By Carrie Battan
This year’s U.S. Open, the grand finale of the major tennis tournaments, has had no shortage of storybook moments. There was the heartwarming post-match interview that found the reigning women’s champion, Naomi Osaka, consoling the fifteen-year-old rising star Coco Gauff, both in tears. There’s the burgeoning romance between the men and women’s singles challengers Gaël Monfils and Elina Svitolina, who’ve created a playful Instagram account designed to stoke interest in their relationship. And then there are the villains: the maddeningly dominant Novak Djokovic, who was booed off the court as he retired from his third-round match with a shoulder injury; and Daniil Medvedev, a twenty-three-year-old Russian who rode “a wave of hostility,” in the words of the New York Times, to a victory in his third-round match, against Feliciano López. After losing a difficult point, Medvedev aggressively ripped a towel from a ball man’s hands, provoking a chorus of boos from the stands. Rather than repent, he flipped the crowd a middle finger and channelled the frisson toward a win. By the next round, media coverage of the incident had turned him into a modern tennis folk hero—someone capable of infusing a stiff and mannered sport with irreverence and uncensored passion.
The passage of time has shaped Andre Agassi’s legacy into something shiny and clean, but there was an era, which now seems long ago, when he was the primary object of such fascination. He was the human-interest champion. This is abundantly clear in “Open,” a 2009 autobiography that adds depth and complexity to Agassi’s reputation as both a champion and an insurgent. “Open” is an unusual sports memoir in many ways. For one, it avoids the litany of clichés about the love of the game that’s typically espoused by professional athletes. (The theme of the book is, in fact, Agassi’s overwhelming disdain for tennis.) During its press run, Agassi foregrounded his relationship with his ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer, the author of the beloved 2005 coming-of-age memoir “The Tender Bar.” Together, combining Agassi’s well of experiences with Moehringer’s delicate pen, they dissect the player’s trajectory, shedding light on Agassi’s agonizing relationship with his drill-sergeant father (a man who tried to feed his son speed before matches to enhance his performance), his repeated attempts to quit the game prematurely, and his reluctant foray into the celebrity-industrial complex. Agassi even confesses to using crystal meth and then lying about it after failing a drug test. Rather than sand down the edges of Agassi’s reputation or shroud it with platitudes, “Open” embraces his volatility and insecurities.
Perhaps most resoundingly, Moehringer and Agassi deconstruct the mythic image that the media created during Agassi’s many peaks and downfalls. At various points in his career, he was written off as a jerk, a fame whore, or a brat. But the reality, as explained in “Open,” was different: his signature mullet was not a statement of rebellion but rather an attempt to conceal the fact that he was going bald at a very young age. The denim shorts, similarly, were not a pointed act of sartorial subversion but a hasty choice made by a naïve teen-ager who’d just scored a sponsorship deal with Nike. (The shorts had been in John McEnroe’s discard pile during a group fitting.) His relationship with Brooke Shields was not as glamorous as it seemed, either—Agassi spent most of it chugging “Gil Water” (a special hydration cocktail mixed by his trainer), nursing injuries, and avoiding celebrity-filled parties before divorcing her. Juicy, energizing, tragic, and compulsively readable, “Open” illuminates the unique loneliness of professional tennis players. Tennis has the greatest platform among individual sports; its players perform on some of the world’s biggest stages for hours at a time, without access to coaches or teammates, and typically in silence. There is plenty of space for narratives to be spun around people in this position.
Reading “Open” a decade later, I couldn’t help but imagine what Agassi’s experience would have been like in the era of social media and high-definition replay. Maybe the heightened attention would have beaten him down, the echo chamber of headlines and think pieces sinking him into despair. Or, maybe, in some perverse way, our media landscape could have surfaced some of Agassi’s nuance, lending his actions a new frame, deeper context. (Imagine the Instagram captions he could have composed.) He’d have a shot, perhaps, at being seen not just as a punk or a superhero, but as a human.
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