Andre Agassi: OPEN

I do go back and forth with the whole reading thing in my life. Recently I've been getting big time back into it and as I mentioned before I was reading The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons. I switched gears and in 4 days ran through Andre Agassi's autobiography OPEN. I will preface it by saying I am a HUGE Agassi fan and always have been.
Agassi does an incredible job of having perfect memory and incredible insight. It tells a story of a kid forced to hit 2,500 balls a day at age 7 from a ball that would spit shots out at 110MPH. His dad was a crazy Iranian olympic boxer who knew nothing but pushing his children as hard as possible at tennis. There was no good job or hug, or any show of love in the slightest way. His mom said very little and did nothing to interfere with her husband's tyrannical rule. Education, normalcy, a social life were all out the window. He was at the Bolliteiri Academy at age 13 and the prized pupil of Nic Bolliteiri. He was a pro by age 15 and done with formal schooling as well. It is an amazing and unreal journey. You couldn't write the stories if you tried and this isn't even 1/4 of the craziness that's happened in his life. I simply can't recommend this highly enough if you are a fan of Agassi, tennis, or of one man's journey of incredible accomplishment. What drives him constantly changes, as his goals, cares, dreams, and life. I had trouble putting it down and it destroyed my sleep schedule.

The only reason I started it was because I was getting sick of reading Bill Simmon's and his biased book. He brings up interesting facts and arguments, but he is also tough to stomach when he just loves on the Celtics for pages upon pages. I really needed to put it away and give it a break. He's ranking teams and players and it's just mind-numbing how he rambles numbers and argues his point and that's apparently is supposed to be taken as biblical fact, or your an idiot. I'll work my way back to reading it eventually and keep you posted, but until then I will be covering Instant Replay, the classic by Packer great Jerry Kramer and the incomparable Dick Schaap. Going good so far reading about the Packer greats and how Lombardi utterly eviscerates them during the preseason. I'll keep you up to snuff on it.