preview

Andre Agassi Relationship

Decent Essays

Open

Family relationships are not always easy. You have grown up in a different generation and a different world than your parents did, and your grandparents did, and therefore it can be difficult to understand one another. This is a problem that the tennis player Andre Agassi in his childhood has experienced and writes about in this extract from his autobiography “Open” from 2009.

He begins his autobiography with the lines “My father’s mother lives with us. She’s a nasty old lady from Tehran with a wart on the size of a walnut on the edge of her nose”. Already here his relationship with his grandmother has been established as problematic, as the first thing we must know about her is her walnut sized wart. He sees his grandma’s only purpose …show more content…

This was the way his father was taught how to fight, although his true compassion was tennis. Since no one else in Iran played tennis, he had no one to compete with, and therefore he pressured Andre Agassi to play, although it may not have been what he wanted to accomplish with his life “She should tell him to back off, ease up, that tennis isn’t life”. His relationship to his father is troubled as well – he even nicknamed the father “the dragon”. His favorite family member is his uncle Isar whom he has heard about all his life, but first meets after Isar has escaped from Iran. In appearance, his father and uncle are identical, but to Andre Agassi is their behavior the exact opposite of each other “My father is shrill and stern and filled with rage. Uncle Isar is soft-spoken and patient and funny”. His uncle helps him with his homework and will gladly explain it to him as much as needed, whereas his father would lose his temper if Andre Agassi did not understand it after the first explanation. Uncle Isar’s calm speaks to Andre Agassi, who finds it hard to understand his father’s rage. His relationship with his siblings is not mentioned in this extract, but in the end of the extract he comments on his mother. She again is a

Get Access