Andre Agassi

The Full Biography

Andre Agassi. Tennis player. The Las Vegas kid who made a comeback look like a second birth.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is hair, denim shorts, and a serve return that looked like an argument. The year might be 1990, or 1999 on the clay in Paris. What the still cannot show is a childhood run like a factory in Las Vegas, a ranking that fell to 141, and a man who built a school so other people’s children would not be worked the way he was.

He was born Andre Kirk Agassi on April 29, 1970, in Las Vegas, the fourth child of Emmanuel “Mike” Agassi, an Olympic boxer from Iran who had boxed for Iran at the 1948 and 1952 Games, and Elizabeth Dudley. The father put a racket in the boy’s hand early and did not treat childhood as a separate country. A ball machine in the backyard. Hours that were not optional. At thirteen the boy was sent to Nick Bollettieri’s academy in Florida, a factory inside a factory, and the image that would sell cameras was already being assembled: hair, neon, a return of serve that took the ball early and sent it back as an argument. He turned professional in 1986, at sixteen. Canon’s “Image Is Everything” campaign said the quiet part out loud. He skipped Wimbledon for years because he thought the place was stuffy. Then he won it, in 1992, in white, over Goran Ivanišević, because the game is bigger than a boycott.

The first act was flash and almosts. He reached the French Open final in 1990 and lost to Andrés Gómez. He reached the U.S. Open final the same year and lost to Pete Sampras, a nineteen-year-old who would become the other American weather. He reached Wimbledon in 1992 and, this time, took the title. He was still, to a stretch of the press, a haircut who could play. The second major arrived in 1994 at Flushing Meadows, as an unseeded player — the first unseeded man to win the U.S. Open in the Open era — over Michael Stich. In January 1995 he won the Australian Open, over Sampras in four, and on April 10, 1995, he reached world No. 1 for the first time. The return was already a climate. The ranking was a confirmation the hair had delayed.

Atlanta, 1996, put a third kind of metal in the case. He won the Olympic singles gold on the hard courts of Stone Mountain, over Sergi Bruguera in the final. With the four majors still incomplete, the gold sat in the file as a different weather: a home Games, a flag, a player who had already been a product and was now a representative. He spent, across the career, 101 weeks at No. 1. He won sixty ATP singles titles. Eight of them were majors. The math is clean. The years under the math were not.

The second act was collapse. In 1997 his ranking fell to 141. He played Challenger events, the minor league, in front of crowds that could not fill a high-school gym. The memoir Open (2009), written with J. R. Moehringer, said the rest out loud: a hairpiece in the years when the image was the product, crystal meth in the year the ranking died, a marriage to Brooke Shields (1997–1999) that was a headline and then a wound, a father, a hate of the sport that had made him. People who only remembered the hair had to reread the career. The book is one of the few athlete memoirs that changed the official story instead of polishing it. The Challenger parking lot is not a footnote. It is the middle of the story.

The third act is the one that lasts. He rebuilt a body and a mind the first fame had used up. He hired Gil Reyes as a strength partner and treated the gym as a second court. In 1999, on the clay in Paris, he beat Andrei Medvedev in the French Open final after losing the first two sets. That title completed the career Grand Slam — Australia, Paris, Wimbledon, New York — on three surfaces. With the 1996 Olympic gold he held the Golden Slam, a room only a handful of men have entered. He won the U.S. Open the same year, over Todd Martin in five. He took the Australian Open again in 2000, 2001, and 2003 — four Australian titles, the last of the eight majors, at thirty-two, on a hard court that had already seen him as a boycott and as a reconstruction. He played Davis Cup for the United States, including the 1990 and 1992 title years, a team weather the individual stills skip. He won the year-end Tennis Masters Cup. He took titles at Miami, at Indian Wells, on hard courts that rewarded the early take. The 2002 and 2004 seasons were a champion playing through a back that had already begun to argue; he reached the U.S. Open finals in 2002 and 2005 and lost both, to Sampras and to Roger Federer, a passing of the American hard-court weather. He retired after the 2006 U.S. Open, in New York, crying on the court he had once treated as a stage, after a loss to Benjamin Becker in the third round. He spoke to the room. The room spoke back. He was thirty-six. He meant the exit.

