Andre Agassi

Andre Agassi is a retired American tennis champion whose brutally candid memoir Open remains one of the finest sports autobiographies ever written.

Andre Agassi won eight Grand Slam singles titles over a career that spanned three decades and became one of the most recognizable athletes of the 1990s. Open, written with the novelist J.R. Moehringer, is the account of that career from the inside — and it is remarkable for its refusal to perform the expected gratitude and triumph. Agassi opens the book by stating that he hates tennis, and everything that follows is an attempt to explain how someone can dedicate their life to something they despise.

Open is a genuinely honest book about a complicated man. Agassi describes his domineering father, his self-destructive years, his drug use (and the ATP’s decision not to pursue the matter), his failed marriage to Brooke Shields, and the late-career transformation that made him arguably better in his thirties than his twenties. The psychological portrait — of a child who had no choice and an adult who had to manufacture choice out of nothing — is more searching than most celebrity memoirs attempt.

Moehringer’s prose is controlled and vivid, and it is worth acknowledging that this is a collaborative work: the voice belongs as much to the writer as the subject. Whether that diminishes its achievement is a matter of taste. What is not in question is that Open delivers what memoirs rarely do: genuine self-knowledge, real vulnerability, and a portrait of athletic greatness that makes greatness seem costly rather than simply enviable.