OPEN: An Autobiography. By Andre Agassi. Illustrated. 386 pages. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.
"What seems to us bitter trials are often blessings in disguise." − Oscar Wilde
Book Review by Paul Fein
"If everything goes according to Brad's plan, I'll face Becker in the semis. Then Pete. I think: If only, when we're born, we could look over our draw in life, project our path to the final," muses Andre Agassi just before the 1995 U.S. Open in his searingly honest autobiography, OPEN.
Given a choice, would Agassi have even wanted the anguished and confusing but ultimately fulfilling hand life dealt him?
Eleven years later, during the 2006 U.S. Open, the final tournament of his roller-coaster career, Agassi stands at the bathroom mirror. Wracked by back pain, he stares at his aging, haunted face and flashes back to the start of his strange odyssey and searches for an answer.
"Somewhere in those eyes, however, I can still vaguely see the boy who didn't want to play tennis in the first place, the boy who wanted to quit, the boy who did quit many times," Agassi recalls. "I see that golden-haired boy who hated tennis, and I wonder how he would view this bald man, who still hates tennis and yet he still plays. Would he be shocked? Amused? Proud?"
Agassi's bad draw in life starts early because he is never given a choice. After his father Mike, a former Olympic boxer from Iran, determines his three other children aren't cut out to be tennis champions, much-younger Andre becomes his last best hope.
Still in the crib, Andre is coaxed to swat at overhanging tennis balls with a ping-pong paddle taped to his hand. At three, he's told to whack whatever he wants, including salt shakers, with a sawed-off racket. At four, he's hitting balls with legend Jimmy Connors, and later with Bjorn Borg and Ilie Nastase, when they compete in Las Vegas. When he's seven, a souped-up machine, that Andre calls "the dragon," fires balls 110 miles an hour at him with a bloodcurdling roar, 2,500 balls a day, with his frenzied father constantly yelling at him.
OPEN, co-written with Pulitzer Prize winner J. R. Moehringer, uses the present tense, which makes you feel as though you are there witnessing everything through Agassi's heart and mind. About the fearsome dragon and his tyrannical father, scared Andre says, "No matter how much I want to stop, I don't. I keep begging myself to stop, and I keep playing, and this gap, this contradiction between what I want to do and what I actually do, feels like the core of my life."
Throughout the enthralling book, Agassi's photographic memory captures anecdotes in vivid detail. His violent father is road rage personified, and the last place Agassi wants to be with him, other than a tennis court, is in a car, where Mike keeps an ax handle and a handgun and is itching for a fight. After Mike punches out a trucker in a traffic dispute, Andre recalls, "The trucker is lying on the pavement. He's dead − I'm sure of it. If he's not dead, he soon will be, because he's in the middle of the road and someone will run him over." After they zoom away, "Somewhat tenderly he says, Don't tell your mother." Andre's loving mother Betty lives in fear of Mike, too, and takes pleasure putting together jigsaw puzzles, the perfect metaphor for their broken, dysfunctional family.
If being berated by his father at junior tournaments isn't enough pressure, his father arranges for nine-year-old Andre to play a match against retired football great Jim Brown for $10,000, the family's life savings. You'll have to read the book to find out what happens in this humorous episode.
Despite all the pain his father causes him, 13-year-old Andre feels heartbroken and abandoned when he's sent to the famous Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Florida. There his quest for self-identity and freedom takes a sudden and dramatic turn. He calls the academy "a glorified prison camp," where after morning school classes that he hates, students endure endless tennis drills, tennis psychology classes, aerobics, weight training and running.
Even more distressing, though, Agassi finds himself in a "Lord of the Flies" environment: "The constant pressure, the cutthroat competition, the total lack of adult supervision − it slowly turns us into animals. A kind of jungle law prevails" with "the constant threat of violence and ambush."
The worse Agassi does in school, the more he rebels. He dyes his spiked hair pink, smokes pot, drinks, chews tobacco, picks fistfights, cheats on a test, commits petty vandalism, and plays a tournament match in jeans. At 14, Agassi gets what he wants from the consternated Bollettieri, a release from formal education and the chance to play pro tournaments. At 15, "the prodigy" − "It's the prettiest word I've ever heard applied to me" − starts beating world-class players.
Gil Reyes, a hulking conditioning and strength coach, emerges as the hero of OPEN. Reyes, more than any other of Agassi's loyal friends − including his devoted brother Phil, his boyhood pal and later manager Perry Rogers, pastor-musician J.P., and coaches Brad Gilbert and Darren Cahill − mentors and protects the sometimes self-destructive Agassi throughout his long, tormenting road to the top.
