Mike Atherton reviews Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi

The serialisation of Open in this newspaper, and the furore that followed, centred inevitably on Agassi’s admission that he had taken the drug crystal meth at the height of his career, and that he subsequently lied about it cravenly to escape censure. This revelation is not insignificant, and there may yet be some fall-out, but it forms a minor strand of the book in which the grand themes are the nature of fatherhood, the often difficult relationship an athlete has with his sport and the search for meaning and maturity in an otherwise gilded life.

The early chapters are dominated by Agassi’s domineering father, Mike, who dreams only of tennis greatness for his youngest child. The rest of the book is a journey to cast off the demons imparted by this man who built a tennis court and ballfeeding machine in the desert, whose idea of a childhood for young Andre was a diet of non-stop tennis, who thrust speed down his son’s neck before a junior match and who held a shotgun level with his son’s nose during an altercation with a driver.

Even at the moment of Agassi’s ascent to greatness, his father cannot bring himself to share his son’s joy. After winning the 1992 men’s title at Wimbledon, his first slam, Agassi phones his father excitedly: “Pops? It’s me! Can you hear me? What’d you think?”

Silence.

“Pops?”

“You had no business losing that fourth set.”

Agassi’s father did not attend his son’s second marriage, to Steffi Graf. Largely as a result of his father’s pathological ambition, Agassi hates tennis. It is one of a number of cues, another being the ongoing rivalry with Sampras, that Moehringer comes back to time and again. Every new character we are introduced to — and Agassi surrounds himself with an eclectic mix — is introduced through this admission. “I hate tennis,” he tells his soon-to-be-trainer-cum-surrogate father, Gil Reyes. “You’re kidding, right?” “No, I hate tennis.”

This particular admission will come as no surprise to professional athletes. Everyone, at some stage, comes to hate their chosen (or, in Agassi’s case, non-chosen) sport. Punished by his father, orphaned off to a tennis academy at 13 and then spending a lifetime dealing with the extreme mood swings that come with winning and losing, is it any surprise? It is only when he meets Graf, after his divorce from Brooke Shields, that he finds someone who understands. “I hate tennis,” Agassi says, to which Graf merely rolls her eyes as if to say, ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ ”

Nor will professional athletes be surprised by the anti-climactic feelings at the moments of his greatest triumphs. After reaching the No 1 slot in the world rankings for the first time, Agassi writes: “I tell him [the reporter] that it feels good to be the best I can be. It’s a lie. It’s what I want to feel. It’s what I expected to feel. But in fact I feel nothing.” Later he muses, “If being number one feels empty, unsatisfying, what’s the point?” In the end, every athlete comes to understand that the glory is in the doing, the competing, and not the wallowing in adulation afterwards.

If these episodes carry the unmistakable whiff of authenticity, then others smell clearly of exaggeration on Agassi’s part that Moehringer was ill-qualified to question. As someone who has suffered from a chronic back condition for years, Agassi’s Lazarus-like recovery from immobility to winning pulsating five-setters stretched my credibility. If true, I wish that I’d had a bad back like his. Likewise, every fast bowler who has ever torn a rib cartilage will tell you that you simply are not able to go out and take a set off Sampras with such an injury.

But these are minor quibbles about what is a superbly written book. Moehringer knows well enough that extended match reports from Agassi’s glorious career would have bored most readers senseless, so he sticks to pithy gobbets from vital games and caustic observations about Agassi’s rivals. Fans of Jimmy Connors ought not to buy this book; nor should Agassi’s former coach Nick Bollettieri, painted as orangecoloured, grasping and a bit of a fraud; nor Shields, who Agassi sees as little more than a vapid clothes-horse. The present tense, used throughout, gives the narrative an added sense of urgency and authenticity.

Although it is well written, it is formulaic in style, and as such requires a Pauline conversion, as most of these autobiographies do. Moehringer lays down certain road signs: we are told, for example, how Agassi puts down a nest egg for the education of child of the owner of his favourite restaurant, and the joy that this brings him. “This is the only perfection there is,” he writes, “the perfection of helping others.”

And so to the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas — unquestionably Agassi’s greatest achievement. And what an achievement it is, this top-class educational establishment in a run-down area of Vegas, that provides first-class schooling to those in need.

Maybe the financial needs of the Academy are the reason for this curiously timed book. Agassi can hardly require the money, nor the hassle that may well come out of the drug-taking revelations. But ours is not to reason why: we are thankful that the mature educationist can look back on his lava hot-panted, hair-pieced younger self with wry detachment. The best sports books are not really about sport — and Open is no exception.

Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi HarperCollins, £20 £18; 400pp