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SM: Andre Agassi

A mile wide, an inch deep

There is an entire generation which believes that memoirs are only self-serving — for grand revelations, to take potshots, to bring others down, or to just stay mum. The customary pre-release excerpts too hanker on the same things. Not for nothing did the famed sportswriter Gideon Haigh say that “expectations shouldn’t be that high” when maestro Sachin Tendulkar released his autobiography. “Fans don’t care much,” he said. “If one buys the book you make a contribution towards the player and in turn you get a part of him. The book does tell you how relentless his drive was to excel. But he also chose that the best was to leave a lot of things unsaid. It’s a mile wide and an inch deep.”

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Open , Andre Agassi’s autobiography, is both a mile wide and a mile deep. It’s a first-rate sports memoir, full of terrific insights into the game, with vivid descriptions of the moments that matter the most in what is perhaps the loneliest of sports. At the same time, it is, as the New York Times chose to describe it, “one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete”, for it describes a disturbing layer below all the glamour and success which could make every aspiring sportsperson shudder.

“As a child, I knew nothing but success would be accepted,” Agassi told Harvard Business Review . “You have some success, and the world tells you that you should be thrilled. I thought that getting to number one was going to be the moment I made sense of my life. But it left me a little empty, and I spiralled down until something had to change.”

There are revelations, such as “I took crystal meth” and “I always hated tennis”. But as he noted once, “I think I had to learn a lot about myself through the process. There was a lot that even surprised me. Whatever revelations exist, you’ll get to see... But... my hope is that somebody doesn’t just learn more about me, what it is I’ve been through, but somehow through those lessons, they can learn a lot about themselves.”

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Sujit Mukherjee was one of India’s most formidable literary critics. He was a scholarly publisher too. But he was also the man who penned what is easily one of the finest books ever written on cricket: Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer . Mukherjee played all of five matches for Bihar in the 1950s and was worth a total of 79 runs. So, in a way, it is the story of cricket’s subaltern. If one needs a window into the lower tiers of cricket, this book, less than 200 pages, should make it to his or her reading list.