Casual
Casual Andre the Giant With last weekend's finale of the U.S. Open, Andre Agassi's farewell tour is now complete. It's easy to love sports, but hard to love athletes. Agassi was the rarest of...
...When success did come, it was at the expense of happiness...
...Baby Agassi had a tennis ball dangling from a string above his crib...
...The rock star gave way to the man, power-walking from point to point, eyes down, shoulders squared...
...Agassi's ranking dropped to 141 in the world...
...He did everything except win championships...
...Jonathan V Last...
...He became a parody of the spoiled, underachieving professional athlete...
...They had children...
...This, then, was the tragedy of Andre Agassi: He was too callow to succeed when success would have been easiest...
...I think I was putting the rightful amount in my marriage, not too much," he whispered...
...He was a grinder...
...Agassi was the rarest of breeds: an athlete worth admiring and loving...
...Agassi was reborn...
...Just keep fighting and maybe something good happens...
...In 1992, a diminished Agassi played his way into the final at Wimbledon, where he faced the fireballing Goran Ivanisevic...
...Then he married Brooke Shields and virtually disappeared from tennis...
...In 1990, he was dismantled in the final of the U.S...
...once he could sit, his father taped a paddle to his hand and tossed balloons to him, to encourage his hand-eye coordination...
...Two years later, Agassi erupted into tennis, advancing to the semifinals of the U.S...
...I don't have the answers, I don't pretend that I do just because I won the match," he replied...
...He acquired an entourage and a reputation for being an insufferable creep...
...The Agassi of rock 'n' roll tennis is long gone...
...His booming groundstrokes were like broadsides from a battleship, but his crossover appeal made young Agassi more rock star than athlete...
...His father is an unpleasant man who treated his son like a laboratory experiment...
...It was what I chose...
...The world of sports is filled with men who become corrupted...
...He is bald now, and a born-again Christian (although you'll never hear him talk about his faith...
...Open by an unheralded teenager named Pete Sampras...
...instead Agassi was redeemed...
...He sported long, bleached hair and wore acid-washed denim shorts...
...His father telephoned him to tell him he should have won in four...
...And with his success came the awareness of how little it meant...
...Open, Agassi came back to beat a young, powerful James Blake after dropping the first two sets...
...His story shows that it's never too late for a change of heart...
...Only when Shields left him did he return to the game in earnest...
...Agassi was one of the five best players in the history of the game and had as much God-given talent as anyone who's ever played, but he wasn't a fluid, effortless player...
...Agassi would begin to melt away...
...In the press conference afterwards, he was asked how he turned the match around...
...While other young Americans, such as Michael Chang and Jim Courier, emerged and won major tournaments, Agassi signed endorsement deals, dated Barbra Streisand, and publicly talked about shaving his body hair...
...It was what I wanted...
...For three years, he was all but retired...
...He was a fundamentally tragic figure...
...Sampras would go on to become the game's greatest player...
...Within months of the divorce, he captured his first U.S...
...In the quarterfinals of the 2005 U.S...
...Agassi, who was supposed to be the future of American tennis, choked in one Grand Slam final after another...
...We're not accustomed to seeing genuine pain on television, so Agassi's subdued response was shocking: "No...
...For a four-year stretch, he finally made good on his teenage promise, winning two jij other Grand Slam titles and emerging as Sampras's foil...
...At the age of 13, he was shipped from his home in Las Vegas to a tennis academy in Florida...
...And at the age of 29, past the moment when most successful players call it quits, Agassi started his third tennis life, winning five more Grand Slam tournaments and becoming only the fifth man ever to win all four majors...
...A heavy underdog, Agassi won in a marathon five sets...
...In the end, it was this tenacity that made the difference, both on and off the court...
...Afterwards, an interviewer asked Agassi why he had fallen so far: Was he putting too much focus on his marriage...
...They got married...
...By 1992, he was a cautionary tale—or a joke...
...He turned professional at 16...
...A gassi began dating Steffi Graf, the greatest woman player of all time...
...He appeared in commercials with the Red Hot Chili Peppers promoting "rock 'n' roll tennis...
Vol. 12 • September 2006 • No. 1
