#411 Tortured Into Greatness: The Life of Andre Agassi
2/4/20261 hr 1 min
Andre Agassi's autobiography is a brutally honest story about a tennis legend who hated the game that made him famous. Agassi traces his journey from a harsh, obsessive childhood training regimen to superstardom, burnout, rebellion, and eventual redemption—revealing the psychological cost of greatness, the search for identity beyond winning, and how he ultimately found purpose on his own terms.
This book was as good as everyone says it is. You should read it.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDavid Senra· Host0:00
I open my eyes, and I don't know where I am or who I am. Not all that unusual. I've spent half my life not knowing. Still, this feels different. This confusion is more frightening, more total. I look up. I'm lying on the floor beside the bed. I remember now. I moved from the bed to the floor in the middle of the night. I do that most nights. Better for my back. I count to three, then start the long, difficult process of standing. With a cough, a groan, I roll onto my side, then curl into the fetal position, then flip over onto my stomach. I'm a young man, relatively speaking, thirty-six, but I wake as if I'm ninety-six. After three decades of sprinting, stopping on a dime, jumping high, and landing hard, my body no longer feels like my body, especially in the morning. Consequently, my mind doesn't feel like my mind. Upon opening my eyes, I'm a stranger to myself. I run quickly through the basic facts. My name is Andre Agassi. My wife's name is Steffi Graf. We have two children, a son and a daughter, five and three. We live in Las Vegas, Nevada, but currently reside in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City because I'm playing in the two thousand and six US Open, my last US Open. In fact, my last tournament ever. I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion