Open : An Autobiography - Review

Open: An Autobiography is more of a memoir, or like reading a diary. Rest assured, you cannot put down this book without finishing it.

My friend often points out that great talents could become larger-than-life characters if spotted and groomed at a much younger age. You can find many examples - Bill Gates and Viswanathan Anand are a few names that come to the top of my mind. There seems to be a strong correlation between success and parental nurturing. This book is one such example - adding weightage to this correlation.

But at what cost? 

Agassi hated tennis! Not in a textbook sense of hate. His relationship with tennis is not something one would understand when told. They must feel it - Feel what it is like to excel, respect and honour something you grew up hating! When you have a demanding father imposing his will on you and seeing you as his means to find the purpose of his life, your identity gets screwed up. And it takes aeons to figure it out. You do not know why you play tennis, yet you do it nevertheless because it keeps you moving.

Aren't we all torn in this dichotomy - On what we should be doing and what we are doing? This book tells us that even the people we think of as achievers in a conventional sense are also susceptible to this! It humanizes them!

I wonder how Agassi could remember so much. He must have played what? 1000 matches? I am sure, like a chess grandmaster, he could graphically describe what transpired in those matches.

After reading the book, I am glad to have known Agassi. I envied when he relishes his victory (because I haven't felt what it is like to win). I sympathized with his losses and empathized when he held grudges against his rivals or when he sank into the bottomless pit of his career, unable to figure out what he was doing.

Open opened up what was inside Agassi. But for the readers, it makes them rediscover themselves.