Andre Agassi seeks balance in post-career – 09/16/2024 – Sports

Eight-time Grand Slam champion Andre Agassi hasn’t had many conversations like this in the last 14 years. He’s mostly been at home in Las Vegas, so you have a few questions for him on a late summer afternoon. 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, perhaps the most honest sports autobiography ever written, in which he told everyone how he hated tennis for so long — no matter how much he also loved parts of it.

The SUV slows down. Traffic in the Midtown Tunnel is congested. There are red brake lights as far as the eye can see.

“Sports can teach you a lot, but they can also hurt you a lot,” Agassi said. Coming from him, given all we know about the agony of ecstasy in sports that nearly turned him into an addict, it sounds like gospel.

With Agassi, it was always about the eyes, those little dark almonds. Early in his career, the long, bleached hair and acid-washed denim shorts were distracting, but the hair disappeared pretty quickly.

Agassi shaved his head, letting everyone see how his eyes conveyed the emotions he brought to the tennis court. The joy, the sadness, the annoyance, the frustration, the anger.

His eyes were also the superpower in his hand-eye coordination. They saw the game much faster than anyone else, seemingly allowing him to jump after a ball before it had even left an opponent’s racket. Reading the ball’s speed, spin, and trajectory, he would return it so early that opponents felt as if it was coming back to them before they had even finished their swing.

Agassi’s eyes caught Boris Becker’s famous serve signal from nearly 10 feet away, helping him to a 10-4 record against the German who could have been a foe. As Becker’s serve soared into the air, his tongue curled to the side, indicating the path of the serve that was about to descend.

Now those eyes are staring at you from two feet away in a car with aggressive air conditioning. Squinting thoughtfully, but almost always meeting yours. Do you want to go deep, they ask? Okay. Let’s go deep.

Agassi’s return came without warning. One minute, he’s in the tennis desert of Nevada. The next, he’s at the Australian Open and everywhere else in Uber commercials mocking his notorious mullet. He’s high-fiving corporate big spenders and hyping up the tournament for his friend Craig Tiley, the head of Tennis Australia. He’s basically every other former champion.

Where did this come from?

Justin Gimelstob had been friendly with Agassi, 54, when they were both on the professional circuit 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 path. 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.

Thus began a series of conversations centered on where they were in life. Each had lost a father. Gimelstob was figuring out his next move after a charge of aggravated assault cost him his positions in the tennis business. With Agassi’s children older and the burden of parental responsibility significantly lighter for him and his wife — 22-time Grand Slam champion Steffi Graf — he had the time and desire to dive back into the game.

“I promised my wife two things,” Agassi said. “One, that I wouldn’t be too busy, and two, that I wouldn’t be too bored, because I’m dangerous in both scenarios.”

Now you’re in Manhattan, walking up Third Avenue toward your downtown hotel. Gimelstob is telling you 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-wearing father congratulating himself for not berating his son after a loss. This same father doesn’t realize that celebrating with his son after a victory can be just as damaging. Children absorb what brings joy, or even love, from a father, and what doesn’t.

The lack of it can hurt in a different way than feeling anger or disappointment, but it can cause lasting damage just the same.

He sees players playing scared, getting scared the way he used to.

What scared him? It wasn’t losing. What terrified him was the possibility of self-sabotage, the feeling that he might just give up.

He’s about to get out of the car. You’re saying goodbye, but you’re not really in the moment because you’re trying to remember what you need to remember about this conversation, about this sport, and about Agassi’s willingness and ability to reveal his essential 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 someone else, even though everything about your daily life — from your training to your rest to every other preparation — is, above all, a constant battle with yourself.

“It’s a tortured perfectionist’s activity,” he said then, his eyes closing slightly as he asked the question all players wrestle with until they decide they’ve hit their last ball, the one that contains all the passion and all the sadness.

“How can I get the most out of every controllable thing, without…going over the limit?”