Open by Andre Agassi

June 01, 2024

I. Brief Summary

A compelling autobiography that takes readers on a journey through the life and career of one of tennis’s most iconic and enigmatic figures — Andre Agassi. Agassi’s honesty and vulnerability shines through the book as he opens up about his conflicting emotions towards tennis. He is candid about his internal battles and the complex relationship with his father and tennis. He chronicled his rise to the top ranks of tennis, but the ride wasn't easy.

II. Big Ideas

Don’t think, feel.

In the heat of the match of your life, you have to trust your thoughts and feel your way towards the outcome you so badly desire.

Fear is your fire.

It would be dangerous to surrender to fear. Fears are like gateway drugs, I said. You give in to a small one, and soon you’re giving in to bigger ones.

Fight your pain and relieve other people's pain are life purposes.

Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. He tells them: We are like blocks of stone.

Perfectionism will kill you.

When you chase perfection, when you make perfection the ultimate goal, do you know what you’re doing? You’re chasing something that doesn’t exist. You’re making everyone around you miserable.

There is a tax to success.

I understand that there’s a tax on everything in America. Now I discover that this is the tax on success.

III. Quotes

Hate brings me to my knees, love gets me on my feet.
Then the only remedy is to alter my game—swing differently, run differently, do everything differently. That’s when my muscles spasm. Everyone avoids change; muscles can’t abide it. Told to change, my muscles join the spinal rebellion, and soon my whole body is at war with itself.
Pressure is how you know everything’s working, the doctor said. Words to live by, Doc. Soon the pain felt wonderful, almost sweet, because it was the kind that you can tell precedes relief. But maybe all pain is like that.
To the children, retire equals puppy. Stefanie and I have promised them that when I stop training, when we stop traveling the world, we can buy a puppy. Maybe we’ll name him Cortisone. Yes, buddy, when I lose, we will buy a dog. He smiles. He hopes Daddy loses, hopes Daddy experiences the disappointment that surpasses all others.
It’s taken me nearly thirty years to understand it myself, to solve the calculus of my own psyche.
I ask Jaden what he’s doing today. Going to see the bones. I look at Stefanie. She reminds me she’s taking them to the Museum of Natural History. Dinosaurs. I think of my twisted vertebrae. I think of my skeleton on display at the museum with all the other dinosaurs. Tennis-aurus Rex.
Life will throw everything but the kitchen sink in your path, and then it will throw the kitchen sink. It’s your job to avoid the obstacles. If you let them stop you or distract you, you’re not doing your job, and failing to do your job will cause regrets that paralyze you more than a bad back.
What you feel doesn’t matter in the end; it’s what you do that makes you brave.
He dresses for every match as if it’s a blind date or a mob hit.
Tennis is about degrees of aggression. You want to be aggressive enough to control a point, not so aggressive that you sacrifice control and expose yourself to unnecessary risk.
I obsess about my bag. I keep it meticulously organized, and I make no apologies for this anal retentiveness. The bag is my briefcase, suitcase, toolbox, lunchbox, and palette. I need it just right, always.
A string job can mean the difference in a match, and a match can mean the difference in a career, and a career can mean the difference in countless lives.
Can’t dwell on tomorrow any more than I can dwell on yesterday.
Baghdatis begins stretching, bending at the waist. He stands on one leg and pulls one knee to his chest. Nothing is quite so unsettling as watching your opponent do pilates, yoga, and tai chi when you can’t so much as curtsy. He now maneuvers his hips in ways I haven’t dared since I was seven. And yet he’s doing too much. He’s antsy. I can almost hear his central nervous system, a sound like the buzz of the stadium.
The guy has as much heart as he has hair.
Your body is like the federal government. It says, Do anything you like, but when you get caught, don’t lie to me. So he’s not going to be able to serve. He’s not going to be able to get out of that chair.
This contradiction between what I want to do and what I actually do, feels like the core of my life.
But I take no pride in my reflexes, and I get no credit. It’s what I’m supposed to do. Every hit is expected, every miss a crisis.
The net is the biggest enemy, but thinking is the cardinal sin. Thinking, my father believes, is the source of all bad things, because thinking is the opposite of doing. When my father catches me thinking, daydreaming, on the tennis court, he reacts as if he caught me taking money from his wallet.
Suddenly my father had his backyard tennis court, which meant I had my prison. I’d helped feed the chain gang that built my cell.
For instance, he often reaches a thumb and forefinger inside his nostril and, bracing himself for the eye-watering pain, pulls out a thick bouquet of black nose hairs. This is how he grooms himself.
