Agassi Agonistes

Posted on December 31, 2009 | 2 Comments

I have just finished reading Andre Agassi’s bio, Open.  Given the media coverage of the book, I half-expected to see a sub-title, Crystal Meth and Me. It’s a great book, due in no small part to Agassi’s collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning author J.R. Moehringer, and the revelations about the tennis great’s drug use are a very small part of it. But Agassi’s “mistake that nearly cost him everything”, as the book jacket describes it, got the lion’s share of attention before the book even hit the stands.

In addition to mulling over the book’s inspiring story, and wondering how anyone could overcome the truly Dickensian childhood that Agassi endured, I have also been thinking about how I would have handled release of the book, from a public relations point of view.  Most of us have confronted the problem:  we have a good product or campaign that we plan to launch.  But part of the story – most likely not central to it – is bound to catch the media’s attention and threaten to overwhelm the key messages that we want to get across to the public.

Here’s what happened with the Agassi story: Time, Inc. had bought the rights to excerpt the book in People and Sports Illustrated, beginning in the SI edition of October 28th. The day before, a respected SI writer posted a note on Twitter about Agassi’s admitted drug use.  An Australian publication, considering the embargo “broken” by the tweet, began running excerpts immediately, getting the jump on Sports Illustrated by a day. Sports Illustrated essentially scooped itself.  The media focused on the drug revelations.  Katie Couric, who had been preparing an in-depth piece for “60 Minutes” on Agassi and had reportedly not asked him about his drug use in earlier taped interviews, went scurrying back to Las Vegas for a few follow-up questions.  And tennis icons Navratilova, Federer, and Nadal let loose with a volley of criticism for their former colleague on the court.

I have been at this long enough – both on the media side and the PR side – to have a few questions about all this.

First, Random House – the book’s publisher – had put out a squeaky clean press release about the book, calling it “beautiful and haunting,” but never mentioning Agassi’s drug use.  Did they really think no one was going to notice that part of the book?

And, does a Sports Illustrated writer really decide unilaterally to tweet about the most inflammatory part of a sports great’s book (that is about to be excerpted at great expense by his employer) without bouncing the idea off of any colleagues?  The tweet disappeared in less than a half-hour, but the secret was out.

And, was Random House calculating that the excerpts in SI and People would bring up the subject of drug use, get it out in the open and inoculate the environment before the book hit the stands?  Or were they letting someone else raise the drug use subject to drive sales of the book, so that they would not appear to be exploiting Agassi’s drug use and subsequent lie to testing authorities? Or both?

Finally, did Random House really just hope for the best in releasing what essentially represented a reported $5 million investment and not strategize well in advance how to handle Agassi’s admission of drug use? If they did, they are unlike any client that I have ever had in preparing for what could have been a major exercise in damage control.

Whatever Random House did, or didn’t do, it worked.  As of today, Agassi’s book is in its fifth week on the New York Times bestseller list.