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Motivation Quote by Andre Agassi

"I'm going to have to pick my shots and play great tennis"

About this Quote

Agassi’s line lands with the plainspoken clarity of an athlete who’s spent a career translating nerves into strategy. “Pick my shots” sounds technical, but it’s really a worldview: stop trying to win every point with one swing; win by choosing the right moments to be bold. It’s the language of someone who knows the difference between highlight-reel tennis and match-winning tennis, between ego and execution.

The subtext is constraint. Agassi is admitting limits without making a spectacle of them. Whether it’s age, an injury, a brutal opponent, or just the grind of a long tournament, the sentence quietly concedes: I can’t outgun everyone all the time. So I’ll outthink them. That’s a veteran’s pivot from raw dominance to controlled risk, from constant aggression to selective violence. “Have to” is the tell; this isn’t a preference, it’s necessity.

“Play great tennis” is the deceptively simple closer, almost banal, which is why it works. Greatness here isn’t romantic; it’s operational. It means clean patterns, disciplined margins, first-serve percentage, returning with intent, refusing the cheap error. In Agassi’s era, when power baseliners were turning points into drag races, his brand was early ball-striking and ruthless efficiency. The quote frames that identity as a survival tactic: you don’t beat the modern game by being louder, you beat it by being smarter at the exact seconds that matter.

Quote Details

TopicSports
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Agassi, Andre. (2026, January 17). I'm going to have to pick my shots and play great tennis. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/im-going-to-have-to-pick-my-shots-and-play-great-37993/

Chicago Style
Agassi, Andre. "I'm going to have to pick my shots and play great tennis." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/im-going-to-have-to-pick-my-shots-and-play-great-37993/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I'm going to have to pick my shots and play great tennis." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/im-going-to-have-to-pick-my-shots-and-play-great-37993/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2026.

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Pick Your Shots and Play Great Tennis - Andre Agassi
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About the Author

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Andre Agassi (born April 29, 1970) is a Athlete from USA.

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