On Reading Sports: Andre Agassi's Open and Other Literary Works

What do they know of tennis -- or, for that matter, any other sport -- who only tennis know?In Beyond a Boundary, his autobiography, the late Trinidadan critic, playwrite, historian, novelist, teacher and activist C. L. R. James asked “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” James somehow manages to tell, simultaneously (and terrifically absorbingly), the story of his life, the story of cricket in the West Indies, and the story of West Indian decolonization. The Guardian justly rated the book one of the top sports books ever (# 3).

Andre Agassi’s Open is not at a level with Beyond a Boundary but it does share with James’s work – and with all excellent sports writing – a deep awareness that the game contains, not only itself and its own laws and practices, but in some mysterious fashion, all of life. The title itself announces this awareness by punning the name of a kind of tennis tournament (U.S. Open, for example, where Agassi begins his story) with the quality of being to which Agassi aspires, from which he often suffers, and which he certainly brings successfully to his writing. From the scoring vocabulary of the game to the dynamics of service, return, and volley, from the solitude of the player on his or her side of the court to the tension between what is ideal (perfectionism) and what is possible (fatigue, injury), Agassi maintains an awareness of the deep meanings immanent in the game he lived with for so many years. At the same time, he knows when to let up on that awareness and let the narration of a match just be the narration of a match. The opening chapter, in which he recounts his penultimate match, a five-set marathon at the 2006 U.S. Open against Marcos Baghdatis is some of the very best sports writing I have ever read.

A Serious Man

From that beginning, which is, of course, also the end of his career. Agassi returns us to another kind of beginning: his childhood in Las Vegas, son of an Iranian immigrant casino worker and ex-Olympic boxer and a mid-western American mother. Having tried and, in his eyes, failed to produce tennis prodigies out of his first three children, Agassi's father, Mike, trains his sights on young Andre. From the age of 7, Agassi is made to spend hours each day on the home-made tennis court in the family's backyard, swatting at balls hurled at over 100 miles per hour from "the Dragon," a terrifying contraption engineered by his father to simulate impossible angles (and no doubt responsible for Agassi's reputation as one of the finest service returns in tennis history). 2500 balls a day, at a net that his father had raised six inches higher than regulation. The balls were allowed to accumulate on the court to make the whole enterprise more perilous. There is great drama and tension, father son wars, and Agassi movingly conveys the point of view and feelings of a small child in the situation: loving his father, craving his love, but despising what he is made to do. His mother, though a more marginal figure, plays a role simultaneously comforting Andre with her calm passivity, and enraging him with her calmly passive refusal to stand-up for him.

Over the course of the rest of the book we learn about some of the already superficially familiar events of Agassi's life, which is to say his career (for a major part of the story is just how inseparable those were for him): his emergence as a prodigiously talented, but somewhat underachieving, professional at the age of 16, his colorful, if not ostentatiously rebellious, clothing and hairstyles, his marriage to and divorce from Brooke Shields, his rise to the top, fall, and rise again. Open skillfully weaves these known quantities into the fabric of a bildungsroman, or novel of formation, so that the behind the scenes views we get do not appear sensational or opportunistic but rather just, well, open. Seeking to understand himself through this narrative, Agassi seems to go pretty far in trying to face up to the reality of his life and choices, even the ones that weren't, until the publication of this book, public knowledge, such as his addiction to crystal meth or his wearing a hairpiece throughout the height of the "image is everything" phase of his career.

Ultimately, the story has a happy ending, for which I was glad because I identified strongly with Agassi throughout the work -- from his life-long struggle between obligation and desire to his love-hate relationship with his father, from his loveless first marriage to the spasmodic alternation between self-contorting conformity and self-distorting rebellion to the sharp paradox of perfectionist self-loathing: "the piece of shit the universe revolves around." But in the end, Agassi finds -- as I have -- the love of his life in Stefanie Graff (a/k/a women's tennis great Steffi Graf), a romance which the book nicely constructs as a kind of fairy-tale destiny, complete with portents. Moreover, Agassi, the high school dropout, devotes considerable resources of money, time, and energy to founding and running a school for at-risk kids in Las Vegas and, of course, writes this book. I should note that he doesn't write the book alone as his acknowledgements duly point out. He sought the help of Jay Moehringer, author of The Tender Bar, and the two of them collaborated in marathon sessions over the course of a couple of years in a process that sounds more like therapy than anything else.

