Do you hate sport? Really hate it. Do you play it for the love of it, or are you inspired and driven by the frustration, the hatred?

This is my afterthought from the extraordinary Andre Agassi autobiography extracts in The Times last week. I found much of it fascinating, but most intriguing of all was the revelation that he hated the sport that made him. And he wasn’t mucking around. In almost every extract, he said he hated tennis. Certainly, almost every time he mentioned his father, there in the same sentence, or not very far away, you read a reminder of his hatred for tennis.

Professional athletes are, almost by definition, unusually driven people. But being driven by hatred? Agassi is not the first. Here are five reasons to hate your sport.

Johnny Nelson

This is Sheffield’s former cruiserweight world champion on boxing: “I absolutely hated it.” he says. Why? “I couldn’t handle the fear. I used to hold off the fear only until I’d get in the ring — then everything that frightened me piled on at the same time.

“In the dressing-room before a fight, I’d be thinking, ‘Why the hell did I pick boxing? Why didn’t I pick golf or football?’ And I’d go through all the sports in my head. Sometimes I’d go in the toilet and look at my watch. We’d fight three-minute rounds and I wanted to see how long three minutes was. That’s how scared I was. Fear of being hurt, fear of getting knocked out, fear of being put in a wheelchair - everything that any normal person who doesn’t box would think.”

Exactly, every normal person would walk away from it. Nelson was spellbound by it, gripped by it. So much so he couldn’t walk away from it.

Debi Thomas

If you want to know hatred in sport, read Little Girls In Pretty Boxes, the chilling study by San Francisco journalist Joan Ryan, of young elite female gymnasts and figure-skaters in the United States and the astonishing pressure they are put under to be thin, brave and perfect and to train like slaves and subjugate their entire lives to their sport.

Little Girls In Pretty Boxes is so powerful, you could assume – and you would of course be wrong to - that every young gymnast out there is forced to perform with a gun against their heads. As Debi Thomas, who was tipped for figure-skating gold in Calgary 1988, said in the book: “I remember thinking at one time, ‘If you don’t skate well, you’re going to die.’”

As it was, Thomas could not deliver in Calgary. On the biggest stage of all, her nerve let her down, she didn’t let her jumps go, her triples became doubles and her doubles singles. A month later she would compete in the World Championships which were viewed, by her agent and coach, as redemption. But this is Thomas’s recollection of those Worlds which would be her last ever competition: “At the Worlds, I’m screwing up stuff right and left and I had the biggest smile on my face because I was just like, ‘You’ll never have to do that again.’”

Simon Hobday