Open by Andre Agassi

For all of its reputation as a country club sport for people who sit down for tea breaks between lobs, tennis is brutal. Tennis is a pure form of pugilism. The first time I opened my mind enough to give tennis a chance and watch a match, I knew exactly what I was seeing: Two people in a survival struggle. Two fighters out to kill each other. It wasn’t a sporting event, it was combat. And for the imagery of tennis being a strict province of rich people, there are a good number of players who come up from situations not dissimilar to those of other pugilists. The Williams sisters came from the bad part of Los Angeles. Jimmy Connors was raised in East St. Louis. Andre Agassi is from working class Las Vegas.

Like far too many other pugilists, Agassi wasn’t magically drawn into pugilism out of fascination or curiosity or enjoyment. He was yanked into it forcefully and legged it out in order to survive. In Open, his autobiography, Agassi is open about a fact tennis aficionados wouldn’t expect about him: He hates tennis. Since the release of Open, Agassi seems to have at least made his peace with his sport and accepted his lot as a tennis lifer. A recent news report said he’s acting as a coach. He appears in ads for major tournaments, still shows up at those tournaments, and posts occasional updates about tennis on his social media accounts. (Although most of his social media updates revolve around his family, and his Twitter feed is full of pictures of them at Vegas Golden Knights games.) (PS: You totally need to follow the Golden Knights on Twitter – they run the greatest account in sports, ever.)

Agassi loves the movie Shadowlands and is a deep introvert who loves a quiet evening in with close family and friends. Yet, the media painted him as a rebellious bad boy. Open is a portrait of a man who had everything one could ever want, except a sense of who he was. The thing about Open that’s most impressive is how it manages to avoid every athlete autobiography trope that ever existed. Throughout the book, the picture that Agassi forms about himself is one of a man who is deeply confused about how a basic human being functions. His entire modus operandi is to make major decisions by wondering to himself, “This is what normal people are supposed to do, right? This is how normal people act, isn’t it?”

Open is the story of what happens when a proper childhood gets deferred in favor of a demanding parent’s dream. Andre Agassi never wanted to play tennis, let alone go professional or become the world’s first-ranked player. In the opening chapters of the book, Agassi comes off as, well, I don’t want to say nerdy, but low-key and shy. His father was a tennis obsessive who demanded Andre stand out in the yard hitting tennis balls every day before school, then every day after school until night. In the middle of the seventh grade, Agassi was pulled out of school and enrolled against his will in the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. His father was inspired to put Andre there after seeing a news report on it… Which exposed it as what was basically a tennis sweatshop that employed child labor. Agassi, in short, was robbed of a normal childhood and spent decades forcing himself on and off tennis courts out of survival. Tennis was the only thing he knew. Agassi’s entire life was fallout.

The idea of how normal people function is a constant theme throughout Open because it was what Agassi wanted most. One of the notable things about this book is that it doesn’t act as any sort of advocate for the life of a professional athlete. This isn’t a typical excesses-and-waste autobiography. Instead, it’s about one man’s search for inner peace and identity in a sport he hates. Since tennis was his life rather than his work, Agassi describes how he left all of his emotions on the court, fighting for every point as if his own life was on the line. He vividly describes the way tennis constantly put pressure on him and shows a sort of jealousy toward his great rival, Pete Sampras, whom he describes as more or less of a robot. He describes the way his fame from his “Image is Everything” ad affected him in a bad way, and how his primary concern during many matches was his wig staying in place.

The way tennis was shoved down Agassi’s throat ended up with a terrible side effect: When Agassi came of age, he had no clue how adults are supposed to think or act. Open isn’t a book about psychology, but there are deep psychological undertones to it. Why is he here, how does he act, and what does he do in various situations? After getting let off with a lenient punishment by a judge at one point, Agassi leaves the impression that he almost wanted the punishment just to see what it would be like. When he marries Brooke Shields, you get the impression that he was proposing because it was expected that a man his age be married. In the meantime, no one ever teaches him how to find people to trust, and so he repeatedly fails to find a team which is more than an entourage. At some point, he spent time with some loser who called himself Slim and used meth. He was lucky to get off lightly doing that, but he ran around the tennis circuit for awhile tanking matches.

Agassi does learn his lessons, though, and it’s at this point that the comeback which turned him into tennis royalty begins. Finally finding a caring father figure in his trainer Gil and a good coach in tennis legend Brad Gilbert, Agassi managed to turn his career around to such a point that he became the oldest first-ranked tennis player in history. He also finds his wife, fellow tennis great Steffi Graf, the only person who could possibly relate to the kind of pressure Agassi faced. Things do turn and end well for him, if not with the sort of anonymity he craved.

Autobiographies like this are rare things. Usually there’s a set group of tropes that athletes adhere to, and Open avoids them all. If an athlete promises to tell a truth that “crazy” or “unvarnished,” those are usually buzz words for a 200-page tome about how awesome the athlete is. In avoiding those tropes, Open pulls off the incredible trick of reminding readers that professional athletes are ultimately the one thing we forget they are: Human. It’s because of this that Open immediately found a spot on my list of all-time favorite sports books.

Tags: Autobiographies