Andre Agassi was one of the most popular players on tour in his heyday and his flowing, long locks helped cultivate that heartthrob image.
But the seven-time Grand Slam champion was hiding a secret… he was losing his hair. It even cost him the French Open title in 1990.
Agassi was just 19 when he started going bald and wore a wig for a number of years to try and hide that fact.
“Every morning I would get up and find another piece of my identity on the pillow, in the wash basin, down the plughole,” he wrote in his highly acclaimed autobiography Open.
“I asked myself: you want to wear a toupee? On the tennis court? I answered myself; what else could I do?”
Agassi turned professional at 16 and was tipped as a future Grand Slam champion having made the semi-finals at Roland Garros in 1988 and the US Open in 1988 and 1989.
It looked as though he would quickly be fulfilling that promise when he made his first final on the Parisian red clay.
He faced Andres Gomez, from Ecuador, and it was a problem with his hairpiece that preoccupied his mind before, and during, the encounter.
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“Then a fiasco happened,” he said. “The evening before the match, I stood under the shower and felt my wig suddenly fall apart.
“Probably I used the wrong hair rinse. I panicked and called my brother Philly into the room.
“‘It’s a total disaster!’ I said to him. He looked at it and said he could clamp it with hair clips.
“It took 20 clips. ‘Do you think it will hold?’ I asked. ‘Just don’t move so much,’ he said.
“Of course I could have played without my hairpiece, but what would all the journalists have written if they knew that all the time I was really wearing a wig?
“During the warming-up training before play I prayed. Not for victory, but that my hairpiece would not fall off.
“With each leap, I imagine it falling into the sand.
“I imagine millions of spectators move closer to their TV sets, their eyes widening and, in dozens of dialects and languages, ask how Andre Agassi’s hair has fallen from his head.”
Agassi did eventually feel comfortable enough to shave off his hair in 1995 and step out onto the tennis court bald.
By 1995, he had won Wimbledon, the US Open and the Australian Open. The American eventually completed the career Grand Slam, becoming the first male player to do so since Rod Laver, when he finally won the French Open in 1999.
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