In Agassi's Court

Tennis great Andre Agassi.

The only sound out here in the desert is feet crunching in brown earth. Burned-out cactus husks surround us, leftovers from a recent brush fire. Ahead of us rises the eponymous sandstone of Red Rock Canyon, a line of mountains left out to rust. In a caffeinated world, you can’t buy this kind of silence, and it’s impressive considering we’re just 15 miles from the Las Vegas Strip, known as much for blowing sensory circuit-breakers as it is for sin.

Here, Andre Agassi—tennis immortal, media icon, and soft-spoken guy—seems at peace. After 21 years in professional tennis, 60-odd titles, some $30 million in prize money, a rise to number one in 1994, a plummet to 141st place in 1997, and a climb back to the top, which included five of his eight Grand Slam wins, Agassi finally played his last pro match in a third round loss at the 2006 U.S. Open.

Time, an excruciatingly bad back, and marriage to another tennis legend, Steffi Graf, showed him how to appreciate what he loved and how to leave behind what he didn’t.

After a career no doubt prolonged by years of diligent training, Agassi is now savoring fatherhood—he has a 5-year-old son, Jaden, and a 3-year-old daughter, Jaz. He also tends to the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation, which he established in 1994 to provide recreational and educational opportunities for at-risk children in southern Nevada. Since its inception, the foundation has supported more than 20 organizations and raised more than $60 million for various programs, including a charter school and a Boys & Girls Club in the poorest parts of Las Vegas. And in the past 3 years, he has shared a partnership with 24 Hour Fitness, opening three Las Vegas-area Super Clubs and two in California.

In an exclusive interview with You24, Agassi sat down to talk with me, and the setting is perfect for the subject: An oasis of quiet just left of a place on the map that defines overload. In a way, this place mirrors what Agassi’s been waiting for his whole life…and now has.

You24: Do you think you’re having the classic midlife career change?
Andre Agassi: Yeah, this definitely isn’t retirement. I’m probably working more now than I ever have before, but without the performance load, which really drops your anxiety levels. If your day’s not going quite like you want, there’s not as much drama. So I get to be busy, [but] I get to do it on my terms. That’s the best of both worlds. And when I do get out on the tennis court, I actually enjoy hitting balls more now than I ever did. Which says a lot.

How often do you play?
Not so often. I didn’t play for 3 months after the Open at all. Stef and I play, but it’s not competitive. We make a deal when we go on the court. Her deal is I have to run her left and right, because she loves to run and work. My deal is, you have to hit it back to me. [laughs] You cannot make me run, or else I won’t hit. I enjoy running on my terms, for athletic or health reasons. I don’t like somebody dictating my movements.

Independence seems to be a big theme with you now.
That’s the most rewarding thing about “retirement.” The ability to have everything on my terms: the time I spend with my family, the time I choose to work, the time I set aside for creativity, trying to change people’s lives with the foundation. They’re all choices, and I love having so many good choices to make. I wish there were 24 more hours in the day.

What kind of shape do you want to be in now that you’re not competing?
I want to be in as good a shape as I’ve ever been in. It used to be for performance. Now it’s just because I enjoy feeling good. I want to be stronger, leaner, and healthier. For me, it’s a way of life—an eating program, a training program, a health program.

How has your training changed since you stopped competing?
I get to do all the things I always enjoyed about training and none of the stuff I didn’t. I used to train everything, every day, for 3 to 4 weeks. Now I have time to build month-to-month. I alternate different muscle groups on different days. I love benching. I do the basic stuff for lats, biceps, triceps, back, and stomach. For cardio, I run. My day doesn’t start until I work out. I drop the kids off at school and go into the gym for an hour and a half. I probably get in a workout 6 days a week.

