The 1999 men’s final at Wimbledon is remembered by historians of tennis as one of the great matches of the modern era. On Sunday July 4, 1999, Pete Sampras beat Andre Agassi in three sets, and in the course of it raised his game to heights few tennis-observers had ever seen before. Sampras was 27 years old, and already the holder of five Wimbledon singles titles; he went into the championships as the number one seed - as he had for five out of the six previous years. Agassi, aged 29, had been champion at Wimbledon only once (in 1992, beating Goran Ivanišević in a tense five-setter), but had by now managed to win all four of the Grand Slam championships - the Australian, the French, Wimbledon and the US Open - which meant he was likewise a giant of the game. For those with hazy memories, Sampras v Agassi at Wimbledon may seem like something that happened all the time in the 1990s (‘Not Pete and Andre again?’), but in fact it had happened only once before, in the quarter-finals in 1993, when Sampras took the first two sets against an apparently sleep-walking Agassi, then conceded two sets, then polished him off in the fifth.
Theirs was indeed the great rivalry of that period, however - or, at least, it was marketed as such by Nike, famously in the sexy ‘Just Do It’ TV ad in 1995, in which the two players jump out of a cab in a busy downtown area, stretch a tennis net across an intersection, and start walloping a ball at each other, with orgasmic grunts, until a horn-honking bus ploughs into the net and the excited onlookers scatter. The idea behind this ad, obviously, was that these two hormonally-charged young American alpha-males couldn’t contain their volcanic feelings of spontaneous wallop for each other - and that they therefore carried tennis court accoutrements with them at all times, so that they were always ready to try each other out on new and exciting surfaces. One wonders whether the Nike ad-men ever suggested a naked-wrestling-on-the-carpet-by-firelight sequence as well, but possibly my mind is wandering into dangerous territory. Anyway, it was definitely a head-to-head between these two that was engineered as often as possible at all tournaments, so it was doubtless a real bummer for Wimbledon that, after the 1993 quarter-final, however hard the seeding committee tried to contrive it, Sampras and Agassi did not meet again across a competitive grass court in SW19 for another six whole years.
On the Sunday morning of the match, I knew I wouldn’t be watching it - and I wouldn’t be seeing the delayed women’s singles final between Lindsay Davenport and Steffi Graf either. Never reliable at the best of times, my Centre Court access had been withdrawn midweek, for the simple, common-sense reason that the press box on Centre Court had a finite capacity, and proper sports writers from all round the world obviously needed the seats to put their bums on. I bore this blow quite well, I think. This was my second time at Wimbledon, and in terms of my dealings with the press office I had largely stopped (in that lovely phrase, not used half enough these days) kicking against the pricks. Also, in terms of seniority on the sports pages, I knew my place. On hearing that my chum Simon Barnes had been held up on a dicky train from Mortlake that morning, I helpfully - one might even say nobly - collected the Times Centre Court accreditation on his behalf.
Speaking to the office at the start of the day, I had found out that they had quite definite views about the outcome they wanted from the upcoming events: Steffi to win the women’s; Andre to win the men’s. Such a result would guarantee sales next day, you see - since Steffi and Andre were both extremely popular old-timer type players, and they had both just won the French (although nobody knew they were an item yet). I thought this was fair enough. I then asked them what they wanted from me, and they suggested (what else?) that I spend yet another day roaming the grounds and reporting the atmosphere - which is how I happen to know that, at the moment when Sampras started to get transcendental, breaking Agassi’s service game at the start of the second set, the people in the queue for pizza didn’t give a toss. I wondered, miserably, what on earth these people were doing here - paying money to get in, and then not bothering with the tennis. I was reminded of stories of the crucifixion (ordinary Jerusalem people going about their daily business and just putting the lights on when it got dark in the afternoon), but tried really hard to drive these thoughts from my mind. The power of association is all very well, but it’s best not to rely on it totally - especially when it leads you down the road to casual blasphemy.
