FORMER Wimbledon champion Andre Agassi, one-time pin-up boy of tennis and 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.

All the brouhaha over the drugs, however, will no doubt help to sell his book, along with 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).

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.

‘‘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.

Hannah Stephenson