Monday, August 07, 2000
Agassi's comeback secret? Hard work
Player wants 'no regrets' in career
By Michael Perry
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Andre Agassi is the No. 1 seed here this week.
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It is 320 yards up the hill Andre Agassi calls “Magic Mountain” on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The desert is on one side, a gated community on the other.
It's Christmas Eve 1999,38 degrees. Following two hours in the weight room, Agassi sprints up Magic Mountain 14 times. As cars pass by, people on the way to holiday dinners, Agassi is sweating, his lungs burning. There's a look of pain in his eyes.
Even Gil Reyes, Agassi's personal trainer since 1990 and the only other person present, wonders what's driving this man.
“I actually stopped him to ask: "What's making you go?'” Reyes said.
“He said, "Gil, it's just something inside. This is my time. If I don't do it now, I'll regret it so much. That's what it's all about, eh, Gil? No regrets?'”
Agassi is one of the favorites in the Tennis Master Series Cincinnati event, which starts today at the ATP Tennis Center in Masson. He has climbed back to the top of the tennis world with hard work. Plain and simple.
“He's thought of as more flash, but I think of him more as workmanlike,” his coach Brad Gilbert said. “He's a little blue-collar. He's got that hard-hat, lunch-pail attitude. When he's committed, he's awesome to work with.”
Of course, that has not always been the case.
Agassi has been aboard one of the greatest roller-coaster rides in the history of sports. He was the No.1-ranked player in the world in April 1995. By November 1997, Agassi had fallen to No.141, only to return 19 months later to the top ranking. He is the No.1 seed here. Agassi finished the 1999 season ranked No.1 and in the past 14 months appeared in the finals of four consecutive Grand Slams (1999 French, Wimbledon, U.S. Open, 2000 Australian Open), winning three of those. Agassi is one of only five men to win all four Grand Slam events in his career.
“It's been a great journey, an incredible accomplishment and an incredible fulfillment for me,” he said.
“I feel like the greatest lesson over this last year has probably been along the lines of just feeling more prepared to take in and appreciate every day. Life feels more valuable to me now than it did a year ago — because I have a year less.”
At 30, he is in the best physical condition of his career, tougher physically and mentally. He is fresher, faster, more energetic.
Consider Magic Mountain.
“That's the difference in Andre now,” Reyes said. “The obstacles are not impossibilities anymore. Andre has told me so many times, he used to be afraid of fear, but now he realizes that the more scared he gets, the harder he's going to fight. Now it's all business.”
Agassi called upon his strength and conditioning one month after that Dec. 24 workout, coming back after losing the first set to defeat Yevgeny Kafelnikov in the finals of the Australian Open.
Agassi's resume includes an Olympic gold medal, a Davis Cup championship, six Grand Slams and 10 Tennis Masters Series titles, including two in Cincinnati (1996, 1995).
“The times he has slipped in the rankings, I never once sensed that he had lost it as an athlete and that he didn't care about his career as a professional athlete,” Reyes said. “I always felt that he disconnected for a time to pursue and address his personal life, the things that really, really matter.”
Agassi admits he fell off the tennis map for a while. He was in search of better balance in his life and found it with actress Brooke Shields, whom he married in April 1997.
His commitment to tennis waned, and his ranking plummeted. Agassi finished in the top 10 eight of nine years from 1988-96, but finished '97 at No.121.
He was criticized for wasting prime years as an athlete and for shunning his responsibility to tennis. He has been perhaps the sport's top drawing card for more than a decade. “I've always had mixed emotions about my responsibility to tennis, because I question my responsibility to everything,” Agassi said. “The byproduct of my success in the last year has had some encouraging benefits for the sport, and for that I'm thrilled. But that's a byproduct of me responding to the responsibility I feel to myself.”
Agassi does not regret taking time to explore life beyond tennis, but he did not want to regret never finding out how good he could be.
“You want to feel that you hit your best, and I know at that point that I hadn't,” he said. “The first time (at No. 1), it was less personal. The second time ... the challenge of it was so much more intense.
“Coming on the tail of a big transition in my personal life kind of made it more special. I think that just kind of raised the stakes of everything. Going through the divorce ... the questions were all over the place, and knocking those questions down one by one, and fighting your obstacles and battles one by one, it's given me a strength and a peace I am just overwhelmed with.”
Agassi and Shields filed for divorce in April 1999.
Last August, at the U.S. Open, he began a relationship with Steffi Graf, one of the greatest women's players of all-time.
Perry Rogers, Agassi's lawyer, business manager and closest friend, said Graf has been good for Agassi.
“She's one of the most amazing people I've ever met,” he said.
“I have never seen him be this balanced. I wouldn't say it's crucial; I would say it's peaceful. It used to be a bit of an on-off switch with Andre. Now he's become somebody who can go back and forth between a personal life and a professional life with equal excitement and vigor.” Said Agassi: “Balance is daily. It's not about getting somewhere, it's about constantly working at where you are.
“You make choices with people you're with because you feel like they represent the things you want for yourself and the things you believe in. She definitely does.”
Two other big reasons for Agassi's re-emergence: Reyes and Gilbert.
“Without Perry, without Gil, without Brad, without those closest to me, I would have no interest in the accomplishments,” Agassi said. “It would mean nothing to me.”
Gilbert, who has the 11th-best winning percentage as a player at the Tennis Masters Series Cincinnati, remembers watching Agassi playing for the first time in 1986 at Stratton Mountain, Vt.
Agassi was 16 years old and ranked 211th in the world. He defeated No.53 Scott Davis and 12th-ranked Tim Mayotte to advance to the quarterfinals, where Agassi lost to John McEnroe.
“I heard all these older pros saying, "Look how obnoxious he is. He's got the clothes and the hair and the earrings.' And I was like, who gives a crap about that? The guy's cracking the ball beautifully,” Gilbert said. “That was my first real impression. By '88, he was already No.3 in the world.”
At Key Biscayne in 1994, Agassi and Gilbert went out to dinner, and Agassi asked what Gilbert thought of his tennis game. Gilbert is straight-forward, brutally honest. He told Agassi he played on sheer talent and reaction without thought and direction to his game.
The two hit the next day and have been working together since.
In addition to the conditioning and tennis improvements — better serve, better movement, better volleys — Gilbert has helped Agassi with his work habits and the mental aspect of his game — strategy and understanding the opponent.
“I think he brought a real element of thinking out there on the court,” Agassi said. “I'm always aware of what it is I'm doing and what it is that's going on. I'm using that as a huge weapon.”
Reyes was the strength and conditioning coach for UNLV's 1990 national championship basketball team when he met Agassi, who had stopped by campus to see how the Runnin' Rebels trained.
“When he came in, I knew that he was famous, but I had never, ever seen one point of a tennis match,” Reyes said. “Immediately I was so impressed with his level of focus and his concentration. ... He thought he was a good tennis player. He wanted to be able to take on five-set matches with greater confidence.”
Reyes resigned three weeks after the NCAA final to work with Agassi full time. “I can honestly say that I believe he has two gears left in him,” Reyes said, “meaning he still has two more surges left in him as a professional athlete to scale the heights.”
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