Word: agassi
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...Andre Agassi's memoir, open: An Autobiography (Alfred A. Knopf; 388 pages), is just as entrancing as his tennis game. Agassi's mind pops back and forth like a ball during one of his rallies: I hate the sport, winning is fun, my father preys on me, but I understand why. It's a perpetual struggle, yet Agassi, who won eight Grand Slams, survives the excruciating points, and your eyes stay glued to the action. He can hit a loud smash. In case you haven't heard, at one point in his career Agassi grew quite fond of crystal meth...
Sports has a proud history of producing self-serving, cliché-ridden memoirs. But by sharing an unvarnished, at times inspiring story in an arresting, muscular style, Agassi may have just penned one of the best sports autobiographies of all time. Check--it's one of the better memoirs out there, period...
...help. Agassi leaned on J.R. Moehringer, who won a Pulitzer for feature writing in 2000, to craft mounds of interview transcripts into a coherent narrative, told in the present tense. (Moehringer, feeling that the book belonged to Agassi alone, refused to put his name on the cover.) Their doubles team clicked. One passage describes how a teenage Andre, landing in Las Vegas after a tournament in Seoul, makes the bold decision to embrace his taskmaster dad. Mike Agassi tortured his son with endless drills; he wasn't the cuddly type. When the moment arrives, Mike "stiffens," Agassi writes. "It feels...
Fans will devour Agassi's juicy revelations about both himself and other tennis luminaries. Thanks to his father, Agassi's childhood was hellish, the backyard court his personal prison. Later, he battled depression, donned a hairpiece, dabbled in drugs and threw a hissy fit after his then girlfriend (now ex-wife) Brooke Shields licked Joey's hand on that episode of Friends. According to Agassi, Boris Becker blows, Pete Sampras is a terrible tipper, and in the Wimbledon locker room John McEnroe once called Agassi's future wife Graf a bitch...
...completely lucky and spoiled growing up. I was able to catch the tail end of John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors and lived through the golden age of American tennis with Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras and Jim Courier and Michael Chang. Even cooler than that, I've been able to establish a relationship with most of them. I'm glad that I had those guys to look...