NORTHERN PLANNER

A voice from the afterlife made me think about the drawbacks of youth very recently. Which brings me to another hero to go with Rutherford and Matt Biondi. It’s Andre Agassi, but not necessarily for reasons you may expect.

I played team tennis as a teenager – nothing special, just good enough to enjoy playing. But I hated my club for reasons that probably handcuff the British game to it’s present day. Namely, you must wear white, children are to be seen and not heard and. most damning of all, it’s not about the game, it’s about meeting people and being social. I do think that sport is a great way to make friends, but in the end, people who love their sport just want to play.

Now imagine what an impact Agassi would have on headstrong fourteen year old faced with all that. The rebel with that hair, awful clothes and loud mouthed, crass objections to any authority at all. Brilliant. Not to mention scintillating tennis. Problem was he never won anything.

French Open final twice, US Open final once, he kept on losing at the final hurdle. Redemption came at Wimbledon in 1992 when he beat Goran Ivanesivic in 5 sets. True redemption would come later, but this moment was pivotal in proving to the world, and himself that he wasn’t a choker.

They’d played four hard sets, Goran had blown him away in the last one and everyone thought he was about to choke again. Except for the man himself. He talked afterwords about feeling it was different this time, being able to tap into his ability, overflowing with it. He could feel his own strength, he knew what he could do and what it was for. Suddenly he wasn’t afriad anymore.

The best server in the game kept thundering these bombs down, powerful enough to obliterate the hated Serbian army. Agassi kept with him and then pounced. Goran had no answer and that was when Agassi became a man. All the ‘image is everything’ stuff was pushed to one side, he had gone right out to the edges and found he could not only live there, he could push further. He started to grow up.

We all go through callow youth, thinking we can take on the world, knowing without a doubt that experience is nothing, we need to turn things upside down. Then comes the slow realisation that we’re only at the beginning, there’s so much we need to learn. It’s quite a shock to realise you’re not infallible, but in the end that only makes you stronger.

Agassi went on to win all the big tournaments, but even better, he grew old gracefully, with dignity and became the game’s best loved player. He was still exciting, but working with Brad Gilbert in later years, and simply growing up, made him one of the most mature, human and kind people in sport.

Now a happy husband and father, he enjoyed his last years as a much loved veteran. He learned that you can overcome lengthening years with ferociously hard work, dedication and pure experience.

Few would have thought that loud mouthed lout would have become such a role model for all. For me that was his real victory. Maybe it’s something the young cannot be taught, maybe you have to learn the hard way. But Agassi showed that the true beginning of knowledge is understanding how little you know.

He is also a famous, successful bald man – so double points for that.

Someone mentioned that I’ve some fight left in me, I responded flippantly but he’s got a point. I do go through life with a sort of quiet stoicism. That’s being Northern I guess, but some of it is down to a past life as competitive swimmer.

(this is me, the one on the right, and two mates on the way back from a swim trip to Chicago. We thought we looked cool. We didn’t)

Come to think of it, I learned quite a lot from swimming. I think it’s worth sharing for two reasons;

1. I think a dose of exercise is good for people in general (sorry if that sounds a bit like Mr Bronson from Grange Hill – who also played Admiral Ozzel, the first character to get ‘force choked’ by Darth Vader).

2. What I’ve learned has been helpful for a struggling planner living Up North. Up here we have to work hard to justify our existence and prove our worth. Planning isn’t ingrained in agency cultures, you have to really make people want you in the room. Planning anywhere takes hard work, patience, humility, maturity, a thick skin and being able to take the knocks. Out here this is doubly so. You get nothing by right, you can enjoy the value of rarity – but you have to bloody earn it.

So enough with the tenuous links. What I learned was:

1. Working hard pays off. To get anywhere, you have to train for three hours before school and three hours after. And push it to the limit. That’s a lot for a twelve year old. But on the day of the race, all that work was worth it. Talent is fine, but slackness finds you out in the end.
2. Discipline can equal fun. With all that training, and school, homework and eating the required 4,000 calories a day, there wasn’t much time for playing out and doing the things kids do. So you learned very quickly to do the dull stuff with no fuss, that way you could have more time for fun. That also meant that the organised kids had the best time.
3. You need rivals. Quite simply, they keep you sharp. They force you to never relax.
4. Love people better than you. When I was in the under 8’s, i trained with the under 10’s. It was hard, but they pulled you along. I also watched what faster swimmers did, and tried to copy them.
5. Process and technique win over brute force. You had to be fit, you had to be strong. But there were these huge,strapping kids who just made lots of splashes. A bad stroke gets you nowhere fast. There were also kids who had great strokes but bad starts and turns. In a sport where success is measures in flakes of a second, little things matter.
6. You need other people. I needed a coach, Mum and Dad to take me places and cheer me on (it mattered), I needed chaperones when I was abroad without them and I needed the people I trained with. When you go through that much together, you need it to be fun. We all got very close.
7. There are times when you just have to get on with it. Traveling abroad without your parents at 10 is quite scary, so is ordering food, staying with strange families and meeting American girls who think you’re older than you are ;-0). You can quiver and not do things, or you can grab the experience with both hands. It’s no accident that my best friends in lower school were swimmers, so were my girlfriends. We were simply more grown up than the people at school.
8. Losing is good. There’s no point having a tantrum or giving up. Understand why you lost, learn from it. Put it right. Sometimes people are simply better than you. That’s quite a shock for a young boy.
9. Patience is a virtue. It takes time to get  good. Good technique, getting fit, those things take time. You’ll fail a lot, and badly, before you start to win. Also, the wait between heats and finals seemed forever. You got used to waiting.
10. It’s good to be around people like you. There used to be a bunch of lads who were deadly enemies in the pool, but liked being around people out of it. We all knew what we’d done to get here, the sacrifices, the work. There was some sort of unwritten, mutual respect that’s hard to explain.
11. You learn the value of transferable skills. Cross country is a doddle and bullies can’t keep up. Growing up quick also helps avoid the first term meltdown some university freshers go through.
12. You learn humility and generosity. When you’re competing against your best friends, you don’t crow over beating them, and you try and help when they’re down.
13. Focus on what you’re doing. If you’re always worrying about what people are doing, how good they are, you’re not focusing on what you can do. If you’ve done your best, and you always look to do even better, the rest will follow.

So there you are. That should be helpful if you’re daft enough to take up swimming, I think it’s been helpful for survival as northern planner too. I suspect it could be useful for a planner elsewhere too.