Emma Raducanu's Journey: Lessons from Andre Agassi

Emma Raducanu is looking for a way back, and she has turned to someone who knows all about falling from the summit and clawing his way up again: Andre Agassi.

Five years on from that astonishing night in New York, when an 18-year-old qualifier ripped through the US Open draw and rewrote tennis history, Raducanu is no longer the sport’s shooting star. She is a 23-year-old trying to piece together a fragile body, a shaken career and a new identity on tour. And she has been doing it with Agassi’s 2009 autobiography in her hands.

“I was especially intrigued by the passage where he got out of his slump in the late 1990s by creating his own training regimen and finding his way back to the top,” Raducanu told Uniqlo. The book, she said, “speaks in depth about his early successes and the lows he reached, perhaps as a result of them. A lot of it was so relatable.”

That word – relatable – is not one usually attached to prodigies who win Grand Slams before they can legally drink in the United States. Yet Raducanu’s story has veered sharply away from fairy tale territory.

From teenage phenomenon to a fight for fitness

In July 2022, less than a year after her US Open title, Raducanu climbed to a career-high world ranking of 10. Today she sits at 98. The slide has not been driven by crisis of confidence alone; her body has simply refused to cooperate.

This season has been a patchwork of setbacks. A foot injury wrecked her pre-season. A post-viral illness then kept her off the court for two and a half months. Most recently, a stress fracture in her lower right leg ruled her out of a return to the US Open, the scene of her greatest triumph and the benchmark by which so many still judge her.

Yet even in this stop-start year, there have been flashes that suggest the story is not finished. At Queen’s Club in June, Raducanu strung together one of the best weeks of her career, reaching her biggest final since that surreal fortnight in New York. For a few days, the tennis flowed again, the ball came off the strings clean and heavy, and the idea of a second act did not feel far-fetched.

That is where Agassi’s journey starts to matter.

Agassi’s shadow – and his message

The American knows what it is to be hailed as a phenomenon and then to lose himself in the noise. A teenage prodigy, he would go on to win eight major singles titles and complete the career Grand Slam, adding Olympic singles gold at the 1996 Games. But between his early explosion and his late-career renaissance came the wilderness.

Agassi went four years without a major title and tumbled to 141st in the world. The fall was brutal. The climb back was deliberate.

“It was literally the hope that if one person read it and it gave them hope, some tools to understand that they're not alone, they can figure it out and get to a healthier place without having to direct their frustrations at the game of tennis, then it was a success for me,” Agassi told BBC Breakfast. “So, hearing that 17 years later it can still impact somebody, especially in this game, it does make me feel good.”

Raducanu is that “one person” now.

Asked what he would say directly to her, Agassi stripped away the mystique and the metrics.

“I would encourage her to focus on being the best of herself on a daily basis, but don't judge that by results or thinking that somehow you have to be 100%,” he said. “You have to learn to be 100% of whatever percent you're at [and] be comfortable in your own identity inside of that - not what people say.”

It is a pointed message for a generation living under the glare of social media. “Back in my day, I could just put down the paper and not read it,” he added. “Now it seems like it's harder for these youngsters to avoid.”

Playing out of fear – and finding a way back

Agassi’s own relationship with the sport was complicated from the start. Tennis was not a childhood passion; it was an obligation. His father introduced him to others as a future world number one, long before the boy had any say in the matter. The pressure was constant, suffocating.

That, Agassi says, drove him to play with “fear”. Only when he plummeted from world number one to 141 did he begin to reconnect with the game on his own terms. Away from the court, he built a foundation focused on education for under-served children. On it, he rebuilt himself.

“I had more success from that point forward than I did playing out of fear,” he said. The lesson, for players and parents alike, is stark. “The first thing I would advise a parent to think about is that it's not their life, it's their child. You raise a child in their way and they'll never depart from it. You just have to find out what their way is.”

Raducanu’s way will not look like Agassi’s. It cannot. Different era, different pressures, different body. But the themes – expectation, injury, identity – overlap enough to offer a blueprint.

A new stage, a familiar intensity

Agassi now steps into a different role, captaining Team USA at the Laver Cup at The O2 in London this week, from 25-27 September. It is a competition that sits outside the traditional calendar but has quickly earned the respect of the sport’s elite.

“Tennis is a hamster wheel of sorts - the fact that these guys make room in their schedule to play this incredible event tells you how great this event is,” he said. “We're obviously playing Team Europe, in Europe, so I don't know where the crowd is going to have their heart. But I know one thing - they're going to see some spectacular tennis.”

Spectacular tennis is what Raducanu once produced on demand. Now the task is different: to accept where she is, to be “100% of whatever percent” she has on any given day, and to trust that the long road back does not have to mirror the meteoric rise that came before.

Agassi found his second career when the rankings told him he was finished. The question now is whether Raducanu can turn a borrowed book and a bruised body into the start of her own revival.