“Only two people in the history of the world have won all four slams and a gold medal-you and Steffi Graf. “It’s destiny,” his coach, Brad Gilbert, had predicted about their marriage at a time, just after Agassi won his first French Open in 1999, when Graf would hardly speak with him. He calls her Stefanie, another child prodigy of an impossible tennis father-Steffi Graf. By memoir’s end, the tennis player has finally solved the riddle, opening a model charter school in the worst part of Las Vegas, his hometown, for disadvantaged children to receive the education he never had but always wanted, and settling down with the woman he had dreamed of years before when she was, not just for her opponents but also for him, unconquerable. The sight of the picture is among several uncanny details in a book in which Agassi’s life unfolds almost like a tale preordained, a clue-strewn riddle of self-discovery laid before him, decades in the unraveling. The analogy is what’s important: Agassi’s father, burdensome and grasping, hanging on the shoulders of Agassi, who, vulnerable, exposed, bears the impossible weight of expectations. The painting is not Italian but French, not Renaissance but Romantic it is Anne-Louis Girodet’s Scene of the Flood, from 1806. With his other arm he clutches a woman holding two infants over a chasm while an old man, “perhaps his father,” Agassi conjectures, clings to the young man’s neck, clasping “a sack of what looks like money.” Wandering through the Louvre after losing his first French Open, Andre Agassi was dumbstruck, he recalls in his memoir, by “a painting from the Italian Renaissance” of “a young man, naked, standing on a cliff.” The man hugs a tree limb with one arm. Andre Agassi and Roger Federer at the 2005 US Open, just after Federer defeated Agassi in the men’s final

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