An Autobiography - Andre Agassi

Open: An Autobiography [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)







Authors Andre Agassi

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Product Description
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Pro tennis could teach the mafia about omertà. Although dozens of champions have chattered away to ghostwriters, their memoirs have generally remained silent about the game's seamy realities. Presented to the public as clean family fun, an upscale entertainment for the country-club set, top-level tennis is actually played by the physical and emotional mutants of a misery machine that leaves them too ill-educated or psychically damaged to understand what has happened to their lives. Like most victims of abuse, they'd rather not talk about it. So it's both astonishing and a pleasure to report that Andre Agassi, who was castigated for an ad campaign saying "Image is everything," has produced an honest, substantive, insightful autobiography. True to the genre of jock hagiography, it has its share of stock footage -- total recall of famous matches, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat and an upbeat ending. But the bulk of this extraordinary book vividly recounts a lost childhood, a Dickensian adolescence and a chaotic struggle in adulthood to establish an identity that doesn't depend on alcohol, drugs or the machinations of PR. Agassi was born in Las Vegas to a brutal Iranian immigrant, a former Olympic boxer, who forced his four children to play tennis. As a pre-schooler, Andre began hitting balls on the backyard court for hours every day. School, friends, social life and especially thinking were considered distractions by his father, who terrified the entire family. But while his sisters rebelled and his older brother, Philly, finally lacked the killer instinct, Andre became his father's obsession and whipping boy -- one who was expected to whip other boys and unsuspecting men on court. His father pitted him at age 8 against suckers, including football great Jim Brown, who foolishly bet $500 that he could beat the kid. Before junior tournaments, Mr. Agassi fed his son caffeine-laced pills. Later, he tried to turn Andre on to speed. At the age of 12, Andre traveled to Australia with a team of elite young players. For each tournament he won, he got a beer as a reward. Then in the seventh grade he was shipped off to the Bollettieri Academy in Florida, where his tennis flourished, but his life turned feral. Drinking hard liquor and smoking dope, he wore an earring, eyeliner and a Mohawk. Nobody objected as long as he won matches. The academy, in Agassi's words, was "Lord of the Flies with forehands." Since the press and the tennis community still regard Nick Bollettieri as a seer and an innovator whose academy spawned dozens of similar training facilities, Agassi's critical opinion of him may shock the ill-informed. But in fact, Bollettieri is the paradigmatic tennis coach: that is, a man of no particular aptitude or experience and no training at all to deal with children. With no time and certainly no encouragement to get an education, Andre stopped school in the ninth grade, which is about average on the circuit. With the possible exception of boxers, tennis players have less formal schooling than any other pro athletes. In addition to blighting their lives and leaving them vulnerable to agents and hangers-on, this severely limits their options. Again and again, Agassi laments that he hated tennis from the start -- he claims he hates it still -- but felt he had no alternative and no talent to do anything else except turn pro at 16. Judging by the record books and his tax returns, this decision seemed to make sense; Agassi went on to win eight Grand Slam titles and tens of millions of dollars. But the personal cost, as he makes clear, was catastrophic. With no idea who he was, he found himself defined by publicity campaigns and articles by sportswriters who couldn't have guessed what he was actually up to and probably wouldn't have reported it even if they had. Lonely and depressed, he drank a lot, just as he'd been doing since adolescence. In a stranger effort to relax, he lit fires in hotel rooms. Nothing apocalyptic, just a bit of pyromania between matches. Petrified that his hair was falling out, he took to wearing a hairpiece, which gave him yet another thing to worry about during big points. What if his rug fell off? He drifted into a relationship with Brooke Shields but knew the marriage was doomed when she made him wear lifts in his shoes so she could wear high heels on their wedding day. Not surprisingly, he began to lose focus, lose the capacity to care and finally lose tennis matches. He played the game like a man with a plane to catch, and spectators and even the Davis Cup coach publicly accused him of tanking. Now that drinking and lighting fires no longer dulled the pain, he turned to snorting crystal meth. Of all the admissions Agassi makes, this may be the one that causes the most controversy. People will debate whether the drug ruined his game or was in fact what allowed him to come back when his ranking fell out of the top 100. But whatever the doping reveals about Agassi, it says far more about the Association of Tennis Professionals and its drug program. When Agassi tested positive at a tournament, the result was never made public; he was never suspended; and the ATP ultimately accepted his bogus claim, sent by letter and supported by no evidence, that he accidentally drank a spiked soda. While not without excitement, Agassi's comeback to No. 1 is less uplifting than his sheer survival, his emotional resilience and his good humor in the face of the luckless cards he was often dealt. In the end he made some inspired choices, not simply by marrying Steffi Graf, starting a charitable foundation for the education of poor children and finding a terrific ghostwriter in J.R. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize winner, but also by refusing to put pressure on his kids to play tennis. bookworld@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Product Details
# Hardcover: 400 pages
# Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (November 9, 2009)
# Language: English

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Reviews An Autobiography - Andre Agassi


Well, this is certainly not that book. "Open" is a journey that I predict will stay with you for a very long time. It's a completely unexpected trip to places you've never been. I'm not one of those quasi-professional reviewers you see on Amazon. But this book practically made me write about it.

Interestingly, Open starts not at the beginning and not quite at the end. Second round, US Open, 2006.

Not the final match of Andre's career--but the one right before that.
Against a competitor you'd never heard of before or since.
The battle was against the guy across the net, and also Andre's hatred of tennis, his failing body, the demons that he harnessed to get through the unending heroic contest that seemed destined to continue until both just fell into a heap on the court. And it is so well told.

After 20 pages, I knew that this was unlike any other biography I had ever read. Couldn't put it down. Couldn't stop thinking about it. Agassi dug deeper inside than most of us ever will have to, to get to core of what made him so powerful as a player and so conflicted as a person. It is all conspicuously real: The small moments, the outlandish triumphs and the friendships that sustained him and/or corrupted him. The gauntlet he had to run through to arrive at the balance and joy he has today. It's transformative.