Andre Agassi’s memoir Open: An Autobiography will release November 9 from Random House. An employee at Sports Illustrated magazine revealed Tuesday on Twitter one of the most explosive confessions in Open. He tweeted, “Book excerpt from Andre Agassi in the forthcoming SI: He admits to taking crystal meth during his career”.
By the time the employee deleted the tweet, he already had caused a media storm. The director of media relations at Random House’s Knopt imprint came forward to confirm that “Those excerpts [appearing in Sports Illustrated] contain revelations about Andre’s use of crystal meth when he was a tennis player.”
It’s said the world’s former number-one tennis player used meth in 1997, which is the same year he married actress Brooke Shields. During their marriage the couple had severe run-ins with tabloids that have been speculated to lead to the demise of their relationship. They divorced in 1999.
Random House’s teasers for Open suggest that Agassi never wanted to play tennis, that tennis camps felt like prison camps to him, that his (weird) relationship with Barbra Streisand was rocky, and that his marriage to Brooke Shields was “doomed.” Based on advance marketing material, it sounds as though Agassi will credit now-wife Steffi Graf, whom he married in 2001, with his personal turnaround.
