I've recommended Open to more people than any other book. Most of them aren't even tennis fans.
Andre Agassi hated tennis. That's the premise of the book — the thing that makes it unusual, and unusually honest. He hated it as a child when his father built a ball machine that fired 2,500 balls a day at him. He hated it as a teenager at Bollettieri's academy. He hated it during the years he was ranked number one in the world.
And yet he played. And yet he won.
What that means for motivation
The clean story of athletic motivation goes like this: find something you love, pursue it obsessively, win. But Agassi broke that narrative completely. He pursued something he actively resented, and found meaning in it anyway — eventually through the school he built in Las Vegas, through the children who needed what his success could fund.
That reframing — why you play matters as much as how — is something I think about constantly with my students.
Some of them genuinely love tennis. Some tolerate it because their parents enrolled them. Some are adults who picked it up for exercise and now find themselves caring far more than they expected. None of these starting points predicts who improves fastest. What predicts improvement is finding a reason to keep showing up.
The Brooke moment
There's a section in the book where Agassi describes meeting Brooke Shields, and later Stefanie Graf, and how love changed him as a player. He found something off the court that gave the on-court work meaning.
I'm not suggesting students need a romantic subplot. But I do think about what grounds a player outside tennis. The athletes I've coached who improve most consistently usually have full lives — work they care about, relationships that matter, interests beyond the sport. Tennis becomes a part of their identity, not the whole of it. That's healthier, and it sustains longer.
The hatred was honest
What I respect most about the book is that Agassi didn't pretend. He didn't write a redemption arc where he discovers he loved it all along. The hatred was real. The commitment was also real. Those two things coexisted for three decades.
That's not a contradiction — it's just what a complicated relationship with something looks like. I've coached students who felt that way about tennis and I try to hold space for it. You don't have to love what you're doing to do it well. But you have to find something in it worth the effort.
Read the book. Even if you've never held a racquet.