Scan barcode
A review by sgbrux
Open by Andre Agassi
5.0
"My father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each day, I’ll hit 17,500 balls each week, and at the end of one year I’ll have hit nearly one million balls. He believes in math. Numbers, he says, don’t lie. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable."
And so begins Andre's long, long tennis career.
I've never played tennis in my life, apart from what was required of me in grade school P.E., and I found this book totally engrossing—just painfully relatable.
This is a book about so many things. Perhaps, most importantly, the obsessive fathers and mothers who forcibly impress their passionate solutions and expectations upon their children. Children who then go out into the world without any true sense of who they are, who suffer through life as perfectionists, who then struggle to find meaning and purpose in their lives.
Portions of this book made me cry, especially in the first half, which gets into Andre's upbringing and his relationships with his brother, Philly, and his best friend, Perry. If the scenes of self-loathing and screaming about being a "born loser" don't gut you, I don't know what will.
"Philly sits in a corner, beating himself up over the loss, but at least it’s a fair fight, one on one. Then along comes my father. He jumps in and helps Philly gang up on Philly. There is name-calling, slapping. By rights this should make Philly a basket case...Instead, after every verbal or physical assault at the hands of himself and my father, Philly’s slightly more careful with me, more protective. Gentler. He wants me spared his fate."
Though I didn't grow up with an enraged Olympian father, I do have a mother who grew up in extreme poverty—third-world country poverty—who, understandably, learned to worship the dollar. Through her own singular temper tantrums, she tried to instill that same belief system in me and my younger sister. Dad, too, in his own way. I'm 36 years old and still find myself struggling to free myself of the caged thinking we were raised in. Some parents take extreme measures to ensure that their children don't have to suffer in the ways they did growing up. All that does is create a new kind of suffering, a new prison to overcome.
If you're a reader who enjoys poking around in someone's head to understand the experiences and motivations that would form a person like Andre Agassi, give Open a read.
Though the thoughts and quirks throughout the 400+ pages are unmistakably Andre's—and backed by vaults of editorial clippings and accessible interviews and games—I think J.R.
Moehringer did superb work in helping get this story transcribed from voice recording to written form. The writing is spectacular.
And so begins Andre's long, long tennis career.
I've never played tennis in my life, apart from what was required of me in grade school P.E., and I found this book totally engrossing—just painfully relatable.
This is a book about so many things. Perhaps, most importantly, the obsessive fathers and mothers who forcibly impress their passionate solutions and expectations upon their children. Children who then go out into the world without any true sense of who they are, who suffer through life as perfectionists, who then struggle to find meaning and purpose in their lives.
Portions of this book made me cry, especially in the first half, which gets into Andre's upbringing and his relationships with his brother, Philly, and his best friend, Perry. If the scenes of self-loathing and screaming about being a "born loser" don't gut you, I don't know what will.
"Philly sits in a corner, beating himself up over the loss, but at least it’s a fair fight, one on one. Then along comes my father. He jumps in and helps Philly gang up on Philly. There is name-calling, slapping. By rights this should make Philly a basket case...Instead, after every verbal or physical assault at the hands of himself and my father, Philly’s slightly more careful with me, more protective. Gentler. He wants me spared his fate."
Though I didn't grow up with an enraged Olympian father, I do have a mother who grew up in extreme poverty—third-world country poverty—who, understandably, learned to worship the dollar. Through her own singular temper tantrums, she tried to instill that same belief system in me and my younger sister. Dad, too, in his own way. I'm 36 years old and still find myself struggling to free myself of the caged thinking we were raised in. Some parents take extreme measures to ensure that their children don't have to suffer in the ways they did growing up. All that does is create a new kind of suffering, a new prison to overcome.
If you're a reader who enjoys poking around in someone's head to understand the experiences and motivations that would form a person like Andre Agassi, give Open a read.
Though the thoughts and quirks throughout the 400+ pages are unmistakably Andre's—and backed by vaults of editorial clippings and accessible interviews and games—I think J.R.
Moehringer did superb work in helping get this story transcribed from voice recording to written form. The writing is spectacular.