Now, from the next room, I hear Stefanie and the children.
I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.Īs this last piece of identity falls into place, I slide to my knees and in a whisper I say: Please let this be over. We live in Las Vegas, Nevada, but currently reside in a suite at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City, because I'm playing in the 2006 U.S. We have two children, a son and daughter, five and three. Upon opening my eyes I'm a stranger to myself, and while, again, this isn't new, in the mornings it's more pronounced. Consequently my mind doesn't feel like my mind. After three decades of sprinting, stopping on a dime, jumping high and landing hard, my body no longer feels like my body, especially in the morning. Now I wait, and wait, for the blood to start pumping.
With a cough, a groan, I roll onto my side, then curl into the fetal position, then flip over onto my stomach. I count to three, then start the long, difficult process of standing. Too many hours on a soft mattress causes agony. I moved from the bed to the floor in the middle of the night. Not all that unusual - I've spent half my life not knowing. I open my eyes and don't know where I am or who I am. Open - how he prepared, mentally and physically, for the emotional ambiguity of retiring from a career he both loves and hates. Read in an excerpt about a day during Agassi's final tournament, the 2006 U.S. In it, he reveals, among other things, that he used crystal meth - and that he wore a hairpiece in the 1990 French Open to hide a bald spot. So over the course of a career that keeps him in constant motion, he's had to find ways to cope - cortisone shots, altering his game and eventually retirement.Īgassi's book is called Open. Andre Agassi's autobiography 'Open' was recently released in paperback.Īndre Agassi, widely considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time, admits in a new autobiography that he hates tennis, "with a dark and secret passion" - and always has.īecause he was born with spondylolisthesis, a spinal condition where one vertebra parts from the other, leaving less room for the nerves in the spinal column, the slightest wrong movement can leave Agassi awash in pain. This interview was originally broadcast on Nov.
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