Book review: Open: An Autobiography By André Agassi

Published on Friday 18 December 2009 18:53

Harper Collins, 400pp, £20

THE pre-publicity about taking drugs may have grabbed all the headlines, but Andr Agassi's memoir is so good it hardly needed it anyway. One of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a sports superstar, Open lacks the triumphalist homily and star-spangled gratitude that mar so many memoirs.

Agassi's main story here is that the game he mastered was a prison he spent some 30 years trying to escape. His first cell was the backyard court his immigrant father, Mike, built behind the family's ramshackle house in the parched outskirts of Las Vegas. Armenian, raised poor in Iran and employed as a casino usher, Mike Agassi was determined to groom a champion and subjected all four of his children to abusive training, yanking them out of school for extra practice time. The three eldest all crumbled, but the jackpot came with the fourth, who was blessed with preternatural hand-eye coordination, honed in daily sessions in which he swatted as many as 2,500 balls belched forth by a machine at speeds of up to 110 miles per hour, at angles so acute the seven-year-old Andr had to swing the instant the ball landed, lest it bounce over his head – the trick of hitting "on the rise" that eventually would freeze opponents, helpless as even their most blistering shots came screaming back.

All this was nurturing, at least compared with his next incarceration, at the Florida tennis academy, or "glorified prison camp", operated by Nick Bollettieri, a sun-baked entrepreneur paid thousands of dollars by parents who shipped their children off for months, even years, of incessant drilling, lectures on motivational psychology and nights spent in barracks-like dorms. "The constant pressure, the cut-throat competition, the total lack of adult supervision – it slowly turns us into animals," Agassi writes. This happened at a time when tennis promoters were eager to feed the public's infatuation with under-age champions like Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert, not to mention half-forgotten casualties like Jimmy Arias and Andrea Jaeger. Agassi rebelled by drinking, brawling, body piercing and sporting "one pinky nail that's two inches long and painted fire-engine red".

Locked into a career dictated by talent and upbringing, he found escape off-court, surrounded by the entourage, or surrogate family, he assembled and in most instances paid for, in particular the company of two father figures – his physical trainer, Gil Reyes, and his coach, Brad Gilbert. Together they reconstructed Agassi's body and his game, and made possible his extraordinary, late-career resurgence, when, at last finding joy in tennis, he briefly eclipsed his arch-rival, Pete Sampras.

There is no sexual boasting in Open, but there are full accounts of Agassi's two marriages. His first, to Brooke Shields, lasted just two years. While her career had stalled, his was near its zenith.

The wedding, scripted by Shields, is rendered as a bleak farce, from the ceremony "with four helicopters full of paparazzi circling overhead" and the squat groom trying hard not to be dwarfed by his towering bride – to the day-after family barbecue, with the couple making their entrance astride horses and wearing cowboy gear.

They had nothing in common. A Princeton graduate with a degree in French literature, Shields disliked tennis and also her husband's pals. Agassi, for his part, was forever a beat behind the banter Shields enjoyed with her showbiz crowd; once, in a jealous fit, he stormed off the set of Friends when she was taping a segment, her big break. They failed to reconnect on vacations, planned by Shields, often on exotic islands meant to recapture the ever-receding memory of Blue Lagoon.

Soon after his divorce in 1999, Agassi began wooing Steffi Graf, another former tennis prodigy who, Agassi says, loathed the game as much as he did but surpassed him in disciplined, competitive fury. They agreed not to build a court behind their Las Vegas home, to spare their children. Instead, Agassi spent and raised millions to erect a youth centre that grew into an "education complex" in the city's most ravaged district, giving underprivileged children, most of them African-Americans, the one advantage he himself had been denied.