With his new book causing a ruckus, former Wimbledon champion and one-time pin-up boy Andre Agassi talks drugs, loves and charity work with 7DAYS - and why he never wants his kids to play tennis

Andre Agassi, winner of eight Grand Slams, has courted controversy for much of his life, but never more so than now.

The publication of his autobiography, ‘Open’, in which he admits snorting the drug crystal meth in 1997 and then lying to the tennis authorities to avoid a ban, has opened up a whole new can of worms.

Speaking from Las Vegas, where he lives with his wife, former tennis champion Steffi Graf, and their kids, Jaden, eight, and six-year-old Jaz, Andre, 39, is unrepentant about his revelations, even though critics have accused him of sending out the wrong messages to children and tarnishing the name of tennis.

“When we deal with the message of drugs to kids, we have to start with the truth,” he says.

“It would be wrong to suggest to a child that a drug doesn’t make you feel good at first and it would be wrong not to communicate the devastation and destruction that it does either. A child needs to be armed to understand the temptations of it.”

All this drug drama will help to sell his book of course - as will the snippets about his love life, anecdotes about his rivalry with other players and details of how he wore a wig in the 1990s (he reckons it may have lost him the French Open because he was so concerned that it would fall off).

It’s been a long and rocky road for the brash kid with the thundering return who became the maverick of Centre Court, a born-again Christian, a player who applauded his opponents’ shots and, at the end, an experienced old hand who bowed to the crowd and could win Grand Slam titles after many of his contemporaries had retired.

From the early days of his mullet hairstyle and teenage groupies to his off-court liaisons with Barbra Streisand, doomed first marriage to actress Brooke Shields and second marriage to German tennis star Steffi Graf, he’s never been far from the headlines.

These days, he spends much of his time at the school in Las Vegas he founded for underprivileged kids.

“This summer 100 per cent of the kids graduated - it was way better than winning a Grand Slam,” he reflects. “Tennis has been a tool for me and has given me a chance to do what is fulfilling in life.”

While tennis and its accompanying lucrative endorsements with Nike and others have given him vast wealth, he says he hated tennis for a long time, and he and Steffi have vowed that their children will not play tennis.

“We just have lived it our whole lives and we know it too well. One of the joys with children is to experience life through their eyes. We’d see the difficulties, the pitfalls and the pain,” he says.

“The truth is, you don’t succeed in this sport unless you give everything to it every day, starting from a very young age.”

Today, he’s metamorphosed from rebel without a cause to mellow family man, although there are days when he’ll go for a run in the desert under the blazing sun to sort out his thoughts. For years he was plagued by a depression, his life teetering between perfectionism and self-destruction.

“I think I am shy. In many ways I spent so many of my early years being who I wasn’t, that rebellious character. I’ve grown more comfortable with myself. A simple life has been very enjoyable to me, working quietly with my school and being with my kids.”

He retired in 2006, at the age of 36, and felt liberated, he says. “I felt like I had finished the race. There was no void, quite the opposite. It’s been very fulfilling to live without some of those dramas. It’s over.”

These days, unless he’s playing in a charity exhibition match, he hardly plays at all, maybe once a month. He still has a bad back from the years of pounding, so he hasn’t taken up another sport.

“People ask if I have a love/hate relationship with tennis and I say, no, I have a hate/love relationship with tennis. No one ever asked me if I wanted to play tennis, let alone make it my life. I didn’t really love the game until I took ownership of my life and made my choice to play the game.”

You have to remember that Agassi was a kid pushed into tennis when he was barely old enough to hold a racket by his violent, obsessive father Mike Agassi, a tough Armenian who represented Iran in boxing at the 1948 and 1952 Olympics before emigrating to the US. He’d put Andre’s three older siblings through the same gruelling scenario, but none of them showed Andre’s potential.

So he would bully, yell, punish and rage at his son day in, day out, dragging out the ‘dragon’, a ball machine he had modified to fire out balls at 110 miles an hour.

“My father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each day, I’ll hit 17,500 balls each week, and at the end of one year I’ll have hit nearly one million balls. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable,” he writes.

Talking about his two-year marriage to actress Brooke Shields Agassi writes that they had nothing in common.

The uneducated hard-hitter from dusty Vegas was like a fish out of water with her thespian friends, while Shields was unable to provide the support he needed on the tennis circuit. She couldn’t take his lengthy moods following the losses, or understand why he couldn’t embrace her world.

Despite his constant self-analysis in ‘Open’, Agassi has retained his sense of humour. Has there has been any particular highlight of his illustrious career?

“Hiding a toupee for all the years I did,” he says without a pause. “I don’t know how anybody can pull that off.”