September, 2006
Viva Las Agassi
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Our generation's most fulfilling player has sailed into the sunset, but it was a kind of poetic justice for him to lose to a certain B. Becker in his last ever match. Why do I say that? Let me explain. Those who watched the game and read the papers will know Agassi lost to Benjamin Becker, not the more famous Boris, who himself retired from tennis in 1999. But it is Boris Becker who revealed something about Agassi's game in his recent autobiography. The two players clashed 14 times, and Agassi walked away the winner on 10 of those occasions. Agassi later told Becker there was a reason why he found it relatively easy to beat him: he could figure out where Becker's serve was headed depending on the direction his tongue was pointed at! (Becker fans would remember the German had a habit of sticking out his tongue....
More about H R Venkatesh
H R Venkatesh is News Editor-Anchor at CNN-IBN. He has just returned from the University of Oxford where he completed an M Sc in Contemporary India as a Shell-Chevening Scholar. He has 9 years’ experience in TV news having worked in several positions. He began as a Business Correspondent at CNBC India in Mumbai where he was asked to report on – hold your breath – the cement, steel and shipping industries. Numbed by two years as an ‘old economy’ reporter, he moved to cover sport at Headlines Today in Delhi. As cricket correspondent he travelled with the Indian cricket team for two years. Highlights from this stint include watching Sachin Tendulkar complete his 10,000th test run, interviewing Sourav Ganguly 18 times and Shane Warne at least 15 times (not so much due to his persistence as to the fact that the duo were contractually bound to do the interviews), and watching Australia conquer the final frontier. Numbed yet again, by the realization that the best way to appreciate sport is to NOT report on it, he moved towards covering politics. Along the way, he began presenting news and moved to CNN-IBN as it was preparing to launch in 2005. He spent the next few years anchoring news & special shows, and occasionally foraying into the field, before taking a break to study. Although nobody’s given him a prize for it, he is proud to have been the first Indian to present a podcast – the News Junkie Podcast – online.
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