Open

"I think Open is one of the best sport autobiographies I have ever read. It is obviously very interesting to find out about him taking recreational drugs and the effect it had on him. There was quite a bit of discussion within the tennis administration about stripping him of some of his titles because of that confession, and then they buried it under the carpet and moved on. But I think it was a very interesting confession to make so many years after the incident had happened. He was on crystal meth which is not a performance-enhancing drug but more for recreation. But even then, because it is not accepted within sport and especially in tennis, there was a lot of controversy around it. And I thought it was bold of him to talk about it. There is another very interesting incident that he narrates in Open and that is his memory of a match he played when he was 13 or 14 against the American player Jeff Tarango who was a talented junior at the time, and he talks about how Tarango cheated in the game and how it shattered him as a boy. He carried that kind of grudge against Tarango all through his adult life. Well in those days during the junior matches, even if it was a fairly serious competition, there were no umpires or linesmen. Instead they relied on each other to call the balls out. Agassi mentions a critical final when Tarango called an obviously in ball out. Agassi was so taken aback that he lost the match. I think it is really ambiguous because it depends on who you support in a way. With most sports you react to opponents and people. In those kinds of situations you are not only up against your opponent but you are also playing against the rules. You are testing the limits of them to see how far you can get. That is what makes this discussion on sportsmanship and cheating very interesting. I think that the halo that surrounds sportsmanship is a bit of a construct and it is also an imperial construct. The whole idea of sportsmanship started off in the middle of the 19th century and was in its prime until the early 20th century which was the peak of the Empire in a way. That is the time that all the rules of the sports were formulated in cricket, tennis and golf. A lot of other things were going on like the Bodyline series in cricket which again brings up this huge question about the role of sportsmanship in a game. A lot of these games came out of British public schools. The idea of sportsmanship is, as I said, very much a colonial construct which has always been contested by the colonised in many ways. The reason I mentioned my next book, The Tao of Cricket , is because Nandy shows the rise of Prince Ranjitsinhji, the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, against the backdrop of the Empire. He looks at why this Indian prince made such progress within what was the rigid society in England in the early 20th century in terms of race, class and colour of skin."