Rafa Nadal is just two steps away from winning his 14th Roland Garros. He would do it at 36 years old (he turns them on Friday, the day of the semifinal with Zverev), an age at which very few tennis players reach in full condition.
In fact, until not long ago, the oldest player to win a Grand Slam was the Ecuadorian Andrés Gómez.. It was in the 1990 edition of Roland Garros. A feat, without a doubt, although with the passage of time his victory is not what is most remembered from that afternoon. [+] THIS IS HOW WE LIVE IT IN THE SPORTS WORLD
And it is that when your rival is Andre Agassi, and also confesses years later that he played that final with a wig, you have all the numbers to go into the background.
It all happened on June 10, 1990 at Piste Philippe Chatrier. The young Andre Agassi (20 years old), the sensation of the circuit at that time, was looking for his first Grand Prix against a much more experienced rival than him (30 years old) and the one he had defeated just a few weeks before in the round of 16 of the Miami Open (6-7, 6-2, 6-3).
However, the final did not start well for the Las Vegas player, who lost the first set (6-2).. He reacted later and managed to balance the match (3-6), but from then on he showed a lack of security and confidence that ended up costing him the third and fourth sets for the same score (6-4, 6-4).
What made Agassi not complete the comeback and end up losing the final? Well, as he himself confessed when he presented ‘Open’, his autobiography, in 2009, much of the blame was on a wig. She explained it like this:
“Every morning I woke up and found another piece of my identity on the pillow, in the sink, in the drain. I wondered do you want to wear a toupee? On the tennis court? And I answered myself: what else can I do?”.
Agassi, desperate
Total, who decided to play Roland Garros with a wig, and things were not going badly for him. His trajectory was impeccable throughout the tournament. He had given up only four sets and left players of the stature of Michael Chang, defending champion, or Jim Courier, champion the following two years, on the sidelines.
tricky situation
But a Grand Slam is very long and his wig accused him. After washing her the night before the final she began to break down, and that’s where the drama began.. With the help of his brother Phil, they made the necessary repairs so that he could look on the pitch as the rebellious, long-haired young man who wanted to take on the world, but it didn’t seem to work.
“During the warm-up before the game I prayed. Not because of the victory, but because my false hair didn’t fall out. With each jump I imagined that I fell to the clay. He imagined millions of viewers leaning closer to their televisions, their eyes widening and, in dozens of dialects and languages, wondering how the hair fell out of Andre Agassi’s head,” he confessed.
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Those concentration problems frustrated what would have been his first Grand Slam, which ended up coming in 1992 at Wimbledon. His revenge in Paris came in 1999, already hairless and unapologetic, when he beat Andrei Medvedev in the final in one of the most remembered comebacks in Parisian lands (1-6, 2-6, 6-4, 6-3, 6-4).
Agassi cries after winning Roland Garros in 1999 
That day, in addition, he achieved the only Grand that was missing and completed the Grand Slam, inscribing his name among the greatest in tennis history. He cried like a child, it was not for less.
