Jim Heirbaut

Book Review

If you still think professional tennis players lead glamorous lives, think again. Or even better, read Andre Agassi’s recently published autobiography ‘Open, an autobiography’. It’s a disenchanting look behind the scenes of professional tennis and an honest account of one professional athlete with the ups and downs he encountered and how he overcame them.

He hated tennis. Yes, you really read this. Andre Agassi, the former teen tennis prodigy and long-haired sex symbol, who later on became number one in the world and won eight grand slam titles, was mostly miserable in his profession.

Yes, of course tennis brought the man great wealth and yes, it sent him across the world from one fancy hotel to the other. But this book shows that it was never easy for him to motivate himself. From a very young age Agassi’s extremely dominant father pushed him into a modern form of child labor. Still in the crib, his dad made baby Andre practice hitting moving objects.

It was just bad luck. Agassi’s three older siblings hadn’t succeeded in becoming professional tennis players, so now all of dad’s pressure dropped on little Andre. Take for instance his story of The Dragon, the ball machine his father had modified to fire the tennis balls even faster at the seven year old. In Agassi’s words, the machine becomes a frightening being, “The dragon has a brain, a will, a black heart– and horrifying voice.[…] the sound it makes every time it fires a ball at me 110 miles an hour, is a bloodcurdling roar. I flinch every time.”

At times the reader will feel sorry for Agassi, but mostly it’s an entertaining autobiography. Agassi turns out to be a smart man with a great sense of humor. It’s hard to compliment him on his writing skills, as the book was ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer. But in the thoughts written down we can see Agassi’s intelligence seep through. And a disarming honesty too, as he writes about playing professional tennis with a hairpiece, to cover up his balding spot.

Later on, as Agassi starts to win tournaments, the story about his ambivalent relationship with tennis becomes less and less convincing. He says he still hates the game, but yet he doesn’t take the steps to abandon it, to pick up something else. Brainwashed by his father? Maybe. Tempted by the sweetness of winning? Yes, that too. But as a grown-up you can make your own decisions in life.

It’s only later, at a more mature age, that Agassi finds something in life that he really wants to do, by own free choice. In his hometown of Las Vegas he starts a preparatory school, for children in lesser areas of the city, where families are poor and life opportunities scarce. After his retirement from the game in 2006, this is where Andre Agassi spends most of his time on.

Above all, ‘Open, an autobiography’ is an entertaining, well-written book, and a good read. It’s especially interesting for tennis fanatics, because they will have fun reliving all those epic matches the ‘comeback kid from Vegas’ describes in such vivid detail.

Andre Agassi, ‘Open, An Autobiography’, Knopf, 2009, $ 28.95. [Order at Amazon]

This book review was written for the Mediabistro course ‘Bootcamp for Journalists’