When was the last time you read a sports biography that wasn't completely narcissistic? When was the last time you read any biography and laughed out loud--repeatedly? And most important, when was the last time you found a book that you simply could not put down? Open is the best sports biography I've ever read. By light years. It makes "autobiographies" like Charles Barkley's Outrageous! (which Barkley famously claimed he never read) seem puerile, and it makes relatively intelligent books like Kareem Abdul Jabbar's Giant Steps or Vince: A Personal Biography of Vince Lombardi seem pale and pointless by comparison. I was able to put those books down. Not Agassi's. Why do I read biographies? To learn lessons from other peoples' lives that I can apply to my own. To learn behavior I can model--or avoid. To understand the struggles and challenges of another person's life and use that understanding to help cope with the struggles and challenges of my
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