When tennis great Andre Agassi first considered writing a memoir, he wanted much more from his professional collaborator than a polished manuscript, said Jim Chairusmi in The Wall Street Journal. Juicy revelations have helped push Agassi’s Open to the top of best-seller lists, but the solid reviews that the book has won are rooted in Agassi’s decision to invite journalist J.R. Moehringer to get inside his head. Agassi called Moehringer in 2006 because, while preparing for his final bow at that year’s U.S. Open, he had become absorbed by Moehringer’s memoir, The Tender Bar. “It really had a profound impact on me,” Agassi says. Moehringer’s story about growing up in a neighborhood bar inspired Agassi to want to “make sense of” his own life.
The collaboration wound up resembling intense psychoanalysis, said Charles McGrath in The New York Times. During 250 hours of taped interviews, Agassi revealed that he had hated tennis since childhood, that he briefly used crystal meth during a 1997 career nosedive, and that his famous youthful locks were part hairpiece. But his greatest challenge must have been talking about personal relationships. “I have a lot of capacity for pain, but I didn’t understand how hard this process would be,” Agassi says. “I was being asked to talk about the subject I know least about: me.” Agassi says he has no regrets about the honesty of the resulting pages. Ever since life handed him “a second chance” to right his mistakes, he says, each day “has been a form of atonement. This book is that.”
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