Ed's Reviews > Open

I have a checkered past with Andre Agassi. Having been a fan of pro-tennis since I was a kid, I was intrigued with Agassi when he debuted on the tour (I'll even admit to owning a pair of those denim shorts), but somewhere along the way something went astray and it took to the last couple of years of his career for me to re-warm up to him. Contributing to that personal opinion decline was observing him "behind the scenes" when I dabbled as a tennis writer/photographer for in the mid-/late-1990s, which now we know was among his most troubled personal and professional times.

So while I went into this book with a somewhat rehab'd personal opinion of Agassi, by the end of it I found most of my warm and fuzzy feelings about him had come undone (and sadly even wife Steffi Graf also suffers some collateral damage). While I now better understand some of the reasons why Agassi was such a troubled soul, after getting out under the thumb of his father and banking tens of millions the "I hate tennis" mantra gets a bit insincere. During his press tour for this book, I sensed Agassi had somewhat of an epiphany about his life, but I really did not find it in these pages.

He said he wrote this book for his children and also speaks of "The Code of Respect" that each student of his charter school in Vegas commits to memory. But again, after reading page after page of Agassi calling linespeople some very nasty things, consistently petty and often mean-spirited stories about his fellow players, and gleefully courting (ha!) Steffi Graf one month after separating (not yet divorced) from first wife Brooke Shields... and not expressing much, if any, remorse or regret about his actions, other than blanket statements like "I made mistakes" or calling himself a contradiction, is all terribly convenient and left me a bit cold.

Agassi is indeed "open" in this book (though I would argue he does so in a selective manner), and while I can respect his on-court accomplishments and certainly his charitable contributions, in the end I did not find him to be a terribly like-able person. As far as separating the book from the man (is that possible?), while I raced through the book I still have yet to find a tennis memoir that successfully can recount a tennis match (something I struggled with during my years of tennis journalism). I also had high hopes for a more literary quality to it as it was ghostwritten by Pulitzer Prize winner J.R. Moehringer, whose own memoir, The Tender Bar, I so enjoyed but while a step up from some, it is still a fairly straight-up/standard tennis "autobiography."

I know folks are finding this memoir quite inspirational, revelatory, honest, but going into this knowing Agassi's story too well and from many different angles/perspectives, I had to take much of this book with the proverbial grain of salt.