about that anecdote in the book when AA claims Tarango cheated him in a junior match - it is a story he has told in the past. Tarango has said it's not true. Is he not entitled to his opinion - particularly when he's presented as a liar and a cheater in that particular anecdote?

 I may be misunderstanding you but it seems re-reading a few of your posts, that you have a problem with anyone who does not agree with your point of view? Why? Isn't the exchange of opinions, the process of discourse, part of the path to greater understanding or are you suggesting you know the answer and anyone who expresses a different point of view is just plain wrong?

  Don't get me wrong: you are absolutely entitled to your opinion and I respect your right to express it just as I respect the right of everyone who posts here to express it. But I get a bit unsettled when someone is suggesting to me "it's my way or you have no perspective" Huh?  I'm sorry, but just don't agree with that approach. We're making the effort to try to speak to as many different people who are discussed in the book to get their reaction to the book and how they are portrayed in it.

    I just got the book, I am only about 60 pages into it. I think it is very, very well written, very descriptive and detailed and it is effective - far more so than other recent player autobiographies - in taking the reader on the journey with him. He takes you from the pre-match shower, into the locker room, onto the practice court, onto Arthur Ashe Stadium, onto the trainer's table after the match when he's in severe pain. It is so well written at times you feel you're in his head as he's experiencing these events. I am enjoying it and learning from it. Once I have read it completely, of course I will post something on it and we have contacted the publisher to try to speak to his author. So, IMO, when you say "find perspective": that's exactly what we are trying to do: find perspective by talking to as many people who are cited in the book or by recapping as many different reactions to the book as we can. Isn't that what perspective is: trying to understand the relationship between facts? It's not just parroting what you think or what I think or what Redhead thinks and accepting that as gospel, it's trying to really understand the facts as they're presented by trying to talk to people who were there, who lived it.

    As for "hating tennis" as I said in the reply to Redhead, I really don't think AA hates tennis. I think, like many elite athletes who devote much of their lives to a sport, there are times of pain, of resentment, of a love-hate relationship, but to be clear though I have not finished the book he writes the phrase "I hate tennis" several times in the book. In fact, he says when he went on the Charlie Rose show and told Charlie "I've always loved tennis" that he was lying. That he really wanted to admit he hated it. It's a pretty powerful and direct statement. As I said in the prior reply to Redhead, until I read the entire book and see how that "I hate tennis" comment fits into context, for example if he reaches any sort of personal epiphany that he hated tennis and then grew to like or appreciate it as he gained a sense of perspective about his life.

   Have you read the book? I will be interested to hear from everyone who has read it and I'm also interested in talking to as many people who are discussed in the book to get their reaction. Jeff Tarango is just one of those people. Would like to speak to several others and will make the effort to do so in an effort to gain some perspective and understanding.

  As for your comment "So many of these player critiques are so ill informed...." Really? Players are people with opinions just like you and me. Some are better informed than others. For instance, I remember years back when Rios said if an American star like Agassi tested positive you guys (the media) would never know because they (the ATP) would never let it get out. Now, I also remember at the time people kind of chuckling "that's that cranky Rios being Rios." Well you know what: he did test positive, the ATP did cover it up and it was not disclosed until now. So there is a classic case of a player (Rios) who was widely regarded as a malcontent saying something that was largely dismissed at the time as a guy shooting his mouth off and years later it proved to be correct. My point is: you can dismiss anyone's point of view if you want, that's your right obviously, but you might be dismissing someone who is bringing some truth to light.

My opinion isn't being carried as "news" on websites...Everyone is entitled to their opinion but - as in all aspects of life - people are often spouting off based on no or misinformation.  The job of journalists is to point that out when pertinent or there's no need for the press - we'll just have open message boards. So Tarango is absolutely entitled to his opinion, but what are the factors we could use to assess who's correct when there's a difference of opinion?  Agassi said something blunt about that in the People story re Shields - they both agree on the recollections of incidents he describes, but disagree on the interpretation.  And that so often is life - two people have the same experience and come away with different perceptions of it.   That doesn't make either one "right" or "wrong" - it means life is complicated, even at the time and especially when recollected long after the event. No need for endorsing "gottcha" assessments that are black or white.

If I wrote a book about my last thirty years (or the last five), I've no doubt other people would remember things differently to how I remember - maybe we'd even remember the date or place or whatever as being different. Sometimes people can accept that, sometimes people are testy about it.  (Blake re Spadea, for example.) Sometimes there is actual error in one side's recollection. Sometimes the error matters (incident didn't happen), sometimes it doesn't (wrong date but right basic event).

Agassi's accuracy - I've no idea.  The only thing I've noticed from the extracts (need to be used with caution) is that there's considerable congruence between his account as thus far revealed and what I remember of John McEnroe's book - for instance, I remember McEnroe recounted the incident where he called Graf a *** in a conversation with Agassi in the Wimbledon locker room which the Reilly column today says is in the Agassi book.  I presume Agassi's perception of that incident is going to be different to McEnroe's though. And that seems fine to me - doesn't mean either one is "wrong" or determine definitively whether she is actually a *** or not. It does tell us what they each took away. (Although it does provide an example of casual bad language in the locker room which another poster was just offended by.  I am thinking McEnroe might have used a few other choice words in that discussion too.)

 I'm no more contentious than anyone on this board, and definitely less than some.

