“Open” by Andre Agassi

Open: An Autobiography

By Andre Agassi
2009
400 pages. Audio: 18 hours and 4 minutes
Nonfiction

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I like sports a lot. Probably more than I should. I also like biographies. No apologies on that. And so I suppose it is inevitable that there would be a couple of sports biographies in my list. But I know not everyone is a fan, so I am limiting myself to two—one biography and one autobiography—and to make my list, the book has to be about more than just sports.

Ironically, the greatest sports autobiography I have ever read involves tennis, and I’m not really a fan of tennis. I was never a fan of its author, Andre Agassi, either. Yet if Andre really wrote all of this himself (the book cover names no co-author) it is even more remarkable.

The broad of outlines of the author's life are well known. His remarkable successes include winning all four of the tennis major championships, his unsuccessful marriage to Brooke Shields and his later happy one with tennis pro Steffi Graff, and of course the disastrous advertising campaign, “Image is Everything,” which went a long way to ruining his life. Well, that's not quite fair. His father began ruining his life long before that. But check it out on the internet if you don’t remember the ad campaign.

Why would a preacher read a book about a sport and potentially a personality he or she may not even like? If ever there was a book about the meaning of life, this is it. Andre's father raised him from a very early age to be a tennis champion. In today's world his father's forcing him to practice incessantly might be considered a form of abuse. He shipped Andre off to a tennis factory boarding school, which wasn't much better.

This is where all of the ironies set in. Tennis wound up providing Andre with a life and opportunities that few of us can imagine. It also turned much of his life into a train wreck. The most controversial revelation in the book is when Andre admits to drug usage, which at the time he lied about and could have led to a lengthy suspension.

But the three most important words in the book are his standard response when people want to talk to him about his tennis career: “I hate tennis.” When he says that I absolutely believe him. So we are faced with one of life's most daunting questions: what must it be like to be very nearly the best in the world at something you hate?

This is one of those diminishing real-life celebrity stories that ends more or less happily ever after. Andre seems to be in love with his wife and family, and this almost totally uneducated boy has developed a powerful foundation committed to providing education for those who may not have the opportunities he did.

But the trip to get there is searing, and after you finish the book the question remains: is it worth it to be the best at something you didn't want to do in the first place?