When Dr Manmohan Singh took over as Prime Minister of India
in 2004, of the many things he spoke of in his first press conference, one line
stuck out. “Life is never free of contradictions,” said Dr Singh, about the
Congress’ association with the Left parties in spite of many policy
differences. While the thinking man’s prime minister was making a political
analogy, almost 15,000 kilometres away, a 34-year-old tennis player’s life was
a living example of the maxim. Andre Kirk Agassi’s journey was all about
contradictions, and that’s what the eight-time Grand Slam champion writes about
in his thoroughly engaging, unputdownable autobiography—Open.
The book, superbly ghost-written by Pulitzer prize-winning
author J.R. Moehringer, follows the journey of a ninth-grade dropout who’s
proudest accomplishment—in a celebrity life full of silverware and moolah— is a
school he builds for underprivileged children. “Life is a tennis match between
polar opposites,” says Agassi. “Winning and losing, love and hate, open and
closed.” Agassi looks at his whole life through the lenses of contradiction. “Do
I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself,” he quotes from Walt
Whitman’s Song of Myself. Agassi is
proud of who he is as a human being; he is proud of his life, even if it is
flawed and imperfect.
Now, one can’t quite imagine Andre Agassi’s life to be
flawed and imperfect, right? After all, he is a man who has won 869 tennis
matches in a 21-year pro career. He has won 60 career titles including eight
Grand Slams and the Golden Slam—all four Grand Slams plus the Olympic Gold
Medal. He has dated and married two of the most beautiful and successful women in
the world, Brooke Shields and Steffi Graf, eventually settling down and having
kids with the latter. Isn’t that a fairy-tale life?
Not really.
Through Open,
Agassi in-depthly describes how his whole life is anything but a fairy tale and
revolves around one grand, shocking truth. “I hate tennis,” says Agassi,
repeatedly throughout the book. When a number of people he tells this to do not
believe him, he stresses, “I really do (hate it).” Why? “(Because) I’m not
suited for anything else. I don’t know how to do anything else. Tennis is the
only thing I’m qualified for. Also, my father would have a fit if I did
anything different.”
Agassi’s flashback begins with his childhood home in the
middle of the Las Vegas desert and how he went from the crib right on to a
tennis court built in his backyard by a domineering, “fire-belching” father who
wanted him to be number one in the world someday. Agassi himself had no such
ambitions and says that he craved to be a normal kid and do normal kiddy stuff.
But instead of action figures and Lego, Agassi’s only toy was a ball machine—christened
“The Dragon”—which was modified by his father to continuously shoot balls at
110 miles per hour. When he describes the machine, you can’t help but feel that
it is the seven-year-old Agassi talking. “Midnight black, set on big rubber wheels...the
dragon has a brain, a will, a black heart—and a horrifying voice. Sucking
another ball into its belly, the dragon makes a series of sickening sounds. As
pressure builds inside its throat, it groans. As the ball rises slowly to its
mouth, it shrieks. For a moment the dragon sounds almost silly, but when it
takes dead aim at me and fires a ball 100 miles an hour, the sound it makes is
a bloodcurdling roar. I flinch every time.”
Agassi describes how his seven-year-old self was made to hit
almost 2500 balls per day and given a target of hitting a million balls-a-year by
his father. At age 13, he is booted off to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in
order to “eat, sleep and drink tennis”. It is here that Agassi becomes a rebel,
drops out of school at age 14 and builds his “punk” image that he was infamous
for in his early pro career. Agassi talks of his pink-mohawk look and his denim
shorts and how sportswriters “murdered” him for it, branding him a “punk” who’s
trying to get noticed. But Agassi explains how he wanted anything but be
noticed. He says, “They (sportswriters) say
I’m trying to change the game. In fact I’m trying to prevent the game from
changing me. They call me a rebel, but I have no interest in being a rebel, I’m
only conducting an everyday, run-of-the-mill teenage rebellion...I’m doing nothing
more than I did at the Bollettiery Academy. Bucking authority, experimenting
with identity, sending a message to my father, thrashing against the lack of
choice in my life.”
It is from this point that Agassi starts to accept who he is
and what his life is and begins to see things in the positive. He begins to
tell reporters not what he actually thinks but “what they seem to want to hear”
him say. He talks of how humbled he is with his growing popularity and how fans
finally accept his “punk” image and begin to dress like him. He talks of how
flattered, yet confused, he is with people wanting to be like him. “I can’t imagine
all these people trying to be like Andre Agassi, since I don’t want to be Andre
Agassi,” he says.
Aside from the fact that he actually hates tennis, Agassi
also brings forth some other scandalous revelations that he had hidden from the
public his entire career: like his falling hair and use of a hairpiece in the
early nineties and how he was so terrified of it falling off on court that he
lost his first Grand Slam final due to his consciousness; the reasons behind
his mid-career downfall, how he took to
crystal meth to get out of depression and lied to the authorities to escape
suspension; the infamous “Image is Everything” advertising campaign in which Canon duped him into using his rebel
image to sell their products. In a way, Agassi pleads with his readers to recognise
that he wasn’t indeed the “enfant terrible” that he was projected to be in the
first half of his career; that he was just a guy who was finding it difficult
trying to figure out his own identity; that he was just human.
Talking of his plummet during the 1997 season and his
resolution to “change” thereafter, Agassi gives a valuable lesson on how to
stop feeling sorry for yourself and get on with it. He says, “I tell myself, So
what if you hate tennis? Who cares? All those people out there, all those
millions who hate what they do for a living, they do it anyway. Maybe doing
what you hate, doing it well and cheerfully is the point. Hate it all you want.
You still need to respect it—and yourself.”
Agassi is very careful to make sure that Open doesn’t come across as an anti-sports
book and gives sports fans their due. He summarises several of his memorable
clashes and even gives a ball-by-ball account of the best. He talks of his
rivalry with contemporaries such as Boris Becker and Pete Sampras and how
thrilled he was at upstaging the latter for the world number one ranking. His
description of “The Summer of Revenge” in which he vows to defeat Becker for
some unflattering comments made about him by the latter is surreal. The passion
and desire to win is apparent in Agassi’s gripping description of these matches
and brings out another contradiction in his life: how he hates tennis but hates
to lose more. He wants to win: at times for his loved ones and sometimes just
for himself.
Agassi surprises many by revealing how jealous he is of
Sampras: not for the Californian’s greater number of titles, but for his
apparent “lack of need for inspiration”, for his suave image compared to his
own brash one. He also talks of how he evolves during the second half of his
career, from a tennis player to a father and family man. “Many people benefit
from every tennis ball I hit,” he says, explaining why he keeps on going. “I
play and I keep playing because I choose to play. Even if it’s not your ideal
life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it
changes everything… I’m a father first, a tennis player second, and this
evolution happens without my being aware.”
Agassi’s relationships with people, whether they are his
immediate family or his extended—comprising of his trainers, coaches, managers
and even tournament officials—is a lesson in life for upcoming players.
Deprived of a proper father figure in his early life, Agassi’s account of his everlasting
relationships with multiple father figures is touching and engaging.
Overall, Open is a
beautifully choreographed memoir of someone whose life was scripted out for him
even before he was born. Andre Agassi is your classic deer caught in the
headlights; a grilled-from-birth perfectionist who hated doing something he
excelled at. It is an exquisitely penned journey of a young-dropout-rebel-turned-educator;
the journey, as tennis historian Bud Collins rightly termed, “from punk to
paragon”.
