Andre Agassi was destined to be a great tennis player even before he was born. His father ordained that. But this destiny came with a price - a lonely childhood, a failed marriage and, we have just discovered, a descent into drug abuse.

How many times have we heard it before - a father with a ruthless determination to make his child a sports star. In this case it was Mike Agassi, an Armenian immigrant born in Iran, who was driven by a relentless urge to make his son the number one-ranked tennis player in the world.

Tennis was the key to everything and nothing was going to stand in his way. When Andre was a baby, his father hung a mobile of tennis balls above his crib and encouraged him to slap at them with a ping-pong paddle he'd taped to the little boy's hand. By 7 Andre was hitting 2500 balls a day. Mr Agassi had worked out that if he did this, Andre would have hit nearly one million balls in one year.

Numbers don't lie, he would say. A child who hit one million balls each year would be unbeatable.

And if you think Serena and Venus Williams' father was mean or that Tiger Woods' father drove him too hard, they didn't have a patch on Mike Agassi. Hardly the father of the year, he was a man so filled with anger that he once pointed a gun in front of his little son's nose at another driver who had transgressed him. He rejected Andre's older brother Philly as a loser and also, unbelievably, gave Andre speed to give him more energy for tennis.

Agassi pretended that it affected his game, so his father stopped.

And how did Andre feel about it all? He feared his father and hated his father's beloved game. For him the tennis court was a prison and he had been sentenced to life.

In his new autobiography, Andre Agassi takes the reader straight into the hell that was his life.

"I'm 7 years old, talking to myself because I'm scared, and because I'm the only person who listens to me. Under my breath I whisper. Just quit, Andre, just give up. Put down your racket and walk off this court, right now."

But despite feeling this way, he can't. "Not only would my father chase me around the house with my racket, but something in my gut, some deep unseen muscle won't let me."

Tennis dictated everything the Agassi family did, even where they lived. A night shift captain at one of the casinos in Las Vegas, Mr Agassi searched the suburbs for a house with a garden big enough to build a tennis court. When he found one, an overgrown shack in the desert, he built a tennis court - a place that would shape Andre, imprison him and ultimately force him to break free.

Of course, Open, the new autobiography, will forever be remembered for the most startlingly late confession in world sport. In a bizarre move 12 years after the event, the hugely popular and clean Agassi decided to tell the world that he had taken crystal meth in 1997.