Andre Agassi Wants Dudes to Embrace Being Bald
Going bald can be a distressing experience for anyone; now imagine having it happen while you’re in the public eye. That was Andre Agassi’s experience in the 1990s, at the height of his career as a professional tennis player. As he racked up victories at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the Grand Slam (eight times!), and even the Olympics, secretly he was losing a battle with hair loss.
Having first noticed signs at age 19, Agassi tried to camouflage his thinning hair by styling it into his trademark blonde mullet — a look he’s not exactly proud of, according to Business Insider. “The truth is that if I found a picture of myself like that, I’d probably burn it,” he told the publication. When styling wasn’t enough, Agassi even resorted to wearing hairpieces, as he admitted in his 2010 autobiography, “Open.”
But one day in 1995, at age 25, Agassi decided it was time to stop covering up and to just embrace himself as he was. So he shaved his head. “When I did that, I never felt freer in my life,” Agassi told Business Insider. “It was like a weight off my shoulders.”
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In retrospect, Agassi says, he can now see that time spent worrying about going bald is time wasted, adding, “The most precious thing we have in life is time. Why spend a moment worried about something? Life is too short for that.” That said, he feels there was a silver lining to stalling when it came to shaving off what was left of his locks. “In a sense it was good timing … because it took a lot of people on the journey with me,” he told the publication.
By the age of 35, two-thirds of American men will experience “some degree of appreciable hair loss,” and of those cases, 95 percent will be due to genetic male-pattern baldness, according to the American Hair Loss Association. About one-quarter of those men will, like Agassi, start shedding strands before age 21.
While he was hiding the truth of his baldness under wigs and bandannas, Agassi “hated feeling like a fraud,” he told Business Insider. Pretending to have a healthy head of hair became tiring, he said, and he feels much more confident now. And he’s not the only bald celebrity to draw strength from his natural look — and to sizzle despite his lack of locks.
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“Let’s put it this way, we’re all going to lose it eventually, so you’re better off making a stylistic choice early,” bald bad boy Vin Diesel once told Elle magazine. “Then nobody will be able to fault you for it later when it’s your style and you’re really losing it.” Bald action hero Bruce Willis has said, “Hair loss is God’s way of telling me I’m human.” And comedian and hair-loss hero Larry David has been quoted as saying, “Anyone can be confident with a full head of hair. But a confident bald man — there’s your diamond in the rough.”
By talking openly about hair loss now, and by being a role model off the court, Agassi wants to inspire other men to be confident in who they are, according to Business Insider. The legend encourages balding men to “be true to yourself” and “just shave it.”
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