A Reflective Look at André Agassi’s Memoir “Open”

André Agassi and his autobiography, “Open.”

Not many pages pass in the best autobiography ever written by an athlete until the author says that he hates the sport that made him a superstar: “I play tennis for a living, although I hate tennis, I detest it with a dark and secret passion, and I have always hated it.” Open, the memoir of tennis player Andre Agassi, begins with the lines: “I open my eyes and I don’t know where I am, or who I am.” This feeling accompanies him throughout the pages.

Agassi says it can’t be a coincidence that tennis uses “the language of life” and finds meaning there. Love (in English it is used to refer to 40-40), break (break, when the opponent’s serve is broken), advantage, when you become ahead at 40-40 and are one point away from winning the game , and tie-break (tie-break, in Spain they call it “sudden death”). Like any tennis player, even many of the best, his career had more defeats than victories. Like any life of any ordinary person.

When he burst in, with his blonde hair and jeans cut like sports shorts, Agassi looked more like a member of Poison or Mötley Crüe than a professional tennis player. There were rockstar tennis players before him, with styles as or more iconic: Bjorn Borg with his blonde hair tied up with a headband and his team’s striped Fila; our Guillermo Vilas always so elegant and aristocratic but with an undeniable rock edge; John McEnroe and his so exaggerated anger at the linesmen that they became sympathetic; etc However, Agassi was American and appeared at the time of the end of the Cold War, television, Nike and Coca-Cola advertisements, the rise of Algerian hard-rock and eighties American action cinema.

[”Open” se puede adquirir, en formato digital, en Bajalibros, clickeando acá.]

The Las Vegas Kid was the perfect product of his time. He became so trapped by his image that when he began to lose his hair, he went out to play with a wig, as in the 1990 Roland Garros final, where he played with fear of it falling out, which significantly limited his movements and ended up costing him the defeat against Andrés Gómez in what could have been his first Grand Slam. He tells it in Open: “In the warm-up I started praying but not because of the desire to win but rather so that I wouldn’t lose my wig in the middle of the match. At every point I imagined that my hair was falling out into the brick dust and I didn’t want millions of people in the world to see it on television and be surprised by how Andre Agassi’s hair had fallen out.”

He would only win his first Grand Slam in 1992, at Wimbledon, where he had not been allowed to play years before for refusing the strict white dress code required by the legendary All England. Throughout his career he would end up winning eight of the big tournaments. Finally, he would shave his head in 1995, adopting what would be his iconic look to this day.

The extravagant and groundbreaking looks that he showed as a young man, according to what he says in his book, were not to attract attention, but rather the opposite, his own particular cry for help: “They say that what I want is to attract attention, to stand out from the crowd. the rest. In fact – like with my Mohawk – what I try to do is hide. They say that I intend to change the customs of the game, when in reality what I am trying to do is that the game does not change me. They call me a rebel, but I have no intention of being one.”

When she started losing her hair, she went out to play with a wig

One of the most overwhelming passages in a book that has many is when just after becoming number 1 in the world for the first time, in April 1995, he says: “I spend several hours walking the streets of Palermo, drinking coffee alone, very strong, wondering what the hell is wrong with me. I have achieved it. I am the best tennis player in the world, and yet I feel empty. If being number one makes me feel that way, what’s the point of being number one? Why don’t I retire and that’s it?”

He would end up holding the top spot in the ATP rankings for 30 weeks, where he decided not to play the hard court season, which is why he was surpassed by his historic rival Pete Sampras, also an American but his complete opposite both on and off the court. Anyone can identify with that, when everything is going well for you but it’s still not enough and a voice in your head keeps asking you: “What for?”

At the beginning of my competition, in the same week I broke two rackets, I was 13 years old and the challenge I received was so enormous that I never crashed one on the ground again. Almost immediately I realized that I wasn’t going to be a professional, so it wasn’t worth it to behave like one on the court either. Today I enjoy tennis much more than when I was a teenager. Agassi, paradoxically, one of the most gifted characters in the history of white sport, from what he tells in his memoirs, he never quite managed to do it. Except when he used the game for others, founding his own academy, there he found his purpose: “I play to raise funds for my school, and to give it visibility. After all those years, I now have what I have always wanted, something to play for, something that goes beyond me and, at the same time, is closely related to me. Something that bears my name but is not limited to me. The Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy.”

Andre Agassi, in 1991, in Wiimbledon. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo)

In tennis, defeat hurts more because it is individual, there is no team on which to distribute the weight. The Swiss Stanislas Wawrinka had Samuel Beckett’s phrase tattooed: “You always tried. You always failed. It doesn’t matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” This weighs on any tennis player, there are many examples of this, to name one active one, the Russian Andrey Rublev – name of a 17th century painter – who has come to harm himself with rackets on the court to the point of bleeding. and he almost never loses the troubled look that, together with his long, messy hair, gives him something of a tragic hero.

But Agassi in Open leaves him exposed, open, like no one else. Tennis, like life, is not about how many matches you win, but about how many blows you can receive – and return – and how many defeats you can go through before getting back up and achieving some victory. And Agassi knows it. Now that he has something to play for, I no longer believe that, deep down, he hates tennis, because it would be something like hating life.

2023-11-27 03:35:00
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