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Agassi's passionate anti-sport memoir
By Sam Tanenhaus |
November 22, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
EVEN those not convinced that Andre Agassi was the best tennis player of his time will readily admit he outdid all others in attracting attention. It started in the 1980s when he was a teenage phenom from Las Vegas who blazed onto the pro tour in stone-washed denim, skintight "Hot Lava" compression shorts and midnight-at-the-roulette-wheel shades, blinding many to the granite consistency of his game: the compact, bludgeoning ground strokes, the lethal service return, the lightning reflexes.
Now, three years into his retirement, Agassi's sterling accomplishments are again being obscured, this time by pre-publication revelations from his autobiography, "Open," especially his admission that during one low period he found solace in crystal methamphetamine, supplied by his "assistant," and later lied about it to tennis officials, thus avoiding a three-month suspension.
Given the current scandals involving steroids and human growth hormone, Agassi's infraction seems minor, even quaint, characterized as it was by late-night binges that more likely retarded rather than "enhanced" his match-day performances.
The more arresting news is that "Open" is one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete -- bracingly devoid of triumphalist homily and star-spangled gratitude.
Agassi's announced theme is that the game he mastered was a prison he spent some 30 years trying to escape.
"The constant pressure, the cutthroat competition, the total lack of adult supervision -- it slowly turns us into animals," Agassi writes.
This happened at a time when tennis promoters were eager to feed the public's infatuation with under-age champions like Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert, a phenomenon that recalls the unhealthy national "love affair" almost a century ago with screen virgin-goddesses like Mary Pickford and the Gish sisters.
Agassi rebelled by drinking, brawling, body piercing and sporting "one pinky nail ... painted fire-engine red."
Locked into a career dictated by talent and upbringing, he found escape off-court, surrounded by the entourage, or surrogate family, he assembled and in most instances paid for, in particular the company of two father figures -- his physical trainer, Gil Reyes, and his coach, Brad Gilbert.
Together they reconstructed Agassi's body and his game, and made possible his extraordinary, late-career resurgence, when, at last finding joy in tennis, he briefly eclipsed his arch rival, Pete Sampras, and staked his claim to being the era's dominant player.
There is no sexual boasting in "Open," but there are full accounts of Agassi's two marriages. His first, to Brooke Shields, rich tabloid nutriment at the time, lasted just two years, the classic bad pairing of jock and starlet, a kind of inverse Joe DiMaggio-Marilyn Monroe, since Shields was his elder by five years.
Apart from having been pushed onto the stage as children, the glamorous couple had nothing in common.
After his divorce in 1999, Agassi began wooing Steffi Graf, another former tennis prodigy, who, Agassi says, loathed the game as much as he did but surpassed him in disciplined, competitive fury.
Hard-won self-knowledge irradiates almost every page of "Open," thanks in great part to Agassi's inspired choice of collaborator, J.R. Moehringer, author of the memoir "The Tender Bar," with its melody of remembered voices.
The result is not just a first-rate sports memoir but a genuine bildungsroman, darkly funny yet also anguished and soulful.
It confirms what Agassi's admirers sensed from the outset, that this showboat, with his garish costumes and presumed fatuity, was not clamoring for attention but rather conducting a struggle to wrest some semblance of selfhood from the sport that threatened to devour him.
Now, three years into his retirement, Agassi's sterling accomplishments are again being obscured, this time by pre-publication revelations from his autobiography, "Open," especially his admission that during one low period he found solace in crystal methamphetamine, supplied by his "assistant," and later lied about it to tennis officials, thus avoiding a three-month suspension.
Given the current scandals involving steroids and human growth hormone, Agassi's infraction seems minor, even quaint, characterized as it was by late-night binges that more likely retarded rather than "enhanced" his match-day performances.
The more arresting news is that "Open" is one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete -- bracingly devoid of triumphalist homily and star-spangled gratitude.
Agassi's announced theme is that the game he mastered was a prison he spent some 30 years trying to escape.
"The constant pressure, the cutthroat competition, the total lack of adult supervision -- it slowly turns us into animals," Agassi writes.
This happened at a time when tennis promoters were eager to feed the public's infatuation with under-age champions like Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert, a phenomenon that recalls the unhealthy national "love affair" almost a century ago with screen virgin-goddesses like Mary Pickford and the Gish sisters.
Agassi rebelled by drinking, brawling, body piercing and sporting "one pinky nail ... painted fire-engine red."
Locked into a career dictated by talent and upbringing, he found escape off-court, surrounded by the entourage, or surrogate family, he assembled and in most instances paid for, in particular the company of two father figures -- his physical trainer, Gil Reyes, and his coach, Brad Gilbert.
Together they reconstructed Agassi's body and his game, and made possible his extraordinary, late-career resurgence, when, at last finding joy in tennis, he briefly eclipsed his arch rival, Pete Sampras, and staked his claim to being the era's dominant player.
There is no sexual boasting in "Open," but there are full accounts of Agassi's two marriages. His first, to Brooke Shields, rich tabloid nutriment at the time, lasted just two years, the classic bad pairing of jock and starlet, a kind of inverse Joe DiMaggio-Marilyn Monroe, since Shields was his elder by five years.
Apart from having been pushed onto the stage as children, the glamorous couple had nothing in common.
After his divorce in 1999, Agassi began wooing Steffi Graf, another former tennis prodigy, who, Agassi says, loathed the game as much as he did but surpassed him in disciplined, competitive fury.
Hard-won self-knowledge irradiates almost every page of "Open," thanks in great part to Agassi's inspired choice of collaborator, J.R. Moehringer, author of the memoir "The Tender Bar," with its melody of remembered voices.
The result is not just a first-rate sports memoir but a genuine bildungsroman, darkly funny yet also anguished and soulful.
It confirms what Agassi's admirers sensed from the outset, that this showboat, with his garish costumes and presumed fatuity, was not clamoring for attention but rather conducting a struggle to wrest some semblance of selfhood from the sport that threatened to devour him.
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