So I didn’t see the matches, but I watched the scoreboard obsessively. And, well, as it turned out, The Times was unlucky that day. Lindsay Davenport won the women’s in two sets; Pete Sampras won the men’s in three. Dear, oh dear. At the end of play, I went back into the press centre and sat down next to Simon Barnes, who was literally rubbing his hands with glee at the thought of all the lovely, lovely tennis greatness to which he would soon expertly attest. I opened my laptop, took a sip of a cup of tea. And then, thinking I ought to show that I had at least followed the results while on my humble trudging duty, I did a foolish thing. I made the innocent and light-hearted remark, ‘So. The wrong ones won.’
I regret this now, of course. But if it’s any consolation, I also regretted it instantly, because this was not the thing to say to a sports writer in a state of rapture. ‘People who can’t appreciate fucking genius should fuck off,’ was Simon’s memorably hot reply - and I’m fairly certain (as Wodehouse might have added) that he meant it to sting. But feelings were running high, deadlines were pressing, and Simon was among the few sports writers who’d been friendly towards me from the start. So, while he then went on to write a heavily ironic opening about exactly how and why Steffi and Andre had lost to ‘the wrong ones’, I, feeling a bit shaken, went on to write a speculative, space-filling 900 words of drivel asking whether the folks on Henman Hill were ‘the true fans’ (as the TV commentators evidently liked to think), or in fact drunken layabouts with no homes to go to. While I was doing this, I kept wondering, ‘Should I interrupt Simon to explain? Does he really think I should fuck off ? Isn’t that a bit unfair?’ But I make it a policy not to argue with people who are angry with me already, especially when I have a deadline impending (and nothing to write about), so I didn’t.
The fact that I hadn’t been allowed to see a single point of the Sampras-Agassi match and therefore couldn’t possibly be accused of not appreciating fucking genius was immaterial, in any case. Simon has always felt (and enjoyed feeling) that he is specially qualified to appreciate the talents of great sportsmen such as Sampras; and of course it is essential to this belief that the rest of the world can’t see it at all. In 2003, when it finally became clear that Sampras had quietly retired, Simon wrote a farewell song of praise to his hero, pinpointing the 1999 Wimbledon final as the day when anyone who had ‘put in the hours and covered the hard yards of sport’ spotted the emergence of true greatness. The fact that no one - no one - disagrees with him about Sampras cuts no ice at all. Recalling that day in 1999, he wrote four years later, ‘Those who felt that yet another Sampras win was a bit of a bore were entitled to their view.’
The only thing I would now argue with in this, is that July 4, 1999 was a pretty interesting moment for Andre Agassi too - and that this has been rather overlooked in all the lovely Sampras myth-making associated with that day. I know this seems an odd thing to say. How could anyone ‘overlook’ Andre Agassi, you ask. Surely he was in the limelight constantly for two decades? Didn’t he work at it? Wasn’t he adored everywhere? After Muhammad Ali and Tiger Woods, he is probably the most universally recognised American sportsman. Well, I can see what you mean by that. I just think Agassi is an interesting case of where sports writing doesn’t quite cope, and that the reasons are worth exploring. If Pete Sampras was a gift to sports writing, Andre Agassi exposed its shortcomings. You could watch Andre play, week after week and year after year; you could write about it a thousand times for the next day’s paper; you could comment amusingly on his latest bodyhair choices; but still you could never get a handle on the man. He wins when he’s supposed to lose; he loses when he’s supposed to win. Is he a flake or what? What sort of perspective can you get on Andre bloody Agassi, and how could it be worth the effort? What does he care what anyone in the tennis world thinks of him, when he’s so rich and popular, and stars all the time in TV ads? In 1989, when he was already a contender in Grand Slam finals, a columnist in the American magazine Sports Illustrated woundingly asked whether Agassi was ‘the game’s new savior or just another infantile twerp’. And the headings ‘SAVIOUR’ and ‘TWERP’ were probably at the top of most sports writers’ notepads (with a line down the middle) whenever they thought about him ever after - or until he finally retired, an impressive 17 years later, in September 2006.
