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Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi | Book review

Source: guardian.co.uk Sport

Nov 08, 2009

Summary

Amid Andre Agassi's self-serving revelations about drugs and his rivals, Geoff Dyer finds some thrilling insights into the game of tennis

Norman Mailer reckoned that, as big fights loomed, great boxers "begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville". If Andre Agassi's Open is anything to go by, great tennis players begin to have minds like JR Moehringer. Um, who? He's Agassi's collaborator, the guy who turned hundreds of hours of taped conversations into plausible prose. I agree, this does come as a disappointment, even if we accept that it's as unreasonable to expect Agassi to sit down and actually write a book as it is to expect Martin Amis (to whom we shall return) suddenly to make the Wimbledon finals. We are dealing, let's not forget, with someone who had roughly the same formal education as Wayne Rooney or Gazza.

Agassi credits the dramatic, mid-90s revival in his fortunes to his new coach, Brad Gilbert, author of Winning Ugly. The problem with JR, Andre's book coach, is that he makes Writing Easy. His hand

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