'My mane was a wig'

Agassi said he wore a hairpiece held together with pins in his first Grand Slam final, the 1990 French Open final, and blamed his concerns that it would fall apart for losing the match to Andres Gomez.

Before the match, he prayed ‘not for victory, but that my hairpiece would not fall off’, he writes in ‘Open’.
He said he started to wear a wig to disguise hair loss. “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.

“I asked myself: you want to wear a toupee? On the tennis court? I answered myself; what else could I do?”
But the wig began to disintegrate as he took a shower the night before the Paris final — “probably I used the wrong hair rinse,” Agassi writes.
He panicked and called his brother Philly into the room. Together, they managed to clamp the wig together using clips and pins.

“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.”