I used to read a lot of sports biography and, especially, autobiography when I was younger. I remember in particular the utter fascination that a trio of such works – by Wilt Chamberlain (Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door, 1973), Kareem Abdul Jabbar (Giant Steps, 1987), and Bill Russell (Second Wind, 1979) – held for me. The three centers dominated the NBA and faced-off in titanic clashes for a decade and a half. First Russell’s Celtics vs. Chamberlain’s Warriors and later Lakers, then Jabbar’s Bucks against Chamberlains’ Lakers (I was lucky enough to see a Jabbar-Chamberlain battle when I was about seven). In my memory, I read all three of these books at around same time, when I was about eight, though the publication dates show that this would have been impossible. I almost certainly read Wilt's at that time. But I probably read Bill Russell's around the time I started high school, and Jabbar's around the time I finished college.

But I think I collapse those times because the books themselves so powerfully evoked for me the memory of the games themselves, in which all three giants coexisted more or less in the same place and time. I don't think I ever saw Bill Russell play live (he retired in 1969, when I was just four), but I saw enough of him and certainly studied and knew enough basketball history to feel as though I had witnessed his epic battles with Wilt. And I definitely saw Wilt vs. Jabbar, both on television and, on one lucky occasion, in person at the Dane County Coliseum in Madison, Wisconsin, where my father took me to see one of the three exhibition games that the Milwaukee Bucks would play there each season. The numbers alone were impressive to me from the height and size of the players to the team and individual statistics that chronicled their unsurpassed domination (Kieran Egan would have a field day with Romantic fascination with the mega ergon of hoops).

They Certainly Were Giants

But what the books evoked, in particular, was the part of those games and battles that was about more than those games and battles; more than Russell’s impeccable timing and defensive play against Chamberlain’s size, strength, and offensive skills. There were moralistic overtones that fed my youthful hunger for meaning in black and white, good and evil. Russell, self-sacrificing team player against Chamberlain, transcendent individual talent. In the ethos of the basketball world in which I grew up this made Russell the Good Guy and Chamberlain the Bad Guy. There were all kinds of subtleties and not-so-subtleties that I didn't pick up on at the time, the main one being the role that race and racism played in superimposing these dramas on a sporting event. And Jabbar, for that matter, would complicate matters, especially after his conversion to Islam – he was against Chamberlain so he must be a good guy, but he was surly with the press and angry about something so he was probably a bad guy: it was confusing.

But the important thing is not that I did or didn't fully understand what was at stake. It is that even at that young age I knew that much more was at stake than just who won a basketball game. I knew, even if I couldn't have articulated it in all its complexity, that Important things were at stake with every loose ball, every basket scored, every blocked shot, every outlet pass: things that had everything to do with life itself, with what it means, with the impossible to answer questions about how to live it, about what makes it good and bad.

Agassi's book provided me with an enjoyable stroll through some of the most exciting moments in tennis history, a stirring narrative of a boy becoming a man, trying to make a decent ordinary life out of extraordinary circumstances that he both does not and does choose, and with a surprisingly revealing mirror of my own life and many of the issues that continue to vex me. But he also illuminated for me a path -- like a set of stones set out across a stream -- that I'd forgotten about in my life, or relegated as a marginal, unimportant B-grade fact in my own life in literature: my love of sports writing and, particular, sports autobiography. From the gargantuan memoirs of Wilt Chamberlain to the sophisticated social commentary of C. L. R. James to the deeply affecting story of Andre Agassi, the passion of my reading life has come as much from these tales of sports, which are also tales of life in the world, as from anything else.

What do they know of reading who only reading know?

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Prelude: A Story of Reading to Live (Section 3 of 3)

(Continued from here. Here's the full Table of Contents.)

Let me say a word about this broader conversation about reading and what I believe I have to add to it that hasn’t been said already. The conversation as it stands might be summed up in this way: 1) reading books is happening less and less in our culture, especially among younger generations who have been raised with other media, particularly the internet, that draw more of their attention, energy, and time (sometimes, there is a also subcurrent of worry that when reading does happen it is less and less often books cherished by scholars for bearing the core values of the Western tradition); and 2) reading should happen more and more because a) it is a pleasure; or b) it is an important means of intellectual self-discovery; or c) it is an important source for knowing the things an informed member of our society ought to know to function intelligently.

