Open

The 36-year-old man woke up on the floor of his New York hotel room. He wasn't sure where he was at first. Then the facts came back to him: married to Steffi Graf, father of two, staying in Manhattan for the 2006 US Open. His final tournament. His body felt ninety-six years old.

He had two herniated discs in his spine, bone spurs, and a condition called spondylolisthesis that he'd been born with. Most nights he couldn't sleep in the bed. The pain drove him to the floor. As he prepared for what would be his last match, a single thought ran through his mind on a loop: "Please let this be over. I don't want it to be over."

That contradiction—wanting something to end while desperately not wanting it to end—captures the central paradox of Andre Agassi's life. He was one of the greatest tennis players who ever lived. He won eight Grand Slam titles, an Olympic gold medal, and became the first man to complete a career Grand Slam on three different surfaces. And he hated every minute of it.

Hated tennis with what he called "a dark and secret passion." Hated it from childhood, through his rise to fame, through his greatest victories, and all the way to that hotel room floor. His memoir, Open, is the unflinching story of that hatred and the extraordinary career it somehow produced.

The book does not follow the usual sports memoir formula. There is no triumphant narrative of a boy who loved the game and worked hard to achieve his dreams. Instead, Agassi gives us something far more honest and far more interesting: the story of a man who spent his entire life doing something he loathed, who struggled with identity, addiction, and despair, and who only found peace when he finally stopped pretending.

Published in 2009, Open was written with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist J.R. Moehringer, and critics immediately recognized it as something special. It was called a genuine bildungsroman—a coming-of-age story—rather than just another athlete's autobiography. The book's title has multiple meanings. It refers to the Open Era of tennis, the period since 1968 when professionals could compete in Grand Slam tournaments. It signals Agassi's intention to be brutally honest. And it points to the central question of his life: could he ever become truly open about who he was?

The answer, it turns out, was no—not for decades. Throughout his career, Agassi played a role. He was the rebel with long hair and flashy clothes, the bad boy of tennis who said "Image is Everything" in a Canon commercial. But that image was a lie. The long hair concealed premature balding and a hairpiece. The rebel persona masked a deeply insecure young man who had never been allowed to choose his own path.

His father, Mike Agassi, had decided Andre would be a tennis champion before he was born. He hung a tennis ball mobile over the crib. He taped a ping-pong paddle to his infant son's hand. By age seven, Andre was hitting 2,500 balls a day, every day, under the watch of a terrifying modified ball machine he called "the dragon." He played because he feared his father. He played because he had no other options. He never played because he wanted to.

This is the story that Open tells: a man trapped in a life he didn't choose, struggling to find himself amid the pressure, the fame, the money, and the constant travel. It's a story of hitting rock bottom—a failed marriage to Brooke Shields, a crystal meth addiction, a ranking that fell to 141st in the world. And it's a story of slow, painful redemption, as Agassi finally found purpose through building a school for underprivileged children, through his relationship with Steffi Graf, and through the simple act of choosing to play tennis for himself, not for his father.

The book opens at the end, with that 2006 US Open match against Marcos Baghdatis. Agassi is in agony. He's had thirteen cortisone injections over his career, and he'll need another before this match. His body is failing him, but his mind won't let go. He doesn't want it to be over. He also desperately wants it to be over. This contradiction, this tension between obligation and desire, between hatred and love, between the public image and the private self—it's the engine that drives the entire narrative.

How does a man who hates tennis become one of its greatest champions? How does he endure the loneliness, the pain, the constant pressure? And how, in the end, does he finally make peace with a sport that defined and imprisoned him?

Those are the questions Open sets out to answer. And as we'll see, the answers are far stranger, darker, and more human than anyone could have expected.