He married Steffi Graf on October 22, 2001, in Las Vegas, a private ceremony two careers that had been public property made into a household. Their son, Jaden Gil, was born in 2001; their daughter, Jaz Elle, in 2003. They have kept the household quieter than the old ads. Graf is not a trophy spouse. She is a partner who understands the cost of a childhood that was a factory. The school came before the farewell. Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy, a charter school in Las Vegas, opened in 2001, five years before he left the tour, for children the city had already decided to under-serve. The Agassi Foundation had been raising money for education since the 1990s. He has said the point was to give children a childhood that included books. The still in denim cannot show that sentence.

I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.Agassi, in his memoir Open (2009)

The turn is not Wimbledon. The turn is the Challenger parking lot, and the decision to rebuild a body and a mind that the first fame had used up. A complete life holds the hair, the meth, the eight majors, and a Las Vegas campus that does not require a ranking.

Jaden and Jaz have had a father who is a Golden Slam and a man at a school board. Friends from the locker room describe a professional who became, after 1997, first in the gym and last to offer the old flash as a personality. Sampras was the other American weather: the serve, the quiet, fourteen majors. Their rivalry is a civic object that is also a friendship the cameras did not always understand. Agassi won the public’s idea of a journey. Sampras won more of the big ones. A complete file holds both.

The later years

Home is a Nevada and California life run, by design, away from the old noise — Graf, the children, a foundation office, a man who still looks like the returner and no longer has to be the product. He was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2011, first year of eligibility, a Newport afternoon that treated the comeback as the monument and the hair as a preface. He did not use the occasion to reopen a career. He used it to close a file and point at a school. He plays exhibitions when the exhibition is also a friendship or a payroll that feeds the foundation. He does not pretend to miss the locker room. He has said, in the book and after it, that he hated the job and did it at the highest level anyway. That sentence is the remainder the stills cannot move.

The school is the work he loves in these years. The original Agassi Prep campus in West Las Vegas grew into a K–12 charter that the state and the charter boards have argued over, praised, and audited the way public money gets argued over. Graduation rates and college-going numbers are the stats he now quotes instead of aces. He has stayed in the argument. The Foundation has expanded into a larger education network — new campuses, a model he has tried to export, partnerships that treat a tennis name as a door for classrooms. He raises money in rooms that still want the 1990 final and leaves those rooms talking about reading scores. He has said the point was never a statue. The point was a childhood that included books. Las Vegas, the city that had been a factory for him, is the city he has tried to repay in buildings. He has sat with mayors and charter operators and parents who do not care about a Golden Slam. That is the remaining professionalism.

He has not become a weekly booth. He has not become a coach of a stable of teenagers on the tour. He has appeared beside Graf at ceremonies the sport required — Wimbledon nights, Australian nights, a 2010s exhibition circuit that was also a payroll for the foundation. He has hit with his son. He has spoken, when asked, about the meth year and the hairpiece without turning either into a brand. He endorsed rackets and shoes when the endorsement was a check the school could use. He did not pretend the check was the work. Open remains the book athletes are told to read if they want to know what a confession that changes the record looks like. He has not written a second confession. He went home to the school and the household. He is in his fifties. The return of serve is a civic memory. The ranking is a clip. The campus is the life.

There is no death date on this life. There is a present tense: a charter network, a memoir that cannot be unread, eight majors that look different once you know he hated the job, a Golden Slam, a marriage that two public careers made private, and a Las Vegas kid who used the second half of his life to build something that does not require a ranking. What remains is a comeback that was not a slogan. A generation saw the hair. Another read the book. A third walks into a school with his name on the door. All three are him.

After the spotlight moved

It moved to Federer’s Sunday and then to Nadal’s clay and then to Djokovic’s pile, and then it came back every time someone wanted an American journey instead of an American serve. The 1990s rivalry with Sampras still plays on documentary television. Kids who never saw a baseline return take the ball early still use his name when they mean a reconstruction. Las Vegas still claims the boy and the campus. Flushing still claims the unseeded Monday and the 2006 goodbye. Paris still claims the two-sets-down Sunday. Newport has the plaque.

The record book is now a different book. Eight majors is no longer a men’s summit. A Golden Slam is still a room. One hundred and one weeks at No. 1 is still a clerk’s fact. The Challenger year is still the middle. The school is the part the denim still cannot show. He left the tour in 2006 and has not asked to be talked back onto it. He has asked, instead, that the city that worked him as a child might work fewer children that way.

He came out of a Las Vegas backyard, skipped a lawn and then won it, fell to 141, completed a slam on clay, married the other great returner, built a school, and wrote the hate down. If you only remember the hair, you have the still. If you remember the Challenger lot, Paris 1999, Graf, and the campus, you have him.

Portrait: Shinya Suzuki · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

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