Focus on the man Agassi has become

Johnette Howard

If you think about the coarse and hoary tradition of tell-all sports books, Andre Agassi’s just-released autobiography isn’t all that explosive or unusual — not even his disappointing admission that he used crystal meth for much of 1997.

Sordid confessional tales about the stinking, lying, drugging, cheating, hell-raising things our sports stars do, and the occasionally petty, bitter, phony, oversexed behavior some of them indulge in has long been a vibrant genre in publishing. (Profitable too!) Jim Bouton’s 1970 book “Ball Four”, which was a frank look at what goes on behind the curtain in professional baseball, pretty much started it all.

Since then, sports books are the place where former Yankee Fritz Peterson explained wife swapping to us, David (“Perfect I’m Not”) Wells claimed to have pitched a no-hitter while still drunk, Dennis Rodman confided he really digs cross-dressing and Wilt Chamberlain fabulously boasted that he had sex with 20,000 women, roughly 19,987 of whom gentleman Wilt gallantly left unnamed. Pete Rose finally described his gambling on baseball in a sports book. Magic Johnson rambled on a bit too enthusiastically about the sexual escapades that preceded his diagnosis with HIV, and NFL great Lawrence Taylor, well, he’s pretty much copped to nearly everything.

All of them took heat. So why should Agassi be any different?

And yet, judging from the quavering, occasionally defensive voice that Agassi has lapsed into during some publicity stops for his autobiography, Agassi is surprised or stung by the backlash he’s caused.

Agassi worked two years on this 383-page autobiography and intended it to be a personal catharsis.

What a comedown to find some people preferred the lie he was living better than the confessional he’s presented us with now. Agassi was more universally liked when fans and peers still saw him as some long-lashed plush toy they just wanted to hug.

He cried real tears on-court. He blew kisses to crowds. His second marriage, to fellow tennis great Steffi Graf, has a storybook quality. Near the end of his career, he endeared himself to the public even more by showing up at press conferences with a “Daddy Rocks” necklace that one of their two children made for him. He’s raised $85 million and created a wonderful charter school for at-risk kids in his hometown of Las Vegas.

Since releasing the book, Agassi has gotten applause for his candor (but, let’s check back in at his school’s next PTA meeting.) But he’s also been catching heat from peers like Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Martina Navratilova and Russian star Marat Safin, who just said on Monday that Agassi should give back all his prize money and titles, every last shiny nickel of it — which sounds over the top until you consider Agassi’s flaws are particularly unwelcome in a sport that’s often been a particularly fertile ground for shocks and scandals. Some very recent. Some not.

After all, it’s tennis that gave us that weird mutation known as the Tennis Parent from Hell, and its self-loathing offspring, the Tennis Brat.

John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, and Jennifer Capriati are just a few of the big-name tennis players who admitted to cocaine or crack use long before Agassi came clean about using meth, and Boris Becker, who confessed to abusing sleeping pills and alcohol, wrote in his autobiography that he once considered suicide.

More recently, tennis has also had a spate of gambling investigations. Just two months ago, we also had the spectacle of top-ranked Serena Williams threatening to cram a ball down the throat of a U.S. Open lineswoman while using language that wasn’t all that different from the obscenities Connors or Nastase used once upon a time. Williams’ outburst was just treated that way. Because this time it came from someone in a skirt. Oh dear.

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