And how’s the back?
[laughing] As long as I’m not thrashing around the court with 20-year-olds, my back feels pretty good. I have a lot of issues. Two bulged discs combined with spondy [spondylolysis, a misalignment of the lumbar vertebrae that causes weakness in the area], which I was born with. I also have a bone spur in an area where the nerves run very close. As a way of life, it’s not an issue. If I train on my own terms, it’s not an issue. It’s when I add the unexpected lunging or bending that I feel it.

You were once quoted as saying, “Just get a day better. Don’t accept not getting a day better. [But] don’t be stupid enough to try to get 2 days better in 1 day.” Does that still apply?
Absolutely. I still want to get the most out of myself physically. I want a program that works for life. It has to work for you. You can’t fight your own program. I used to train in bursts. Now I get to build over months. That gives me a chance to apply that theory: just a little gain every day.

Does the competitive mindset shut off when you stop competing?
Not for me. I’ve always challenged myself. I don’t care what I’m doing, whether it’s something with a higher standard or lower standard. I get something in my sights, [and] I pour myself into the process.

What do you miss most about playing professionally?
Wow. [pause] There’s a difference between thinking fondly of it and missing it. I don’t miss anything. The part I think about most fondly was challenging myself, those times where you have to push yourself through moments on the court or daily routines that really allow you to discover who you are. I think fondly of those challenges—but I feel them in different ways now. I have creative outlets with my businesses, I take care of the growth of our foundation and the direction it’s going. And yet I don’t have that performance demand that piles on the high stress, that makes you tell your kids, “I can’t run around on the beach with you today because I’m training or recuperating.” So I still have outlets for all that without the downside. I’m pretty happy with that.

Back in the day, you did the “Image is Everything” campaign. What, today, is everything?
My family. Family is it. They make everything else worth doing. The greatest thing tennis has given me is the chance to raise my children. But tennis feels like a long time ago already. Which is good.

Let’s talk about the moment—the actual moment at the Open—when you stopped playing.
It felt like a necessary evil. A necessary goodbye. It wasn’t about not playing tennis anymore. It was me saying goodbye not just to something I did but who I did it with. That’s what hit me the most. Saying goodbye to the people I did tennis with—all the support I’ve gotten over the years, all the people who were there that day, the people watching at home. The connection I felt made every day of those 21 years worth it.

How do you think of your place in the sport, your legacy?
I don’t have any interest in thinking about that. I’m much more focused on today and tomorrow than yesterday. And I prefer to look at what I got out of myself when I asked myself to do something. The accomplishments mean a lot for personal reasons. Knowing what it’s like to hold up that trophy at nearly every tournament I ever played. Knowing I accomplished the thing that’s hardest to do: to be the last one standing. To do it at all the Slams, to do it with a gold medal, to do it at seven of the nine Masters series. The ones that I didn’t win, like Monte Carlo and Hamburg, those tournaments look like mountains to me. Like, “Oh my God, I couldn’t do it.” But I look at all the ones where I could, and that makes me feel good. I enjoyed getting over the line the times when I asked myself to do it.

Your career was a roller coaster: to the top, to the bottom, to the top again. How do you handle a comeback like that?
The hardest part about making a comeback is that every step along the path you realize where you’re not. You’ve been there before, so you know how long the road is, how far you need to go. When you’re a teenager coming up the first time, you only care about the next step. You don’t have any idea what’s in store. But when you’ve been there and realize where you’re not, it can really discourage you. You have to push through those experiences. To still fight through and make it back was way better than the first time. You appreciate things more the older you get. For me to do all those things at 29 and well into my 30s, it was a time of my life where I could be really thankful for it.

Yet aging is regarded as a negative.
No one wants to get older, but it’s the only way you learn or appreciate anything. Knowing you have to say goodbye one day is the part that makes those years what they were in the first place. So I have no problem paying the piper there. It’s been a great journey.

It sounds like, all in all, you’re at your happiest today.
Oh yeah, I’m in the heart of the melon. A 5- and a 3-year-old. A chance to raise ’em. A lot of fun projects and business on my terms. And I get to do all of it with my wife. It’s not lost on me how nice things are right now.