The only drug scene presented is the first the others-'too many' being the only number he'll give-aren't referenced, and the process of getting off what is a highly addictive drug isn't discussed. But contrast his treatment of the two most sensational excerpts released before publication: the crystal meth use and the premature balding. And yet, after knowing his wife Steffi Graf for less than five years, it's she whom he calls 'the greatest person I have ever known,' at her induction into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.Īn autobiography, which is I guess what we call celebrity memoirs, must be selective in the very eventful 30 years this one covers, Agassi can't possibly go into much depth on every personality and experience that changed his life. If Nick Bollettieri is as greedy, thoughtless and selfish as he's painted here, it would be hard to imagine how he's managed to maintain the respect of the rest of the tennis world for so long.Īs many other reviewers have noted, Agassi's longtime trainer Gil Reyes is cast in the hero's role, and if there's one negative thought or action assigned to him in the book, I don't recall it. Hanging your life story on a framework like that certainly helps to move it along, take it out of the mundane, daily diary mode, but it necessarily leads to portraying complex personalities only in the context of the roles you've assigned them.Īlthough I don't live with one, I have encountered some pretty scary tennis parents in the course of the past half dozen years, and yet none of them would come close to Mike Agassi if his son's portrayal of him in the book is accurate. There are villains, heroes, foes to vanquish, heroines to woo, and it all ends happily ever after. Joel Drucker, in his excellent review of the book for the San Francisco Chronicle calls it a 'confessional fairy tale,' and it's hard to disagree. In others words, my reactions are complicated and contradictory, and in many ways that mirrors the book itself. It proved to be a useless attempt to organize my thoughts, because often the things I liked about it were the things I didn't like about it. As I neared the end of Andre Agassi's best-selling autobiography 'Open', I had so many conflicting emotions that I thought it might help to do spreadsheet with one column for things I liked about the book and another for what I didn't like about it.

Andre agassi book review