Even then, one suspected that Agassi's rebellious image was partly manufactured in consort with his sponsors. So maybe the opprobrium wasn't all about a look – "fluffy, spiky, two-toned mullet, with black roots and frosted tips" – which, in fairness, seems far more preposterous now than it did at the time. Since the autobiography of a tennis player is, by definition, self-serving, it's worth bearing in mind a 1996 essay in which the late David Foster Wallace wrote that he "loathe Agassi with a passion" and found him, in person, "about as cute as a Port Authority whore". But in this Confession – a confession in danger of being reduced to the slogan "I hated tennis and took meth" – maybe we should have been told approximately how many millions it took to lure him to participate in this betrayal in the first place.
Speaking of which, after shooting himself in the foot with a Canon campaign based around the slogan "Image Is Everything", Agassi feels "betrayed by the advertising agency, the Canon execs", by everyone "who treats this ridiculous throwaway slogan as if it's my Confession". It might be true that, after arranging "a nest egg of Nike stock" for a friend's sick child, Andre learned that "the only perfection… is the perfection of helping others", but, put like this, it sounds like he's just signed a new endorsement for Compassion Inc.
"I've always been a truthful person," Andre confesses while preparing a singularly unconvincing lie to explain how he tested positive for meth. Perhaps this is why, strangely, it rings least true at moments of maximum declared honesty. It's not that Open reads as if it's been written with a view to a lucrative serial deal (normal enough) it reads as if it's already a serialisation of itself with potential headlines (Agassi took crystal meth!) and pull quotes ("I always hated tennis") thrown in. The problem with JR, Andre's book coach, is that he makes Writing Easy. We are dealing, let's not forget, with someone who had roughly the same formal education as Wayne Rooney or Gazza.Īgassi credits the dramatic, mid-90s revival in his fortunes to his new coach, Brad Gilbert, author of Winning Ugly. 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. Um, who? He's Agassi's collaborator, the guy who turned hundreds of hours of taped conversations into plausible prose.
If Andre Agassi's Open is anything to go by, great tennis players begin to have minds like JR Moehringer. N orman Mailer reckoned that, as big fights loomed, great boxers "begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville".
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