Open by Andre Agassi

I was hooked by Open by Andre Agassi from the very beginning, when he says that he hates tennis.

That phrase stayed with me through the entire book. How can one of the best tennis players in history hate tennis?

A big part of the answer is his father. He pushed Andre incredibly hard from childhood because he wanted his son to succeed. He was an immigrant, ambitious, competitive, and wanted his children to win.

This created a tension that I found fascinating. As a parent, you want your children to succeed. You want to push them, teach them discipline, and help them become strong. But you also want to give them freedom to choose their own life. Where is the line?

The whole family story was interesting to me because of this: the relationship between Andre and his father, his mother, his siblings, their ambitions, sacrifices, and desire to win.

The other thing that fascinated me was the mental side of professional sports. At the highest level, everyone is incredibly skilled. And yet you can still lose a match because mentally you cannot hold yourself together. Your legs can tremble. You can become afraid. You can stop fighting at exactly the moment when you need to fight the most.

Open is not really just a book about tennis. For me, it was a book about ambition, family, pressure, winning, and the complicated question of how much of our life we actually choose for ourselves.