A Team, but Watch How You Put It
By Charles McGrath
Published, New York Times, November 11, 2009

LAS VEGAS — Andre Agassi’s new memoir, “Open,” is an unusual addition to the shelves of jock autobiography. For one thing it’s honest in a way that such books seldom are. Mr. Agassi famously admits that he took crystal meth and lied about it, and that he sometimes tanked matches he had no interest in playing. He also reveals that to amuse himself he lighted fires in hotel rooms, that his notorious mullet hairdo was partly a wig, that after 1997 he gave up wearing underwear on the court and that at his first wedding, to Brooke Shields, he wore lifts in his shoes so she could wear heels.

Isaac Brekken for The New York Times
J. R. Moehringer, left, and Andre Agassi in Las Vegas on Tuesday. They collaborated on Mr. Agassi's memoir, “Open.”

“A lot of the things that have been said about me aren’t true, and a lot of the things I used to say about myself aren’t true. Part of my story is something I’m ashamed of,” Mr. Agassi said on Tuesday before a publicity event at the Wynn hotel here, his hometown. He had signed so many copies of “Open” that his signature had come to resemble a runic symbol or a snippet of electrocardiogram. “I knew in the book I had to expose everything. I think the reader can tell when you’re holding back, and I also wanted to see my own narrative come into focus. The truth is always surprising.”

Mr. Agassi’s book is also an uncommonly well-written sports memoir, and part of the credit for that belongs to J. R. Moehringer, Mr. Agassi’s collaborator, who insisted that his name appear neither on the cover nor the title page. “The midwife doesn’t go home with the baby,” he said on Tuesday. “It’s Andre’s memoir, not our memoir, not a memoir ‘as told to.’ It’s his accomplishment, and he made the final choices.” He added that in September, before the book went to press, he wanted to change the final line, but Mr. Agassi wouldn’t let him. “He explained the ending of the book to me. He understood it better than I did.”

Writing in The New York Times, Janet Maslin said of “Open” that “somebody on the memoir team has great gifts for heart-tugging drama.” Mr. Moehringer, who at the beginning of his career worked briefly at The Times, is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman and the author of “The Tender Bar,” a well-received 2005 memoir about growing up fatherless in Manhasset, N.Y., and finding role models at a pub. Mr. Agassi, a ninth-grade dropout whose father was so tyrannical and tennis-crazed that his son has spent much of his life trying to create an alternate family for himself, read the book in 2006. He was so taken by it, he said, that he began to ration the pages, hoping to make it last longer.
The rest at NYT.