Reyes not only turns the scrawny (5'11", 148 pounds) Agassi into an imposing physical specimen who can bench press 315 pounds and outlast opponents in grueling matches. He also builds Agassi's battered psyche and, 18 years older, becomes a father figure. Whether it's standing up to obnoxious bullies at a restaurant or standing in front of Andre's home all night when his girlfriend, actress-model Brooke Shields, is threatened by stalkers, Gil has Andre's back. "I feel such overwhelming love, and gratitude, for Gil," Andre says.
A fair amount of OPEN covers Agassi's yo-yo highs and lows on the pro tour. After he is upset in his first three Slam finals, his first major title, the 1992 Wimbledon, brings him "relief and elation and even a kind of hysterical serenity."
His bitterly disappointing loss to nemesis Pete Sampras in the 1995 U.S. Open final − "In the end I always lose, because there is always Pete." − plunges him into "a bottomless gloom" and a long slump. He bottoms out at a career-low No. 141 ranking that relegates him to satellite tournaments.
Shields provides little comfort in their mostly long-distance relationship and short, doomed marriage. Shields, a Princeton graduate, and Agassi have little in common aside from an abrasive stage parent. She is absorbed with her acting career and Los Angeles coterie, and even worse, ridicules Agassi's friends, while he similarly lacks interest in her career and friends.
Agassi is at his storytelling best recalling the 1999 French Open which Gilbert has to talk him into even playing. He calls his improbable run to the final "my return from the dead," his chance to complete a rare career Grand Slam "my final shot at redemption," and a pivotal point in the deciding set against Andrei Medvedev "the turning point in the match, perhaps in both our lives."
Soon after his Paris resurrection that does turn his life around, Agassi embarks on a journey to capture more major championships and the object of his affections, Stefanie Graf who first enchanted Agassi when they danced at the 1992 Wimbledon ball. How ingeniously and relentlessly Agassi courts the German superstar, now his wife, is touching and often amusing.
While Agassi lavishes praise on Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, some of his 1990s rivals have not appreciated how they have been portrayed in the book, or at least in the media's accounts of it. He calls Sampras robotic, boring and cheap (although the anecdote about Sampras leaving a small tip seems more like a cheap shot). Agassi intensely hates Becker for maligning him in the press and blowing kisses to Graf during a match. And he's offended by pious Michael Chang who credits God for his victories, thus implying that "God would side against me" in a tennis match. In fairness, these former rivals should understand that is how Agassi viewed them then − not today, when he has established good relations with most of them.
Agassi often levels criticism at sportswriters, too. Nothing infuriates and haunts him more in the early 1990s than the memorable "Image is everything" Canon camera commercial that the sports media twists to taint Agassi. When his Wimbledon victory forces them to change their tune, he writes, "After two years of calling me a fraud, a choke artist, a rebel without a cause, they lionize me."
Early press reports about critically acclaimed OPEN, which ranked No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, focused mostly on Agassi's stunning revelation that in 1997 he used the performance-inhibiting (not enhancing) drug crystal methamphetamine, then lied to the ATP about how it actually happened, and how he got away with it. Federer, Nadal and Becker, among others, denounced him for that. Since most sports autobiographies are self-serving, Agassi deserves credit for being honest and self-critical, an uncommon and admirable trait. As George Orwell rightly observed, "An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful."
Hilarious anecdotes are sprinkled throughout the book. After Agassi gets two speeding tickets within an hour, an Arizona judge summons Agassi to his courthouse. The judge, an avid tennis fan, tells him he should have beaten Jim Courier at the French, asks for an autograph, and concludes, "I sentence you to go give 'em hell down in Scottsdale." Ivan Lendl once described the teen phenom as "a haircut and a forehand," but premature baldness traumatizes Agassi, and his attempts to hide it provide farcical episodes.
Irony also abounds, and Agassi appreciates its bittersweet nature. The morning after he overcomes Marcos Baghdatis at the 2006 U.S. Open in a savage battle, his father sees him hobbling and urges him to quit and go home so he won't suffer any more. Andre replies, "I'm sorry, Pops. I can't quit. This can't end with me quitting."
Agassi has raised $85 million for disadvantaged children in Las Vegas for the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy, an acclaimed charter school which sent its entire first graduating class to college. Imagine that − the ninth-grade dropout who now says his proudest accomplishment is his school.
Agassi recently confided that it wasn't until tennis gave him his school and his beloved wife that the scales started to balance. Now, despite his painful past, he loves the game.
This inspiring book will strike a chord with anyone who has gone through domestic abuse, rebelled as a teenager, or succumbed to drugs at the depth of his depression. It is a story about survival, love and redemption. In OPEN, Agassi ruminates, questions, investigates, experiments, tests, evolves and ultimately discovers the meaning of his life. Even if he has more to lose than to gain from his intimate revelations − which he contends − he wants to share the story of his enlightening and poignant journey with you.
