While many people also remember Agassi as the bad boy of tennis, flaunting his colored mowhawks and pierced ears, it's easy to empathize with him when he writes that he's spent half his life "as a stranger to myself." In this book we catch a glimpse of him trying to solve the "calculus of my psyche." That cannot have been easy. "This contradiction between what I want to do and what I actually do feels like the core of my life." Agassi's father, a former Olympic boxer, epitomized the tyrannical father who was physically and psychologically abusive, firing tennis balls at 110 miles per hour at his little boy from a machine called "the dragon." When the son faltered, the father ranted and screamed. What most people don't know, and what his candid autobiography reveals, is that he hated tennis from the beginning. Across twenty-nine years of competition he won 869 matches, placing him fifth on the all-time list for wins. Many people remember Andre Agassi as one of the greatest tennis players ever. Andre Agassi, Open An Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 2009), 388pp.
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