Eight-time Grand Slam tournament champion Andre Agassi
Reuters File Photo
New York: Andre Agassi, an eight-time Grand Slam tournament champion, has not had many conversations like this one in the past 14 years. He has mostly been at home in Las Vegas, so you have some questions for him on a late afternoon in late summer. Where has he been all this time? What brings him back to New York?
There was that book called Open with his name on the cover, maybe the most honest sports autobiography written, in which he told everyone how he hated tennis for so long — no matter how much he loved parts of it, too.
The SUV slows. The Midtown Tunnel traffic is backing up. There are red brake lights as far as the eye can see.
"Sports can teach you a lot, but they can also hurt a lot," Agassi said. Coming from him, given everything we know about the agony of ecstasy in the sport that very nearly turned him into an addict, it feels like the gospel.
With Agassi, it has always been about the eyes, those small, dark almonds. Early in his career, the long, frosted hair and acid-washed jean shorts distracted from them, but the hair went pretty quickly.
Agassi shaved his head, letting everybody see how his eyes trafficked the emotions that he brought to the tennis court. The joy, the sadness, the annoyance, the frustration, the anger.
His eyes were also the superpower in his eye-hand coordination. They saw the game so much more quickly than everyone else, seemingly allowing him to jump after a ball before it had left an opponent's racket. Reading the ball's speed, its spin and its trajectory, he would return it so early that opponents felt like it was coming back at them before they had finished their follow-through.
Agassi's eyes caught Boris Becker's famous serve tell from 90 feet away, helping him to a 10-4 record against the German, who could have been a nemesis. As Becker's toss was rising into the air, his tongue would curl out to the side, pointing the way of the serve that was about to come down.
Now, those eyes are looking at you from 2 feet away in an aggressively air-conditioned car. Squinting with consideration, but almost always meeting yours. You want to go deep, they ask? OK. Let's go deep.
Agassi's reentry came without warning. One minute, he is in the tennis wilderness in Nevada. The next, he is at the Australian Open and all over screens in Uber commercials mocking his notorious mullet. He is glad-handing corporate big spenders and pumping up the tournament for his friend Craig Tiley, the head of Tennis Australia. He is basically every other former champion.
Where did this come from?
Justin Gimelstob had been friendly with Agassi, 54, when they were both on the pro tour in the early 2000s. Then they barely spoke for years, until Gimelstob, 47, reached out with some questions about youth baseball in 2022. His son was heading down that road. Agassi's son, Jaden, was playing at the University of Southern California.
Gimelstob wanted to know what the road ahead looked like. Come to a game, Agassi said. We can talk.
So began a series of conversations centered on where they both were in life. Each had lost his father. Gimelstob was figuring out his next move after a felony battery charge had cost him his positions in the tennis business. With Agassi's children older and the parenting load significantly lighter for him and his wife -- 22-time Grand Slam singles champion Steffi Graf -- he had the time and desire to dip his toe back into the game.
"I promised my wife two things," Agassi said. "One, that I wouldn't be too busy, and two, I wouldn't be too bored, because I'm dangerous in both scenarios."
Gimelstob asked if he could make some calls on Agassi's behalf to see what might be out there. Agassi had messy confrontations with a former business manager, Perry Rogers, who ended up suing Graf. Maybe going in with a friend like Gimelstob was the way forward.
"I've traveled the world with Andre and seen what he means to people," Gimelstob said. "I knew the market would be there for an iconic star who meant so much."
The Uber deal for the Australian Open, which Agassi won four times, was just the start. He has gone deep into pickleball, signing a deal with Joola for a line of paddles and clothes. Agassi has become a much-sought-after corporate speaker, especially with the financial companies that sponsor tennis, and there are discussions about giving "Open" some sort of movie treatment.
"People want to connect with him and his story," Gimelstob said.
On the tennis side, Agassi has signed on to succeed John McEnroe as the captain of Team World in the Laver Cup.
"I'm curious about it," he said.
Age, time away and raising a son who plays baseball and a daughter who dances have helped Agassi reach this point. The thing about tennis is by the time you understand it, you are unemployed.
Agassi's return is a revelation because he sees things in a way so few others do.
You are into Manhattan now, crawling up Third Avenue toward his midtown hotel. Gimelstob is telling him where he's going and whose hands he has to shake. You want to hear a little more about what he sees.
He sees the tennis parent patting himself on the back for not getting on his child after a loss. That same parent does not realize that celebrating with his child after a win can be just as damaging. Children absorb what brings a parent joy, or even love, and what does not.
The absence of that may hurt in a different way than feeling the brunt of anger or disappointment, but it can cause lasting damage all the same.
He sees players playing out of fear, scaring themselves the way he used to.
What scared him? It was not losing. What terrified him was the possibility of self-sabotage, the feeling that he just might quit.
"I always felt like that was looming," he said, as it almost always is when you are doing something hard.
He knows the look of a player who feels that terror, players for whom winning brings mostly relief. You throw out some well-known names prone to easily observable sadness and frustration on the court. He does not disagree.
He is about to step out of the car. You are saying goodbye, but you are not really in the moment because you are trying to remember what you need to remember about this conversation, about this sport and about Agassi's willingness and ability to render its core truths.
It goes back to an hour ago in Queens when he talked about the contradiction at the heart of tennis. You are always judged against somebody else, even if everything about your daily life -- from your training to your rest and every other preparation -- is, most of all, a constant battle with yourself.
"It's a tortured perfectionist's kind of activity," he said then, his eyes closing slightly as he posed the question that all players wrestle with until they decide they have struck their final ball, the one that holds all the passion and all the grief.
"How do I get the most out of every controllable, without without stepping over the cliff?"
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.