There has just been released a book that every parent of every athlete should read. Then the athletes ought to read it, and then they should give it to their favorite uncle, whose kids aren’t athletes, so after he reads it he can hand it down to those kids.

I am talking about the new autobiography by one of the greatest tennis players who ever lived. Andre Agassi, who won eight Slams tournaments, all four Grand Slams, and even an Olympic Gold Medal, is generally considered by critics and fellow players to be among the greatest tennis players of all time. Nobody who has ever played was better at returning a serve.

So when he repeatedly writes in his new book, “Open,” how much he hates the sport he once dominated, perhaps it is cause for those who have adored watching him play yet scorned him for his ear ring, his ratty appearance, and his stormy journey to the top of the game, should also listen to what he now has to say.

You may have already noticed where, when the very first galleys were made public, he freely admits he used one of the worst drugs imaginable – crystal meth – during the 1997 season and, when he was married briefly to actress Brooke Shields, he wrote why it was doomed from the start: “I have a thought no man should have on his wedding day; I wish I were leaving, too. I wish I had a decoy groom to take my place.”

What? Are you kidding me? Brooke Shields? Crystal meth? I haven’t yet read the book, but the other day I read a marvelous review in the Los Angeles Times where David Davis, who has read its every word, called it “a wrenching chronicle of (Agassi’s) lifelong search for identity and serenity, on and off the court.”

Andre’s dad, we have long ago learned, was a horribly-overbearing parent. While you never heard of one of those, I saw dozens during my years as a sports writer, and I cannot remember an instance where either the parent or the child ever seemed to overcome it.

An over-zealous parent is best seen in individual sports like tennis, golf and swimming rather than in “team play,” but the book tells us that Mike Agassi, a former boxer from Iran who brought his family to Las Vegas when Andre was just a small kid, failed with three older Agassis until Andre, the youngest, came along.

“No one ever asked me if I wanted to play tennis. What I want is not relevant,” he wrote, detailing how his demanding father would make him spend hour after hour in front of a ball machine. His voice is one of anguish, the tone just like basketball great Pete Maravich used when, after his career, he would recall his father making him dribble a basketball outside the car window as the automobile increased its speed.

Agassi , when he was just in the seventh grade, was shipped to the famed Nick Bollettieri tennis academy in Florida and now calls the experience hellish, likening the place to a “glorified prison camp” because – to be blunt – even then he hated tennis.

The trouble was that Andre hid his feelings. Yes, he once added frosted highlights to his hair and played “commando style” (which means without underwear). Further, in his climb to becoming the best player in the world he was a “whiner,” losing matches he shouldn’t have and giving every excuse in the world.

In his confessional of a book, Agassi admits he even lost on purpose. He tanked matches. Don’t you get it? He hated tennis but was a pawn, a chess piece, a “tool” used by others to rule the game. It hardly takes a psychiatrist to understand the “meth,” the bitterness, the pain.

When he finally married Steffi Graf, the German who won 22 Grand Slam singles events, it was the marriage made in heaven to an adoring world-wide public. But the book tells the two share a heavy bond. Steffi’s just-as-zealous dad, upon meeting Andre’s dad the first time, immediately got into an argument with the elder Agassi on tennis technique and the two had to be separated before they went to “fist city” together.

You know why Andre and Steffi have such a great marriage today? We are led to believe it is because both were – to be blunt about it – abused during what should have been their happiest adolescent years. Is the message sinking in at all? Here we have one of the greatest tennis players of all time telling us what we saw wasn’t what he had hoped we were really supposed to see. “In tennis you are an island. It is the loneliest sport.”

Andre retired in 2006 and today has financed a “charter school” for children of low-income families in Las Vegas. As a high school dropout at age 14 (read, “Bollettieri Tennis Academy”) he has changed his mantra from “What do I have to do to be No. 1?” to “What can I do for others?”

Better than that, in his heart-breaking book review, David Davis senses that Andre Agassi is finally healing, ever so slowly and ever so gently, from the days he took crystal meth and still ruled the game of tennis. He’s even mellowing about the sport that was cruelly stolen from him as a toddler in front of a relentless ball machine.

So he leaves us with a lesson in the book that every zealous parent, and every child who will never quite please them, must read and next week, at Thanksgiving, we will remember Andre Agassi’s courage and forthright honesty to share the truth in a way that maybe the next sports phenom who comes will actually “enjoy the ride.”

royexum@aol.com