You don’t cheat anybody out of their experience, whatever it is.

Agassi’s line suggests a hard-edged ethic about consequences: you can’t truly deprive someone of the life they are going to live, including the lessons that come from pain, failure, or disappointment. It implies that experience is not a commodity another person can steal or withhold; it is something each person inevitably accrues through time and circumstance. The quote can be read as a caution against paternalism (trying to “protect” others from reality) and as a reminder that actions reverberate—if you wrong someone, you may change their day or their trajectory, but you are also giving them an experience they will have to integrate. In that sense, it frames adversity as formative rather than merely damaging.