Memoirs of a Tennis Legend: A Book Review on “Open”

By Courtney Miller

Autobiographies are tricky because the good ones a) tell the truth, b) that truth is interesting to an audience and c) it is conveyed so to keep the audience interested.  That may seem like an obvious statement, but certain things—like ego, insincerity and make-believe—just don’t belong in the genre.  Andre Agassi’s book “Open” is a good autobiography.  It’s also an intriguing and shocking read.  Relationships, racquets and crystal meth—Agassi lays it all on the table to tell the story of how tennis both shaped who he became and prevented him from discovering himself.

The man’s name will go down in tennis history.  Andre Agassi.  He’s won all four major tournaments and an Olympic gold metal, and he played far past the retirement age of most tennis players, coming back from numerous slumps.  He was the wild child player of the 80s.  But very few knew that his career boiled down to two basic things: loneliness and hatred.

Agassi was born in Las Vegas and from the day he was able to hold a tennis racquet, he’s been holding a tennis racquet.  But number one in the world was his father’s dream for him.  In chapter one, we’re introduced to the Andre pictured on the back cover—seven years old and spending hours on the back yard tennis court hitting balls fired by the ball machine he calls “The Dragon.”  He learned tennis was more important to the people around him than school, a realization that would later propel him to found and fund a school that encouraged learning of all kinds.

Throughout his book, Agassi refers back to tennis as the loneliest sport.  He says tennis is the only sport where you don’t have physical or even vocal contact with your opponent or with your “team.”  You have only yourself in a box on a court and no one else comes in that box.  He confesses how much he hates playing and the constant struggle between wanting it to be completely over and not being able to let go.  His portraits of the Andres across the years are sincere and unsettling as he allows the reader to discover the boy caught in a world of fame and mind games.  He relives his relationship with Brooke Shields and his nearly life-long crush on Stephanie Graf, who he would eventually marry.  Agassi has said it wouldn’t be worth writing “Open” if he wasn’t going to be unabashedly open about his life.  And he is, especially concerning his most important friendships and the lowest points of his life.

“Open” is a collaboration between Agassi and J.R. Moehringer, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, though Agassi’s name is alone on the cover.  Together, they create a simple, striking style.  There are no quotation marks and when there’s no need to describe the logistics of getting from one place to another, there’s no description.  The writing, like Agassi’s tennis and his personality, is graceful and strong.

A solid ace.