In Andre Agassi’s autobiography Open, Agassi uses his personal
experiences to express the positive and negative effects professional tennis
can have on a person. Andre Agassi spent his whole life playing tennis and as
he grew up it became evident that he would play tennis as his career. Agassi
did very well as a professional tennis player; he won many major tournaments
like Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. However, as he continued to play tennis there
were many injuries he faced. Being a professional tennis player is rigorous,
for Agassi, he struggled with constant back pain as he continuously tried to
win a title at a tennis tournament. This extreme pain led to Agassi’s
retirement.
The
rhetorical devices used in Agassi’s book are his appeal to ethos and pathos.
Agassi makes it clear to his audience how much tennis impacted his life. Not
only was it a sport he grew up despising but it created many physical injuries.
Due to a wrist and back injury, he had to slow down his rate of playing matches
which dropped him from number one to 141st in the world. It took him
an entire year of physically demanding exercises to become one of the best
tennis players in the world again when he reached number sixth in the world. Agassi
appeals to ethos because he has experienced what it was like to be a
professional tennis player and he uses his personal experience to show the audience
the physical, and mental demands playing tennis professionally has on a person.
In this autobiography, Agassi’s
audience is able to relate to the injuries Agassi sustained and the demands tennis
has had on his life. The audience was to inform tennis players who have watched
Agassi play on the court what Agassi really went through to be the number one
tennis player in the world. Agassi wants his audience to know how much work it
really took to keep a toned body and a healthy relationship with people outside
of tennis. I believe that Andre Agassi proves his purpose because he uses
experiences that had a great impact on him to successfully prove the effect
tennis has on people.
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