Fear and loathing in Las Vegas
Andre Agassi
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So internationally renowned and widely debated are the excerpts from Andre Agassi’s forthcoming autobiography Open that it is tempting to wonder just what mystery the remainder of the 390-page volume can possibly have left when it hits the shelves on Monday.
The eight-time Grand Slam champion’s admission that he used crystal meth and then lied about it to the ATP in 1997 has certainly stolen the show, not least because the World Anti-Doping Agency is intent on finding a way to bring either the American or the sport’s governing body to account over the episode.
After that, the disclosure that he was wearing a wig that threatened to fall apart at any moment during the 1990 French Open final seemed like a bad joke, spoofing the outcry in the wake of his drug confession. But yes, that too was true.
All sporting autobiographies worth the paper they are printed on – and many that are not – are serialised somewhere or other, often disclosing a meaty morsel to whet the appetite before the book itself goes on sale.
What sets the Agassi excerpts apart from the many teasers that have gone before is that, for once, we were shocked by what we heard – something that so very rarely happens to sports fans these days.
The reactions to excerpts of Open published in The Times last week, where Agassi recalls his first encounter with crystal meth, have understandably posed a number of questions.
Perhaps the hardest to answer has been: why is he admitting this now? What does he have to gain from this confession? Some have jumped on the bandwagon that the sensational sells, with money was high on Agassi’s agenda when he agreed to spill his darkest hour into print.
But to dismiss Agassi’s candid memoir as nothing more than a sensational moneyspinner is criminal. Without putting in the decimal point, Andre isn’t short of a bob or two, and neither is his wife Steffi.
Still not convinced? Try reading the fuller passages currently available on the Sports Illustrated website. Suddenly it becomes clear that this is not a standard issue sniff-and-tell.
Unlike Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in this cautionary tale the drug use is incidental rather than the central theme. Instead, this Las Vegan’s fear drove him to loathe the very game he had been programmed to play before he could even walk.
After the crystal meth and the wig came Agassi’s third revelation. “I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis,” he recalls thinking just days before the end of his career at the 2006 US Open. “Hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.”
Even after the disclosures that had come before, that one takes the wind out of you. How could an eight-time Grand Slam champion, the game’s oldest world No.1 and of only six men to complete the career slam hate tennis? How could a hero to millions and an ambassador for the game detest it with such long-standing vitriol?
How could he hate what made us love him?
Agassi hated tennis because he had never been allowed to know anything else. His father Mike, portrayed as a violent screw-loose tyrant, rigged up a supercharged ball machine that a young Andre would face day after day, until he was hitting a million balls a year, honing a style that later became his trademark.
He does admit to enjoying the sensation of striking a clean ball. “Though I hate tennis, I like the feeling of hitting a ball dead perfect. When I do something perfect, I enjoy a split second of sanity and calm.”
Too scared of his father to do anything but comply, Agassi harboured a deep-seated – and understandable – contempt for the game from an early age. A direct line can be drawn from this miserable childhood through to 1997 and his drug use while at a low ebb.
Okay, maybe the line doesn’t quite pass through the hairpiece. But strip away the sensational and downright bizarre confessions in Andre Agassi’s forthcoming autobiography, and you are still left with one of the most important testaments to the psychological damage that overbearing parents can inflict on a sporting prodigy.
This was the Las Vegan’s motivation for the autobiography, having originally held the view that only those at the end of their lives should publish memoirs – whatever the cost to him personally.
“I had way more to lose by telling this story in its full transparency than I had to gain,” Agassi himself admits in an interview set to air this weekend on US current affairs show 60 minutes.
“The price that that comes with is the cost that I have assumed, and I’m okay because the part that I worry and think more about is who this may help.”
After the controversy has died down, WADA and the ATP have said what they have to say and the press have had their fill, this will be the lasting legacy of Open.
And while Agassi’s own legacy has received a substantial knock in the process, his own reputation, and no doubt some sanity, is partially restored by his honesty at long last.
So too, is his relationship with the game. “I was tortured by it. Hated it. Took ownership of it,” he also admits on 60 Minutes, before things changed.
“[I] started to have a relationship with it. Started to embrace it. Started to extract from it and grew to love everything it had to give me, which was the relationships in my life, the people, the fans.”
“It was a gift. I go out with my wife now and I hit balls and I can enjoy it.”
Open: An Autobiography is available now for the special price of £9.99 at the Tennis Gallery for personal callers only.
The Tennis Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday 10am-5pm. 112 Wimbledon Park, London SW19 8AA. Tel: 020 8715 8866
