Tennis: Agassi's open tale meets high standard

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.

What has puzzled tennis fans and former rivals is why the winner of eight Grand Slams would wait until now to reveal this dark side and risk losing the credibility he has built up over the years. Some say he did it to sell books, or because the World Doping Agency would not prosecute such an old case. He says he did it to come clean.

But it is this bombshell, with a few grenades along the way, that makes this such a good read. Some critics have accused Agassi of not being truthful, even though the book is called Open, but the dispassionate yet intense style of writing is captivating, pushing this book into the realms of one of the best sporting books.

Agassi does not pull his punches on any subject, be it his relationship with his abusive father, his drug-taking, his failed marriage to actress Brooke Shields, his fascination with and eventual marriage to Stefanie Graf (as he calls her), and especially his frank assessment of his fellow tennis players.

Basically Agassi did not have much time for most of his rivals. He did not need them. To ward off loneliness, he steadily built an entourage consisting of his brother Philly, his coaches Nick Bollettieri and then Brad Gilbert, his trainer and surrogate father Gil Reyes and his friend Perry.

He is particularly scathing of Jimmy Connors and Boris Becker, disliking both men intensely. He is very disparaging of Michael Chang, who irritated him because he won the French Open before him and because he used to say God was on his side.

Agassi, the only man to win the Golden Slam (all four Grand Slams and an Olympic Gold medal), also admits to tanking in an Australian Open semi-final match against Chang because he was not mentally prepared to face Becker in the final.

His relationship with his main rival, Pete Sampras, was intriguing. They were the friends whose rivalry never allowed them to be true friends. Although clearly Agassi wished he was more like the controlled Sampras.

But the silver lining in the dark cloud that seems to have been Agassi's life is Steffi Graf and his children Jaden and Jaz. It seems he has finally found what he was searching for. He is happy, he is wealthy and he is doing good things, like his school for underprivileged children in Las Vegas.

Agassi has come a long way from the tortured young boy forced to play a game he hated.

ALONGSIDE THE GREATS ON THE BOOKSHELF:

The Fight

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This is Mailer's account of arguably the greatest boxing match ever - the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. It is superbly written by a literary genius.

It's Not About The Bike

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The Tour de France legend's story of battling cancer is up there with the best because its about a champion facing his toughest test.

Fever Pitch

By Nick Hornby (1992):

Regarded as a football (that's soccer) bible, this novel is the tale of an obsessive Arsenal fan and marked the sport's rise during the commercially successful 1990s. Funny and moving, it captures a fan's highs and lows.