Parental pressure experienced in childhood by professional athletes: The case of Andre Agassi

Abstract

The pressure to seek optimal performance in sport is present from an early age. Sometimes this pressure comes from the family, particularly from the parents, and conditions the experience of the young athlete, which can become a negative experience. The aim of this research was to show how pressure from his father influenced the sporting experience of professional tennis player Andre Agassi during his childhood. To do this, we follow the biographical method by analyzing Agassi’s published autobiography, “Open, an autobiography “. After a first exploratory phase of the complete book we focused on parental pressure, from whose analysis we obtained the following categories: his father’s passion for tennis, parental pressure strategies, thoughts of giving up tennis, lack of alternatives to tennis, victory as a way to meet his father’s expectations, anxiety in the face of defeat, fear to parental rejection, identity and discrepancy. The results are discussed in the light of different investigations and theoretical reflections on parental pressure in sport. We conclude that parental pressure can be a double-edged sword since, on the one hand, it can favor the motivation of the individual or, on the contrary, create situations of anguish and anxiety that can culminate in sports abandonment, or in important identity crises. Finally, we highlight the importance of analyzing the sporting phenomenon in a critical way within school physical education, pointing to the published autobiographies of professional athletes as an excellent pedagogical and research resource.