I recently reviewed Andre Agassi’s autobiography Open on this blog, and the response was significant. Many fencing parents told me they picked up the book because of that review. That’s great — it’s an extraordinary memoir that every sports parent should read. But I’m worried that some parents took away the wrong lesson.

Here’s what some of them heard: Agassi’s father was relentless, demanding, borderline abusive in his single-minded obsession with making his son a champion — and it worked. Andre Agassi became one of the greatest tennis players in history. Therefore, pushing your child to the breaking point produces champions.

That’s a dangerous misreading. And I want to address it directly.

The Survivor’s Story

There is one Andre Agassi who succeeded with a tiger dad. Well, based on the book, I would call Emmanuel “Mike” Agassi a sabre-toothed tiger dad — a man who built a ball machine in the backyard, forced his toddler to hit thousands of balls a day, pulled him out of school, shipped him to a brutal tennis academy at thirteen, and created an environment so suffocating that Andre Agassi spent decades hating the sport that made him famous.

And yes, it worked. He mega-succeeded. He won eight Grand Slams. He became a household name. He wrote a book.

But here’s what the book doesn’t tell you, because it can’t: for every Andre Agassi, there are a million other kids whose fathers were also tiger dads. These kids also hit thousands of balls. They also had their childhoods sacrificed on the altar of a parent’s ambition. They also trained through pain, through exhaustion, through tears.

They didn’t write books.

The reason is simple: these million other Agassis were dead to the sport before they could become the one Agassi. They were mentally crushed, physically devastated, and emotionally broke before their results could mean anything. They didn’t quit because they lacked talent or because they weren’t tough enough. They quit because their parents wanted them to be the one — and the weight of that expectation destroyed them.

The Math That Parents Ignore

Let’s be honest about the numbers. In any competitive sport, for every champion there are thousands of children who trained just as hard, sacrificed just as much, and had parents who pushed just as relentlessly. The overwhelming majority of these children don’t become champions. They become former athletes who associate their sport with pressure, anxiety, and the feeling that they were never enough.

This isn’t speculation. I’ve been running a competitive fencing club for over a decade, and I’ve watched this pattern play out dozens of times. A parent arrives with a young child, full of enthusiasm and ambition. The child shows some promise — maybe wins a few local tournaments, earns a rating, gets noticed. The parent’s eyes light up. Suddenly, the schedule intensifies. More tournaments. More private lessons. More pressure. The parent starts analyzing every bout, questioning the coaching, comparing their child to every other fencer in the age group.

And the child? The child who initially loved fencing — who loved the strip, the competition, the camaraderie — slowly begins to shut down. It might take two or three years, but in most cases it will inevitably happen. The joy drains out of their face. They start finding excuses to skip practice. They develop mysterious injuries before big tournaments. They stop caring about results — not because they’ve achieved some zen-like process focus, but because caring has become too painful.

Eventually, they quit. And the parent blames the coach, the club, the sport, the child’s lack of dedication — everyone and everything except the mirror.

What Agassi Actually Teaches Us

If you read Open carefully — and I mean really carefully, not just the highlight reel — the lesson isn’t that tiger parenting produces champions. The lesson is that Andre Agassi succeeded despite his father, not because of him.

Agassi hated tennis for most of his career. He says so explicitly, repeatedly, painfully. He battled depression, addiction, and a crisis of identity that nearly ended his career multiple times. He had to rebuild his relationship with the sport from the ground up in his thirties — essentially learning to love something that had been forced on him since birth.

Is that the model you want for your child? A champion who spends twenty years hating the thing that defines him? A person who needs decades of therapy to undo the damage of a childhood spent being someone else’s dream?

And remember: Agassi had once-in-a-generation talent, born to the former Olympian. Supernatural hand-eye coordination. An athlete’s body and a genius’s mind for the geometry of tennis. He survived his father’s approach because he was gifted enough to succeed even while psychologically drowning. Your child — and I say this with the deepest respect — is almost certainly not Andre Agassi. Neither is mine. The approach that barely worked for a generational talent will devastate an ordinary one.

What Your Child Actually Needs

I’ve watched hundreds of young fencers develop over the years. The ones who go the farthest — not just in fencing, but in life — are almost never the ones with the most intense parents. They’re the ones with parents who provided support without pressure, structure without suffocation, and the freedom to develop their own relationship with the sport.

These children fence because they want to, not because they have to. They compete because they’re curious about how good they can get, not because a parent is keeping score. They lose and come back because the sport itself pulls them back, not because a parent’s disappointment pushes them.

I wrote recently about the Medalless Child — the fencer who never wins a trophy but builds confidence, resilience, and character through the experience of competing. That child’s parents aren’t tiger parents. They’re the quiet ones in the stands who clap after a loss and say, “Good bout.” They’re the ones who ask, “Did you have fun?” instead of “Did you win?” They’re the ones who understand that the car ride home is not a performance review.

These parents will never write a book about how they made their child a champion. But their children will grow up whole.

The Uncomfortable Question

So here’s the question I want every fencing parent to sit with: when you push your child harder, schedule more tournaments, demand more practice, force them to complement their club training at home, analyze more bouts — are you doing it for them? Or are you doing it for you?

Be honest. It’s a hard question. The answer is almost never entirely one or the other. But if you find that your child’s fencing results affect your own mood, your own sense of accomplishment, your own social standing among other fencing parents — that’s a signal. That’s the Agassi pattern starting to form. And unlike Emmanuel Agassi, you don’t have a once-in-a-generation prodigy in your backyard. You have a child who needs a parent more than they need a coach.

You are not Padre Agassi. And thank God for that. Because one was more than enough.

Image: source PickPik of royalty free photo