"Open" by Andre Agassi

I have been reading every night while Mindy feeds Maddie. I have been wanting to read Andre Agassi's autobiography for a while now. Growing up in the 90s, I was a big fan of Agassi. He was the supposed rebel who took the tennis world by storm. He's still my favorite tennis player of all time. He just seemed to genuinely love playing and was the picture perfect display of sportmanship. A true class act. I finally picked up the book and read it. I enjoyed it a lot. It amazed me how much detail he remembered from all of his matches. He played for 20 years and recounted very specific details from his earliest matches in 1986 to his final match in 2006. He described how he felt emotionally and physically before and after each match and how those feelings effected him on and off the court. The most interesting thing was that he says numerous times during the book that he "hates tennis." At the beginning I could understand it because his father basically bullied him into playing tennis and treated him like a slave to make him a great player. I don't believe that he continued to hate tennis however because he wouldn't have continued playing for 20 years if he hated it so much. He has always had serious back problems and had to play through pain in almost every match. He had a great excuse to quit but I think he loved the game too much to walk away from it. Anyway, it's a great book and I had fun reading it. It was funny to hear how he met Brooke Shields and later married her and how he always secretly wanted to marry Steffi Graf and how that dream finally came true. You gotta be a sports fan, especially of tennis, to enjoy it though because the majority of it recounts his matches so it could be boring to someone who doesn't know the game of tennis. If you're a sports fan though, I encourage you to read it. It's a fun read for sure. It hilarious to hear him talk about Pete Sampras. He didn't like the guy at all and you would have never known it. I have a whole new opinion of Sampras. He always seemed to be a pretty good guy but according to the stories that Agassi tells, he was a total egotistical jerk. Just wanted to throw out a recommendation to all you leisure readers out there.