Life is full of surprises, and for me the latest came when I read "Open," Andre Agassi's just-released autobiography.
I picked up the book after various reports in the media — a "60 Minutes" segment that aired last Sunday in particular — that the tennis champion used crystal meth while he was an active player and then lied about it so he could keep playing.
As is so often the case, the drug episode is only a small part of a very big, very complicated picture — and as is also so often the case, the media sound bites, and the reactions to those media sound bites, take it out of context and blast its proportions beyond recognition.
But then came the surprise. I expected to read a little gossip insulated by justification and rationalization — the usual self-serving celebrity autobiography, in other words — and instead found myself ushered into a confessional booth with Andre Agassi himself.
The book is so brutally, sometimes viciously, honest, that when you're finished you almost wonder if you are at liberty to share what you've just learned. Wouldn't you be violating some sort of therapist-patient privilege?
Famous people intrigue us. At least they intrigue me. Famous athletes, especially. Partly, I suppose, because I've met quite a few, and I've often wondered why they don't seem as happy as I thought they'd be. They've got it all: fame, fortune, fleets of nice cars, beautiful spouses, mansions, swimming pools, personal assistants — best of all, part-time jobs! — and yet more often than not they act like they're "The Fugitive" trying to find the one-armed man.
Agassi addresses that subject. The love-hate nature of becoming a champion athlete. The agony of victory. Can't live with it; can't live without it.
He hates tennis. That's the theme of his book. Last thing he'll do is have his kids play the game. (A view shared, incidentally, by their mom and his wife, Steffi Graf, the greatest women's tennis champion ever).
In 1997, coming off winning a gold medal in the Olympics at Atlanta and about to marry the beautiful movie star Brooke Shields — you've got your adversity; he's got his — Agassi hates tennis, and his life, so much that he turns to the aforementioned crystal meth.
This drug isn't performance-enhancing, it's performance-ruining. (Not to mention marriage-ruining, which in Andre's case turns out to be a good thing.) His world ranking drops like Enron.
But just as he is about to bottom out completely, what comes along and saves him? The very thing he hates. Tennis.
After that — he's in his upper 20s now, approaching geezerhood for a tennis player — he wins five of his eight majors, including the elusive French Open, achieves legendary status and marries Graf. Then the kid who never made it past ninth grade spends millions to open a K-12 charter school in Las Vegas for underprivileged children.
At the turning point, when he decides to get it all back together, he's in Germany, having just bombed out of a tournament, and he writes this:
"I stare out at the Stuttgart traffic. I hate tennis more than ever — but I hate myself more. I tell myself, So what if you hate tennis? Who cares? All those people out there, all those millions who hate what they do for a living, they do it anyway. Maybe doing what you hate, doing it well and cheerfully, is the point. So you hate tennis. Hate it all you want. You still need to respect it — and yourself."
Nonfiction is so much more fascinating than fiction.
Or it can be. If people tell the truth and tell it like this.
It helps, of course, to have a great ghostwriter. J.R. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and author, assisted Agassi, which is another way of saying Moehringer wrote the book.
But the story, and the life, is all Andre Agassi's. It's refreshingly candid and candidly refreshing. And it makes you wonder if you really want to live like the other half lives.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com