When the rubber starts to wear down, my father cuts a tennis ball in half and puts one half on each toe. I tell Philly: It’s not bad enough that we live in a tennis laboratory—now we have to wear tennis balls on our feet?
My father craves perfection. Geometry and mathematics are as close to perfection as human beings can get, he says, and tennis is all about angles and numbers.
My father loves money, makes no apologies for loving it.
My brother sounds the way I imagine a father is supposed to sound. Proud of me and scared for me at the same time.
For all the pain my father has caused me, the one constant has been his presence.
People like to call the Bollettieri Academy a boot camp, but it’s really a glorified prison camp.
When we’re not drilling, we’re studying the psychology of tennis. We take classes on mental toughness, positive thinking, and visualization.
For a moment I imagine what it would be like to do something besides playing tennis—something I choose. Then I go to my next class, math, and the dream dies in a cloud of algebra formulae. I’m not cut out to be a scholar.
The next class, French, is worse. I’m très stupide. I transfer to Spanish, where I’m muy estúpido. Spanish, I think, might actually shorten my life. The boredom, the confusion, might cause me to expire in my chair. They will find me one day in my seat, muerto.
The worse I do in school, the more I rebel. I drink, I smoke pot, I act like an ass.
He demonstrates the virtue of rest.
Add my name to the list of those who’ve expired on Graveyard Court.
My mind departs my body and goes floating out of the arena.
Journalists write down exactly what I say, while I’m saying it, word for word, as if this represented the literal truth. I want to tell them, Hold it, don’t write that down, I’m only thinking out loud here. You’re asking about the subject I understand least—me. Let me edit myself, contradict myself. But there isn’t time. They need black-and-white answers, good and evil, simple plot lines in seven hundred words, and then they’re on to the next thing.
He’s ranked number three in the world, but to my mind he’s the player of the moment.
Trying to wear him out, I wear myself out.
Treat this crisis as practice for the next crisis.
The best exercises, he says, exploit gravity. He tells me how to use gravity and resistance to break down a muscle, so it will come back stronger.
Calorie, for instance. He says it comes from the Latin calor, which is a measure of heat. People think calories are bad, Gil says, but calories are just measures of heat, and we need heat. With food, you feed your body’s natural furnace. How can that be bad? It’s when you eat, how much you eat, the choices you make—that’s what makes all the difference.
He asks, How much do you run every day? Five miles. Why? I don’t know. Have you ever run five miles in a match? No.
I tell him my life has never for one day belonged to me. My life has always belonged to someone else. First, my father. Then Nick. And always, always, tennis.
He has less trouble accessing his anger.
Andre, I won’t ever try to change you, because I’ve never tried to change anybody. If I could change somebody, I’d change myself. But I know I can give you structure and a blueprint to achieve what you want. There’s a difference between a plow horse and a racehorse. You don’t treat them the same. You hear all this talk about treating people equally, and I’m not sure equal means the same. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a racehorse, and I’ll always treat you accordingly. I’ll be firm, but fair. I’ll lead, never push.
He continues to say without compunction that Christ is on his side of the court, a blend of egotism and religion that chafes me.
How lovely it is to dream while you are awake. Dream while you’re awake, Andre. Anybody can dream while they’re asleep, but you need to dream all the time, and say your dreams out loud, and believe in them.
There’s a lot of good waiting for you on the other side of tired. Get yourself tired, Andre. That’s where you’re going to know yourself. On the other side of tired.
Now that I’ve won a slam, I know something that very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long as the bad. Not even close.
I understand that there’s a tax on everything in America. Now I discover that this is the tax on success.
But fame is a force. It’s unstoppable. You shut your windows to fame and it slides under the door.
I marvel at how unexciting it is to be famous, how mundane famous people are. They’re confused, uncertain, insecure, and often hate what they do. It’s something we always hear—like that old adage that money can’t buy happiness—but we never believe it until we see it for ourselves.
Writers take malicious joy in calling me Burger King.
It would be dangerous to surrender to fear. Fears are like gateway drugs, I said. You give in to a small one, and soon you’re giving in to bigger ones.
Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. He tells them: We are like blocks of stone.
Quit going for the knockout, he says. Stop swinging for the fences.
