Summary

“Open” by Andre Agassi tells the story of eight-year-old Andre, who lives in Las Vegas with his parents, his siblings, and his grandmother. He considers his grandmother to be a nasty woman, who has been nagging Andre’s father, Mike (Emmanuel), all her life. She is also a nuisance for all the other members of the family.

However, the grandmother helps Andre find out more about his father’s past. Through his grandmother’s stories, he finds out that the family was very poor when they were living in Tehran.

His father discovered tennis through American and British soldiers who were stationed in Iran after the World War II. Mike acted as a ball boy for them and took care of the improvised court. However, he couldn’t practice tennis with anyone in Iran so he became a boxer. He participated in two Olympic Games but did not perform very well.

After that, Mike decided to leave Iran. He used a false passport to emigrate to the US. In the US, he worked as a lift boy and continued to practice boxing with his coach, Tony Zale. The coach always pushed the man to be more violent and hit harder.

Mike’s fighting strategy was to counterattack the opponent’s best technique and this is what he teaches young ...