Nothing like a sordid secret to send a star’s autobiography flying off shelves

Agassi’s drug revelations smack of cynical ploy

PARIS — Imagined conversation between literary agent and retired tennis megastar with a dirty secret: “You want to get richer with me?”

“How?”

“With ker-plunk.”

“What the hell’s ker-plunk?”

“A tell-all autobiography.”

“Why do they call it ker-plunk?”

“Because that’s the sound the dollars make as they drop into our bank accounts.”

Should we be surprised that Andre Agassi now tells us, 12 years after the fact, that he snorted crystal meth when his life and tennis were at a low? Absolutely not. You could fill a rehab center with all the top athletes who succumbed over the years to cocaine, weed, alcohol, binge-eating and the rest.

But we are entitled to feel manipulated by the manner in which Agassi’s sordid confessions are being dished out — in tantalizing — even addictive? — little doses that will likely have readers, mugs that they are, heading for stores and hungry for more.

Was that taster good? Now buy the whole dose.

In the same way that Agassi’s assistant Slim cut and readied “a small pile of powder on the coffee table,” choice morsels from “Open: An Autobiography” — on sale Nov. 9, folks! — have been sliced, diced and pushed on us.

“Andre Agassi reveals his drugs shame,” ‘’sensational confession,” the Times of London trumpeted, among four publications that paid for rights to headline-grabbing excerpts.

“Slim is stressed,” read the juiciest part of the Times’ extract. “He says, ‘You want to get high with me? On what? Gack. What the hell’s gack? Crystal meth. Why do they call it gack? Because that’s the sound you make when you’re high … Make you feel like Superman, dude.’”

Get that, kids?

Agassi took crystal meth and still won five more Grand Slams, reclaimed the No. 1 ranking, wed Steffi Graf and tugged heartstrings with his tearful 2006 adieu to pro tennis at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

So either counselors have been overdoing their warnings that crank, ice — call it what you will — is one of the most addictive and ruinous drugs out there. Or, more likely, it’s simply easier to kick the habit when you’re rich enough to hire personal trainers to beat you back into shape and not living in misery with no future beyond your next high.

In short, was Agassi’s drug-taking really worth sharing because it offers a universal and valuable lesson about how mistakes can be corrected? Or, mindful of its potential impact on those who look up to him, should he have kept this to himself?

The Times’ excerpts don’t really allow us to answer those questions. Guess we’ll have to buy the book. Instead, the message that comes across loudest is that crystal meth seems pretty fabulous. Too bad it makes your teeth fall out.

“A tidal wave of euphoria that sweeps away every negative thought in my head. I’ve never felt so alive, so hopeful — and I’ve never felt such energy,” Agassi says.

Perhaps recalling this high was cathartic for Agassi, but lacing his account with a bit more soul-searching might have been more educational.

As International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge noted, “If his admission would go together with the message to young athletes that it should not be repeated, then that would be useful.”

Equally disturbing is Agassi’s revelation that he failed a drug test but escaped sanction by telling a dog-ate-my-homework lie to the ATP that he “drank accidentally” from a beverage that Slim had spiked, “unwittingly ingesting his drugs.”

Question for those who run tennis: How many other stars were let off the hook like this? If Agassi, by then a three-time Grand Slam winner, hadn’t been such a crowd-pleaser, would he have been punished?

The year Agassi snorted was also the first to see a tennis player suspended for drug use. But who had ever heard of Ignacio Truyol of Spain, ranked No. 127 and convicted for a steroid and a stimulant?

Given retired players’ subsequent autobiographical confessions about how they toked and sniffed, it now seems a glaring failure that the sport didn’t clean house as vigorously as Agassi says he did on meth’s high, tearing around dusting his furniture, scouring his tub and making his beds.

Bidding among publishers competing for Agassi’s memoir reportedly topped $5 million — more in line with what a former U.S. president might expect — when Alfred A. Knopf acquired the rights in 2007.

“White House money,” a rival publisher, David Hirshey of HarperCollins, said at the time.

Now drip-drip-dripped excerpts are creating pre-sale buzz.

Maybe money from the book will go to one of Agassi’s philanthropic endeavors. Having earned more than $31 million in career prize money, perhaps cash wasn’t his motivation for this at all.

But if not, then, as with drugs, don’t be taken in.

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John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org