What I have to say is that yes, certainly, reading should happen more and more carefully, and yes, reading can do all these things, but most of all reading can be more than a pleasure or an intellectual responsibility we owe to ourselves or our society. In fact, in reading we can practice breaking down such dichotomies as pleasure and task, freedom and responsibility, emotion and intellect, self and other or self and world. Reading can be a joy and, as such, can be practice for a joyful life. Or, to state it another way, what I want to add to the conversation is, first, the importance of reading slowly and carefully with a mind and heart open to unforeseen discoveries and transformations; second, the role that affect and emotion play in making reading the pleasure and the source of intellectual self-discovery it can be; and third, that the beneficial effects of reading in this way can be far more profound and far-reaching than merely making us functional citizens. Reading in this way can help us to become more fully functional human beings filled with desire and intimately connected with our power to act creatively.

I believe that the best way to convey what I mean by the value of reading to live is simply by doing it. So most of the rest of this book will consist of eight readings of texts that I have loved that both demonstrate and illustrate the practice of reading to live in several of its many different aspects. It might be helpful if I first offer an overview of the basic features of what I mean by reading to live. I don’t mean this overview to be taken as a formula to be applied. As my own readings will show, reading to live is above all a relational encounter with the words of someone else and entails a willingness to let that encounter shatter formulas and disrupt preconceptions and agendas. It would be more accurate to think of this overview as one of a number of possible ways to distill into a few points what I think the readings I will share have in common with each other.

Reading to live is slow, like a three-foot hike. It is reading that loves words and so it takes its time with them and gets close to them. In so doing, reading to live is mindful and attentive to the myriad sensations and possibilities of meaning offered by the words on the page. Reading to live is likely to entail, at least on occasion, rereading, sometimes many times, sometimes at intervals of only an instant and at other times intervals of years or even decades. At different points in this book I will use adjectives like slow, mindful, attentive, deep, close, and intensive interchangeably to evoke different facets of the pace and quality of attention entailed in reading to live.

I want to emphasize that the call to read closely says nothing about the length of what is read or the length or exhaustiveness of our report to others, if one even emerges, of the reading experience. One can read closely three words of a text or a 600 page work, and the result of that close reading may be a sentence or an entire volume, or even just a passing and unspoken thought. But for the moment, I mean to suggest a reading that is like a kind of stroll. Whether that stroll takes place in a crowded city or an isolated park, in the countryside or through the woods, reading to live is a stroll through a text in which we allow time for noticing, for pausing, for retracing our steps, for following curiosity down what may turn out to be an unfulfilling path, for being moved.

We can drive from St. Louis to Chicago on Interstate 55 and get there in no more than four or five hours. Along the way we’ll see open fields, dotted with trees and, every ten miles or so, an interchange dense with gas stations, mini-marts, and McDonald’s. Or we can drive from St. Louis to Chicago on old US Route 66, which runs more or less alongside Interstate 55. It will take us double the time and along the way we’ll see houses, churches, stalks of corn rising just a few yards from our car window, old dilapidated diners and shiny new ones, sharp curves that we have to slow down to negotiate and small towns that we have to slow down to pass through. At times the road will seem simply to end and we’ll have to pause to figure out how to keep going. Sometimes we’ll go so slow that we notice a sign “Pie $1.99” and that will draw us in and we’ll stop and sit at a counter and have a conversation with a stranger. We branch out.

Similarly, among the effects of the slowness of reading to live is the discovery of complexity and ambiguity at ever more minute scales. The slow pace of reading to live delivers to us, when we are willing, an awareness of the rich complexity and ambiguity of the book, story, language, and words we are reading. And this tremendously enriched experience has a very important effect. By complicating it suspends, our sense of certainty.

Think of the drive to know, with certainty, as that drive to get to Chicago as fast as possible with no detours or distractions. But in the slow time of reading to live it is no longer clear what there is to be certain about, what there is to know, or what knowing would even mean anyway. In reading to live, the imperative to read for knowledge and information gradually yields to the desire to read to sense and learn and feel and think and discover and create. Awareness of sensations and affect flood the space created when we suspend our drive to get to the truth that we might have imagined is held, like water in a pitcher, in the meaningless container of language. We may gradually stop thinking of language as a clear container for truths that are themselves just accurate pictures corresponding to the way things actually are in the world. Gradually, we start to experience words, sensations, feelings, thoughts, and world as all parts or aspects of a single fabric that is being in the world.

