Open, by Andre Agassi

I am not a fan of the memoir, and I don't think I've read a memoir by an athlete since the early 1970s, when my dad talked me into reading Ball Four, by Jim Bouton (which I still remember as laugh-out-loud funny). I probably wouldn't have read Andre Agassi's book if my daughter-in-law hadn't loaned me her copy...but I'm really happy that I did.

Open is an incredible window into the mind of a world-class athlete who is not afraid to lay out his fears, his neuroses, and his bad decisions--along with his triumphs and his slow progress toward a happy and meaningful life. Given Agassi's talent and the success he experienced in his two decades in tennis, I would have expected that the man had a strong sense of self. Nothing could be further from the truth--Agassi seems to have been doomed to years of angst by his childhood at the mercy of his tennis-crazed father and adolescence as a commodity at the factory-like Bollettieri Academy. As I saw Andre make so many mistakes--trying meth and marrying Brooke Shields when he knew shouldn't are but two examples--I rethought some of my judgments of other top athletes with pushy parents (yes, Tiger Woods was on my mind).

Open is also very well written (J.R. Moehringer worked on the book with Agassi). The prologue, titled 'The End," is wonderful--one of the best first chapters I've read in a long time. You have to read this book once you're read the opener. I occasionally got a bit tired of the accounts of tennis matches (I know, I know, he's a tennis player after all), but the angst and the relationships kept me going. A number of things about Andre's relationship with his eventual wife Steffi were almost unbelievable, with the account of the initial meeting of the two fathers approaching the surreal (though I absolutely believe it happened).

I wholeheartedly recommend Open, for fans and non-fans of memoirs and sports.

Favorite passages:

People often ask what it's like, this tennis life, and I can never think how to describe it. But that word comes closest. More than anything else, it's a wrenching, thrilling, horrible, astonishing whirl. It even exerts a faint centrifugal force, which I've spent three decades fighting. Now, lying on my back under Arthur Ashe Stadium, holding hands with a vanquished opponent and waiting for someone to come help us, I do the only thing I can do. I stop fighting it. I just close my eyes and watch.

I watch Stefanie watching the kids, smiling, and I think of the four of us, four distinct personalities. Four different surfaces. And yet a matching set. Complete. On the eve of my final tournament, I enjoy that sense we all seek, that knowledge we get only a few times in life, that the themes of our life are connected, the seeds of our ending were there in the beginning, and vice versa.