Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Open by Andre Agassi

I am not a lover of memoirs, preferring fictional reads, don't know much about tennis and don't care for sports yet I loved this book.  OpenIt starts in the present day and goes back.  In 1992, when Andre "burst" (he tells the many years of gruelling effort that led up to that) onto the world sports stage by winning the Grand Slam at Wimbledon, he looked like a deer in headlights. Nobody seemed more surprised and upset by his big win that day than he did. For good reason, too. Agassi hated tennis. This is the biggest revelation in his very revealing autobiography. Agassi has hated tennis from early childhood, finding it extremely lonely out on the court. But he didn’t have a choice about playing the game because his domineering aggressive father drove him to become a champion, like it or not. Mike Agassi, a former Golden Gloves fighter who never made it professionally, decided that his son would become a champion tennis player. I almost cried at how beautifully he expressed how much he loves his wife and children and, at other moments in the book, I openly laughed out loud.  This is an easy enjoyable read that feels very "open" and real.

Rating: 4.8 Recommend