Rivalry in Love and Sport

File under Mind/Body, here is Michael Kimmelman's very good review of a couple of books about tennis that are really about so much more. 

"Finally, Agassi comes to love tennis, which had been a life forced on him, but now had given him a wife and, with the school, something to play for other than just himself or his father’s approval. “From punk to paragon” is how Bud Collins, the tennis commentator, described Agassi’s public transformation—the pigeon-toed teen brat in stone-washed denims, gambler’s shades, and a Mohawk who becomes a philanthropist, philosopher, and statesman. “To my thinking,” Agassi writes,

Bud sacrificed the truth on the altar of alliteration. I was never a punk, any more than I’m now a paragon…. Transformation is change from one thing to another, but I started as nothing…. I was like most kids: I didn’t know who I was, and I rebelled at being told by older people…. What people see now, for better or worse, is my first formation, my first incarnation. I didn’t alter my image, I discovered it.

Which is the (albeit convenient) parable of this remarkable and quite unexpected volume, one that sails well past its homiletic genre into the realm of literature, a memoir whose success clearly owes not a little to a reader’s surprise in discovering that a celebrity one may have presumed to know on the basis of that haircut and a few television commercials hawking cameras via the slogan “image is everything” emerges as a man of parts—self-aware, black-humored, eloquent."

Read the full article in the New York Review of Books