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One thing is plain in reading Andre Agassi’s new book Open, which was released on Monday: what happens off the court in the personal lives of players significantly affects what happens on the court in matches.

Tennis isn’t a team sport like hockey or basketball where a 10 or 20 per cent dropoff in a player’s performance can be camouflaged by the individual being part of a greater whole.

In Agassi’s case, his crystal meth use, his relationship with his first wife Brooke Shields, the breast cancer that affected his mother and sister Tami at the same time, his own and other friends’ health issues, and his growing infatuation with the woman who was to become his second wife, Steffi Graf, all were huge factors in explaining the ups and downs of his results on the ATP Tour.

After reading the excerpts from Open that have come out leading up to this week’s publication – about drug use, about his traumatic relationship with his father, about his hatred for tennis, about his agonizing back problem is his last years on tour – the book itself can seem mildly anti-climactic. But it is a very good autobiography that touches on all stages of his life on and off the court.

It is especially good on his early life in tennis, his ill-fated relationship and marriage to Shields and his persistent and ultimately successful courtship of Graf.

There are some seemingly mean-spirited asides in the book, such as the way he describes how the relatively obscure German player Bernd Karbacher is bow-legged and “his ass is chapped,” and how “I leave him standing there like a Jehovah’s Witness on my doorstep” about Boris Becker waiting at the net for a post-match handshake.

As well, there is the frequent, sometimes jarring, use of the f-word in various forms in describing the inner conversations he has with himself. This particularly odd if he intends, as is implied, that the book is partly to be a record for this children, Jaden and Jaz, eight and six respectively, to read later in life.

Not surprisingly, because his co-author J.R. Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize winner, Open is well written. At times, it is clear that it is Moehringer’s prose and turns of phrase that come through, even if Agassi has an undeniable ability to be eloquent on his own.

About the crowd for his first-round match at the 1999 French Open, the book reads, “There were sixteen thousand people in the stands, screaming like peasants overrunning Versailles.”

Also, the books later describes Roger Federer “with his suave agility, his shot-making prowess and puma-like smoothness.” Those sound a lot more like Moehringer’s words than something written by “double A,” as Agassi used to be known.

If the content of the book is virtually 100 per cent Agassi, then the style, feel and flow of the writing has to be at least 90 per cent Moehringer.

In the ‘Acknowledgments’ at the very back of the book, Agassi writes, “I asked J.R. many times to put his name on the book. He felt, however, that only one name belonged on the cover. Though proud of the work we did together, he said he couldn’t see signing his name to another man’s life.”

Still, it seems wrong that there is no sign of Moehringer’s name anywhere in the book except for in the “Acknowledgements.”

But all in all, prospective readers, especially those of the more hardcore tennis variety, will be pleased that the book focuses on the sport enough that it cannot be classified as a sell-out to the more sensationalist sides of Agassi’s tumultuous trek through life.

AD-IN

There are a couple of odd references to ‘Canadians’ in the book. Talking about the time he was defaulted in Indianapolis in 1996 for using obscenities against Daniel Nestor, the Torontonian is described as “Daniel Nestor, a Serb from Canada.”

A few pages later, about a loss in San Jose in 1997, he writes, “I falter in the semis against Greg Rusedski from Canada.” That was two years after the former Montrealer left for Britain.