In these ways, reading to live is open. By that I mean open to nonsense, paradox, ambiguity, and difficulty, to doubt and uncertainty, to what may sometimes be uncomfortable feelings of pain or sadness or anger, though also, of course, to feelings of love, sympathy, excitement and joy, open to connection with others and the world and open to a tender awareness of the vulnerability that comes with that connection. This openness is facilitated by the slow pace of reading to live, but that slowness is not in itself sufficient to provoke it. Even in a stroll or meandering drive we may find ourselves trying to close our hearts and minds to what we encounter. Therefore reading as openness entails an active effort to recognize those impulses to close ourselves off when they arise and to allow them to pass, even though we may not know what might occur when we do so. As we read with openness we find that the hard boundary between our reading self and the author other begins to slip and blur and perhaps to dissolve entirely. We transform the text and the text transforms us, much as happens when we love.

As we suspend the drive to treat what we read as the repository of a single meaning or as a mere source of information and follow instead the paths of desire, feeling, doubt and curiosity, we may find ourselves led well beyond the text we are reading. We may be led to personal associations such as memories of past experiences, of reading or otherwise. We may be led to think of other texts, by the same author or by authors we know influenced him or her, by critics or scholars writing about the text we are reading, or even texts at first glance seemingly unrelated to the one we are reading. We may be led out of the textual world entirely, into feelings and thoughts about the world we live in, about its natural or social dimensions, about the people in it, strangers or loved ones, about the problems, challenges, and joys of living in this world. Reading to live entails affirming the value of following these paths connecting the text to what is outside the text and making permeable the boundary between the text and our reading of it and the world and our living in it.

In this way, finally, reading to live is a fundamentally inventive, creative activity, in which we take the given materials of text, self, and world and treat them slowly, openly, associatively, so as to at once passively and actively generate new relations within and among them, forging in the process new possible ways of being for all three. This creative dimension of reading I consider to be pragmatic. I mean pragmatic in the widest sense of what may be practical. I do not mean that we read narrowly and hurriedly to find solutions to problems presented within or outside the text. Rather, I mean that in the course of reading we widen the field of our possible practical engagements with ourselves in the world; which is to say, we augment our freedom and our joy.

Let me conclude, finally, with a brief description of the organization of the book. In the remaining readings of this book I hope to develop the account I have already offered of these basic issues and of the role that a certain kind of reading that is also a certain way of living can play in responding to those issues. I’ve divided the book into two parts, with four readings in each. These readings are like lessons in the sense that they are occasions in which, in reading, I have learned something about what reading to live can be. They are, in other words, lessons for me, which I want to share with you.

In Part One, I provide a series of four readings of cherished texts that serve three purposes. First, they are examples of reading to live. Second, they elaborate different dimensions of reading to live. Third, they offer an understanding, from the perspective of reading to live, of the texts themselves. I’ve chosen the texts I will be reading primarily because I love them, because they have called me back for rereadings, and because they have equipped me for living at different points in my life. Of course, the list of texts that have worked this way on me is much longer than what you will find in this book. I’ve narrowed that much longer list to these texts because they are a mix of genres, periods, and traditions, from British adolescent fantasy epic to Latin American short story, from 20th century American to 14th century Korean poetry, and because I find that they provide especially rich material for learning to read to live.

The four readings comprising Part Two put the practice of reading to live to the test, in response to one of the most basic facts of our existence: death. Stephen Batchelor encourages his readers to consider the question: “Since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?” Such an emphasis on death may seem to run counter to what we usually think of as conducive to the cultivation of joy, not to mention to Spinoza’s own assertion that “a free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death.”

But the point of such a meditation is not to encourage a morbid and paralyzing preoccupation with our own mortality of the sort Spinoza cautioned against. It is, first of all, to clear space for an appropriately vital placement of death within our mental life. The presupposition behind Batchelor’s injunction to consider this question is that, our refusal to acknowledge the fact of death, affectively and intellectually, makes of our lives a kind of continuous, unconscious flight from death. We become driven by the urge to flee from death, which plunges us erratically into behaviors designed to do little more than keep the thought of death out of our awareness.

Considering death in the way that Batchelor encourages is intended to permit us to transform our relationship to death in order to free us to live our lives affirmatively, from the point of view of productive desire (rather than reactive fear). It offers a path, consistent in my opinion with Spinoza’s, for learning how to let go of death and to cultivate freedom and wisdom. But it is important to emphasize this does not mean that Batchelor believes we can come up with an answer to the question. The point is to awaken a felt-sense of what it means to live a life that will stop. I might say that Part Two of Reading to Live offers a series of examples of reading to live a life that will stop.

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