BEN

I’ve just finished Andre Agassi’s biography “Open” which is quite frankly brilliant. It helps that it was ghostwritten by a Pulitzer prize-winning novelist (J.R. Moehringer) because the prose is taut and the structure and pace are perfect. But it is Andre’s voice you hear telling you a story. I had just listened to him giving a lengthy interview to Simon Mayo on the BBC and was intrigued enough to pick up “Open” at the library, so his voice was actually still in my head, and reading it felt like I was sitting with him at a bar and over the sound of beer bottles clinking and billiard balls clicking in the background, he told me his story.

Apart from the beautiful narrative, its brutal honesty and self-reflection are so rare in biographies. He relates not just events but exactly what he was thinking and feeling at the time with no holds barred. He trashes other players and speakes bitterly about the people who hurt him, yet he himself is so full of self-loathing that it’s clear at those moments he seems to hate himself more. He doesn’t try to tread lightly around his ex-wife Brooke Shields, he talks about her and how he felt she was shallow and uninterested in his career, yet he also says he was unreasonably self-centered and they were just a bad fit. He pays tribute to Pete Sampras and their epic battles but also manages to get in sly digs at his rival’s dullness and cheapness (probably the one anecdote I felt was unnecessary in the whole book was the one of Sampras tipping a valet). His whole life seems to be full of contradictions, and yet isn’t that how we all are?

Like another great biography I’d read a few years ago, Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential”, Andre’s writing is filled with hyperbole meant to entertain but also to reveal the truth, just like the best sports writing. What I admired most was his willingness to be honest, with others and more importantly with himself, no matter whose feelings he might hurt along the way. The title, “Open”, obviously a dual reference to tennis titles and his decision to be completely candid, is inspired, and his biography more than earned the right to use such a clever title.