Ten Years with Andre Agassi
A tribute to Agassi’s enduring autobiography, Open
This marks the tenth year I’ve read Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open. I know, without a doubt, I read this book every year because it has heart pounding out of its pages. The tidbits about Pete Sampras not being a good tipper and what Jimmy Connors was really like in the locker room are entertaining. But, the substance of this book lies in Agassi’s extremely heartfelt journey of self-awareness.
One of the phrases in Open that always sticks out to me is what Agassi calls a “near-life experience.” He describes the day he won the 2003 Australian Open, “As they hand me the trophy, I tell the crowd: There’s not a single day that’s guaranteed to us, and certainly days like this are very rare. Someone says later that I sounded as if I’d had a near-death experience. More like a near-life experience. It’s how a person talks when he almost didn’t live.”
A few years prior to Agassi’s 2003 Australian Open win, he had lost all motivation for tennis, piling up loss after loss, and was in an unhappy relationship with his now ex-wife, Brooke Shields. He detested his tennis career so much he used drugs to escape his depression. He was holding on to a relationship he knew was wrong for him because he feared being alone. This was Agassi’s version of a “near-life experience.”
How many of us are currently having our own version of a “near-life experience?” Clinging on to jobs, people, or habits we know aren’t for our highest good? Hesitating to take the first step towards something better and continually coming back to the comfort of what we know because we fear the unknown?
The good news is that even superstar athletes like Agassi with a “lucky horseshoe up their ass” as his father describes him, struggle. If you open to any page of his book it’s likely to be a moment in that time of struggle. It’s a reminder that those feelings are completely normal; that it’s part of the human experience to feel confused and unsure.
What resonates with me about Agassi’s journey is that his life begins to change for the better only once he accepts that it requires him to start from zero. Many of us continue on with our “near life experiences” because we can’t accept starting over. But Agassi had the courage to begin again. This applied not only to his tennis career, where he went back to square one, competing at tournaments in local parks to regain his ranking, but also to his personal life, where he left his very public relationship.
He also realized that to live an inspired life he had to serve others in some way, and so began the Andre Agassi Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas, a charter school for low-income students. Tournaments now had a purpose for Agassi. Winning meant more visibility and funding for his school. And when Agassi scored the biggest win in his life, in my opinion, by marrying tennis legend Steffi Graf and starting a family with her, his tennis career became about supporting his school and his new family. These became the inspiration for him, the inspiration he’d been searching for.
Thanks for the life lessons, Andre. Looking forward to next year’s read.