It’s all about odds and percentages. You’re from Vegas, you should have an appreciation of odds and percentages.
When you chase perfection, when you make perfection the ultimate goal, do you know what you’re doing? You’re chasing something that doesn’t exist. You’re making everyone around you miserable.
With your talent, if you’re fifty percent game-wise, but ninety-five percent head-wise, you’re going to win. But if you’re ninety-five percent game-wise and fifty percent head-wise, you’re going to lose, lose, lose.
Simply knowing your enemy is a powerful advantage.
Pete is serving live grenades, one after another, a typical Pete fusillade.
When you eat, he says, and how you eat, that’s the thing.
He can’t tell the difference between loving me and loving tennis, it’s love all the same. Few of us are granted the grace to know ourselves, and until we do, maybe the best we can do is be consistent. My father is nothing if not consistent.
So I’m number one. So a computer loves me. So what?
Pride is bad, stress is good. I don’t want to feel confident. I want to feel rage. Endless, all-consuming rage.
My concentration is so intense, it frightens me.
Sportswriters accuse me of tanking, not going for every ball. They never get it right. When I tank, they say I’m not good enough; when I’m not good enough, they say I tank.
Surrogate father is a role for which I have the greatest respect.
We’re not on the same frequency. We don’t have the same bandwidth.
Before I can answer, the jeweler is peppering me with her own questions. Size? Carat? Color? Clarity? She keeps talking about clarity, asking me about clarity. I think: Lady, you’re asking the wrong guy about clarity.
I replay our conversation, and I can’t tell the difference between the lines in her script and the lines we’ve just spoken to each other.
At last it’s time for me to leave. I kiss Brooke goodbye, kiss Granny Strickland goodbye, and notice that both kisses have the same amount of passion.
For once I don’t hear that nagging self-doubt that follows every personal resolution.
Decisions, especially bad ones, create their own kind of momentum, and momentum can be a bitch to stop, as every athlete knows.
My primary concern is children at risk. Adults can always ask for help, but children are voiceless, powerless. So the first project my foundation undertakes is a shelter for abused and neglected children who’ve been placed in the protective custody of the courts.
Mandela said once in an interview: No matter where you are in life, there is always more journey ahead. And I think of one of Mandela’s favorite quotes, from the poem Invictus, which sustained him during those moments when he thought his journey had been cut short: I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
His theme: we must all care for one another—this is our task in life. But also we must care for ourselves, which means we must be careful in our decisions, careful in our relationships, careful in our statements. We must manage our lives carefully, in order to avoid becoming victims.
He survived the loneliness of constant confinement by reading.
Mandela talks about the road he’s traveled. He talks about the difficulty of all human journeys—and yet, he says, there is clarity and nobility in just being a journeyer. Mandela is saying that every journey is important, and that no journey is impossible.
The scoreboard said I lost today, but what the scoreboard doesn’t say is what it is I have found. Over the last twenty-one years I have found loyalty: You have pulled for me on the court, and also in life. I have found inspiration: You have willed me to succeed, sometimes even in my lowest moments. And I have found generosity: You have given me your shoulders to stand on, to reach for my dreams—dreams I could have never reached without you. Over the last twenty-one years I have found you, and I will take you and the memory of you with me for the rest of my life.
We ask one thing of every teacher: to believe that every student can learn. It sounds like a painfully obvious concept, self-evident, but nowadays it’s not.
We thought it important that students wear uniforms. Tennis shirt with khaki pants, shorts, or skirt, in official school colors—burgundy and navy. We think it creates less peer pressure, and we know it saves our parents money in the long run. Every time I walk into the school I’m struck by the irony: I’m now the enforcer of a uniform policy.
The essence of good discipline is respect. Respect for authority and respect for others. Respect for self and respect for rules. It is an attitude that begins at home, Is reinforced at school, And is applied throughout life.
I won’t let myself down the way others have. It’s up to me to change the course of my future and I will never give up.
Life is a tennis match between polar opposites. Winning and losing, love and hate, open and closed. It helps to recognize that painful fact early. Then recognize the polar opposites within yourself, and if you can’t embrace them, or reconcile them, at least accept them and move on. The only thing you cannot do is ignore them.
I was late in discovering the magic of books.