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Is Andre Agassi’s ‘Open’ the Greatest Tennis Memoir Ever Written?
It has juicy bits about his past crystal meth use and his marriages to Brooke Shields and Stefi Graf — but there’s much more to it
Where are the tennis books that ace their serve?
A few years ago, the gifted English writer Geoff Dyer rightly observed that “the contents of the tennis shelf are, like men’s shorts from the 1970s, rather skimpy.” Among players’ autobiographies, Dyer found only two worthy of high praise: Andre Agassi’s Open and John McEnroe’s Serious.
I haven’t read McEnroe’s memoir, but Agassi’s is stellar. It isn’t just the best autobiography I’ve read by a tennis star — it’s among the best by an athlete in any sport.
When Open first appeared in 2009, many reviews focused on two of its juicer bits. One was that the former №1 tennis player had used crystal meth. The other was that he chafed against his first marriage to a strong-willed Brooke Shields (who, he says, insisted that he wear shoes with lifts in them at their wedding so she wouldn’t tower over him in the photos).
But Open is more interesting for its vivid account of how a superstar wrested a worthy life from dismal circumstances than for its gossip. Among the early…
