Open by Andre Agassi: A Review

The media hype about “Open” created a buzz at school, at the club, and at dinner.

Playing tournament and high school tennis gives you a certain reputation at school. Your friends and teachers may not ask why your thumbs are bandaged, but they always want to know how you did in your last match. So, as a “tennis girl,” everyone asked what I thought about Andre Agassi’s new book, with its supposedly main revelation his drug use while still on the tour.

The shocking news became dinner conversation in my house. Was he really on meth? The buzz at school and at the tennis club was a combination of snide remarks, disgust, and disbelief. Why would Agassi deliberately scar his image? To me it seemed so selfish to say he hated tennis when I had learned to love tennis by watching him.

Then I saw him on 60 Minutes and actually opened the book, and something was immediately clear. Agassi’s book wasn’t at all about drugs. In fact drugs weren’t mentioned for hundreds of pages. The book was an intimate story of the life and the struggles of an athlete.

I started not wanting to read it, but ended up…