Why does a man who once confessed to hating tennis keep showing up on courts? Andre Agassi is back in headlines ahead of Pickleball Slam 4 in 2026, cheerfully explaining his love for a sport played with paddles and plastic balls. The easy story is a retired legend having fun. But if you have spent any time with his autobiography, Open, you know Agassi's relationship with racket sports has never been simple. He was a kid who cried before practice, a champion who used crystal meth during a career slump, a philanthropist who built a school with tournament winnings he once resented earning. Watching him grin through pickleball press clips without that backstory is like reading the last chapter of a novel and calling it the whole plot.
Most coverage around Agassi and pickleball treats his involvement as a clean celebrity endorsement moment: famous athlete tries trendy sport, likes it, plays in a made-for-TV event. The Sporting News and similar outlets cover the what and the when. They skip the psychological texture that makes Agassi's public enthusiasm worth pausing over. This is someone who spent decades trapped between compulsion and resentment on a tennis court, driven there first by a father who rigged a ball machine in the family backyard and later by a professional apparatus that rewarded his talent while ignoring his misery. That he is voluntarily picking up a paddle and calling it joy is a statement, even if no interviewer presses him on it.
Open, co-written with J.R. Moehringer, begins with a scene most sports memoirs would bury: Agassi waking up before his final professional match, his body a catalog of chronic pain, his mind already grieving a career he never fully wanted. That opening sets the terms. Victory and suffering share every paragraph, and the author refuses to pretend one cancels the other. The early chapters are the most visceral. Agassi's father, Emmanuel, a former Olympic boxer for Iran, converts the family home into a tennis laboratory.
He builds a ball machine the children call "the dragon" because of the way it fires balls at alarming speed. Young Andre is drilled relentlessly, and the prose captures the claustrophobia of a childhood organized entirely around someone else's ambition. By the time Agassi is sent to Nick Bollettieri's academy in Florida as a teenager, he is already skilled enough to turn pro and angry enough to sabotage himself. The mohawk, the denim shorts, the image rebellion of the early 1990s were real expressions of friction, and Agassi writes about them without nostalgia or apology.
The middle stretch covers the years of fame, the marriage to Brooke Shields, and the methamphetamine use that nearly ended his career. Agassi's account of lying to the ATP about a failed drug test is uncomfortably frank. He frames it as panic, and that honesty is the book's greatest strength. It is also, in places, a limitation. Moehringer's prose style leans into cinematic compression, and some match descriptions read more like screenplay beats than lived memory. Point-by-point reconstructions of key matches grip you in isolation but occasionally feel engineered for dramatic pacing at the expense of emotional accuracy. A few of the late-career chapters, too, settle into a repetitive rhythm of injury, doubt, and comeback that could have been trimmed by a harder editorial hand. What holds everything together is Agassi's account of his second act: the relationship with Steffi Graf, the founding of the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas, and the slow, painful climb back up the rankings in his thirties. The philanthropy chapters could easily slide into self-congratulation, but Agassi ties them to a specific realization. He spent years performing excellence in a sport he resented, and building a school let him feel useful on his own terms for the first time. If you come to Open expecting a tidy redemption arc, the book will frustrate you in productive ways. Agassi never fully reconciles with his father. He never claims to have loved tennis, even at the end. The best he offers is a hard-won truce with the sport and with himself. That ambivalence is rare in athlete memoirs, which tend to land on gratitude or triumph. Agassi lands somewhere more honest and less comfortable.
If the pickleball clips have you curious about Agassi, Open is where the real texture lives. It treats athletic greatness as a problem to be survived. And it might change the way you hear a retired champion say he is having fun, leaving you to decide whether that fun is freedom or the latest turn in a lifelong negotiation with competition.