Open, English edition

THE END



I open my eyes and don t know where I am or who I am. Not all that unusual I ve spent half my life not knowing. Still, this feels different. This confusion is more frightening. More total.

I look up. I m lying on the floor beside the bed. I remember now. I moved from the bed to the floor in the middle of the night. I do that most nights. Better for my back. Too many hours on a soft mattress causes agony. I count to three, then start the long, difficult process of standing. With a cough, a groan, I roll onto my side, then curl into the fetal position, then flip over onto my stomach. Now I wait, and wait, for the blood to start pumping.

I m a young man, relatively speaking. Thirty-six. But I wake as if ninety-six. After three decades of sprinting, stopping on a dime, jumping high and landing hard, my body no longer feels like my body, especially in the morning. Consequently my mind doesn t feel like my mind. Upon opening my eyes I m a stranger to myself, and while, again, this isn t new, in the mornings it s more pronounced. I run quickly through the basic facts. My name is Andre Agassi. My wife s name is Stefanie Graf. We have two children, a son and daughter, five and three. We live in Las Vegas, Nevada, but currently reside in a suite at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City, because I m playing in the 2006 U.S. Open. My last U.S. Open. In fact my last tournament ever. I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.

As this last piece of identity falls into place, I slide to my knees and in a whisper I say: Please let this be over.

Then: I m not ready for it to be over.

Now, from the next room, I hear Stefanie and the children. They re eating breakfast, talking, laughing. My overwhelming desire to see and touch them, plus a powerful craving for caffeine, gives me the inspiration I need to hoist myself up, to go vertical. Hate brings me to my knees, love gets me on my

Andre Agassi

A New York Times Notable Book and a Forbes, San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington Post Best Book of the Year

Agassi may have just penned one of the best sports autobiographies of all time. Check it s one of the better memoirs out there, period. . . . An unvarnished, at times inspiring story [told] in an arresting, muscular style. . . . Agassi s memoir is just as entrancing as his tennis game.
Time
 
Fascinating. . . . Inspiring. . . . Open describes Agassi s personal odyssey with brio and unvarnished candor. . . . [Agassi s] career-comeback tale is inspiring but even more so is another Open storyline. It could be called: The punk grows up. . . . Countless athletes start charitable foundations, but frequently the organizations are just tax shelters or PR stunts. For Agassi helping others has instead become his life s calling. . . . Open is a superb memoir, but it hardly closes the books on an extraordinary life.
The Wall Street Journal

Honest in a way that such books seldom are. . . . An uncommonly well-written sports memoir. . . . Bracingly devoid of triumphalist homily, Agassi s is one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete.
The New York Times
 
Not your typical jock-autobio fare. This literate and absorbing book is, as the title baldly states, Agassi s confessional, a wrenching chronicle of his lifelong search for identity and serenity, on and off the court.
Los Angeles Times

The writing here is exceptional. It is can t-put-down good.
Sports Illustrated
 
An honest, substantive, insightful autobiography. . . . The bulk of this extraordinary book vividly recounts a lost childhood, a Dickensian adolescence, and a chaotic struggle in adulthood to establish an identity. . . . While not without excitement, Agassi s comeback to No. 1 is less uplifting than his sheer survival, his emotional resilience, and his good humor in the face of the luckless cards he