I think this website (and other media outlets) are doing readers a disservice by constantly sensationalizing quotes for which there's absolutely no context. The Agassi media barrage this week is only one example of that trend.  They have reported responses which include all kinds of actual errors of fact without noting that.  It's been extraordinary to me this week how little actual journalism there's been in terms of processing/considering/assessing the nature of the information and how that speaks to the story - and instead how much jumping to sensationalism.  Why might people be reacting differently?  That would be useful to know. (Widespread reproduction of the Navratilova comment, for instance, with no parsing of the validity of what she said  - and almost none of the not so sensationally gratifying BJK saying she wasn't going to give a comment until she'd read the book - and not nearly as much from people who spoke supportively - Murray or Roddick, say.  The negative was a easy fit with sensationalism and in many parts of the media no apparent interest in working a more complicated picture. )  Veritable rush to judgment based on very partial information.  You suggest you are doing more than that now which would be great if we could have a piece based on considered and informed insight based on various perspectives instead of verbatim quotes with no evaluation that emphasize one side. Unfortunately this same pattern occurs across all kinds of stories, not just sports ones.

Nor am I the only one struck by this - see this editorial I guess you'd say on the Tennis website this evening:  

http://www.tennis.com/features/general/features.aspx?id=190954

Bravo on that first paragraph, and especially first sentence.

 I've been off work recovering from flu this week and not able to do much except cruise the web so I've followed this story closely, and been able to compare the performance of many different outlets.  It's been interesting and quite striking.

I used to read this website a lot in its former incarnation - not sure that was now but a while ago - when it had a pristine clean layout and I think before the founder died.  It was a state of the art specialist tennis site then. Great articles.  Beautiful writing.  (I think you were a part of all that.) Returning to it this week has made me wish for the old days. 

PS The ATP "covered up" Agassi's test.

I'm not sure about that because as far as I can understand the procedures at that time, they kept test results in strict confidence until the independent tribunals ruled.  Since the tribunal threw out Agassi's result, following procedures meant the ATP followed procedure in preserving confidentiality. The big violation there as far as I can see was in the Greg Rusedski case when his name was leaked before the tribunal ruled.

Now I think with WADA oversight the rules and procedures are so much different, I don't think (per recent cases) that confidentiality is preserved at all after the first positive test.

What does seem interesting to me is that this week's comments suggest that other players knew what Rios knew - Agassi had had a positive test (but didn't know how he'd "successfully" explained it because of confidentiality so presumed, erroneously I think, an ATP coverup).  The Swedish JJ (whose name I can't spell) said today that the positive test was an open matter when he joined the tour a few years ago.  So the ATP didn't cover it up in that regard that successfully ie the confidentiality wasn't fully preserved.  This I presume is why rumors circulated of him doing p.e.d.s - on the assumption the positive test had been for that.   (I think Pat Cash - someone else who's walked on the wild side plenty himself and might do well to remember that - referenced this this week.)   And honestly I think before last week, if you told 100 people Agassi had had a positive drug test and asked them to guess what for, you wouldn't have had one who would guessed crystal meth, so that was a reasonable putting together of 2 and 2 - to make 5. (Although a colleague who lived in Vegas in the 1990s told me it was awash in crystal meth then, so maybe people who live there would...)

I just read the Tarango reaction carefully - and of course I haven't read the Agassi version of the match yet.

I've watched a lot of junior tennis matches the last five years though for my sins, and several things about it strike me in terms of trying to get beyond the "he said, he said" as it were:

1) This was almost certainly a very very  intensely competitive match between two future pros - how often does that happen in juniors?  My daughter's played a lot of future college players but I'd be surprised if anyone she's played is going to be a (viable) pro.  I'm sure they both felt very on edge by the end of the match.

2) Line calling in juniors - don't even get me started on that.  So many wrong calls in juniors.  Some perfectly honest ie partly it's hard to call yourself (as the pros low challenge success shows), partly

they watch the ball and not the line, partly they predict one way or the other before the ball lands and then don't adjust.  Sometimes there's some wishful thinking that I still wouldn't put in the consciously dishonest category. Some also alas more to manipulate in their favor on occasion.  Often the legit and dodgy mistakes are by vast margins.  Sometimes we've just been laughing outloud watching our daughter's matches. It's not all malicious.

So they disagreed whether the ball was out or in - that happens in juniors all the time ..

c)  Tarango says this:  "I mean it was a USTA (sanctioned) match. It's documented, he was overruled twice in a row." I'm not sure what this means. Juniors call their own lines in USTA matches and I've never seen any official there to  "document" or to "overrule."

The roving USTA officials who wander around will stand and watch in a contentious match, but I've never seen one of them overrule a call (and this doesn't seem to have been a super high level tournament) although I've seen them plenty of times them walk juniors through how to negotiate their disputes over the call or score.  

So since the meaning is so unclear, that doesn't seem helpful to me to persuade me that his version of the incident is more legit than Agassi's.

d) Agassi cried when he lost because he was afraid of his dad -  judging from what we've seen of the book, no doubt.  No doubt also cried because he was very frustrated and upset.  Seen many red faced crying kids at the end of long close matches myself (including my own) and some of their parents seem perfectly nice. Probably a bit of both.

e) 30 years later they both still have an intense memory of the match, can you imagine what competitive little so and sos they were.  

There's no way to say anything more conclusive than here's a typical example of how two people perceive a particular experience differently. It doesn't "prove" Agassi is full of bs, and doesn't "prove" Tarango cheated.

The Tarango rant about what other drugs Agassi might have done which is totally unfounded and what the ATP covered up ditto - is apparently based in long time rivalry between them and his segway into that doesn't help his case in persuading that his memory of their match is more credible either.  (The players apparently frequently had/have very little knowledge of the drug testing rules and procedures.)