In my experience, Agassi would generally elicit a shiver of impatience, a frisson of distaste, in people who write about sport, largely because of his sheer wealth and rock-star popularity, but also because - in so many ways other than the literal - he didn’t play the game. A wilful shape-shifter, evidently with a lot to prove and a pair of equally-matched demons tussling inside him for his tennis-playing soul, he found a simple way of clouding the issue of his inner torment: he dressed up in eye-catching clothes. Looking back, this strategy seems a bit obvious - but it wasn’t obvious at all to the people paid to watch. When Agassi played Andrei Chesnokov in the first round of Wimbledon in 1992 - having reached the final of three Grand Slam events in the preceding 12 months - John Barratt did not say, ‘Looks a bit tense and haunted to me, this talented young man; personally, I blame the way his tennis-mad father brought him up. And call me simplistic, but I also wonder whether this look-at-me long blond ponytail is a classic example of psychological double-bluff, because actually he doesn’t want people to penetrate what’s inside.’ No, Barratt did not say that. Instead he chuckled, ‘He looks a bit like a pony, doesn’t he?’ And when Agassi had completely mysteriously chucked away the second set (6-1), but then regained himself to polish off Chesnokov in the fourth, Barratt commented, ‘A showman to the last, the Las Vegas kid goes off to the kind of applause we usually give to pop stars.’
‘A man of contradictions’ goes nowhere near to accounting for Andre Agassi. Perceived as an obnoxious lightweight who couldn’t decide whether he was serious or not about his sport, he became, in the long run, in 2003, the oldest man ever (at 33) to hold the number 1 spot in the world rankings. In 1998, he staged the biggest comeback that had ever happened: from 141st to 6th, in a single year. At the start of 1999, the British Davis Cup captain David Lloyd flatly declared, ‘He couldn’t beat my mum now. He’s finished.’ Agassi then went on to win the French Open and the US Open in 1999, and the Australian Open the following year. The effort was heroic. The achievement was extremely improbable. In fact, though, one might see Agassi’s amazing mid-career comeback as a magnified version of what happened in so many of his matches. Win two sets easily, then drop the third and fourth spectacularly, and then - having made sure you’ve drawn all the crowd’s anxiety to your cause (‘Come on, Andre! Come on, Andre! We love you, Andre! It can’t be all over!’) - fight back and win by 10 games to 8 in a gut-buckling fifth. But it was no less remarkable for that. In July 1999, therefore, he was not only on glorious form; it was a perfect mid-point in his Wimbledon career. Seven years earlier, he had become champion - in a field that still included John McEnroe, Stefan Edberg, Ivan Lendl and Boris Becker. A full seven years later, Agassi would finally retire from Wimbledon, when beaten in the third round by Rafael Nadal - a man who was so far his junior that he was, literally, in the womb when the 16-year-old Andre Agassi turned professional in May 1986.
Didn’t Andre Agassi present a far greater (and more interesting) challenge to sports journalism than Pete Sampras? So why was he so hard, or unrewarding, to write about? Well, it didn’t help, probably, that his entire motivation in life seemed to be to prove everybody wrong, all the time. You might also argue that the unconventional, not to say amorphous, shape of Agassi’s tennis career was impossible to assess while it was still going on: his roller-coaster form was probably a truly tiresome phenomenon to observe at close hand. But if it was pointless to try, I’m sure he very much wanted it that way. He often skipped press conferences, preferring to pay the tiddly fine instead. Asked once at a Melbourne press conference to distinguish the latest comeback from the one before, he said, smilingly but unhelpfully: ‘Well, that was my new, new attitude. This is my new, new, new attitude.’ He has now been paid $5 million by a New York publisher to write his memoirs - a fact that suggests he hasn’t lost the knack of getting top dollar ( John McEnroe got a measly one million for his excellent book Serious). It’s just a bit worrying that no one in publishing has noticed Andre Agassi’s careerlong propensity for creating false expectations (‘He’s going to win!’/‘He’s going to lose!’/‘He’s going to write his memoirs!’), and then doing his utmost to defy them.
However, the big issue Agassi raises most uncomfortably for sports journalism is that of where sport meets entertainment. It is, you see, the main tenet of sports journalism that spectator sport is never to be confused with other spectator activities; other ways of paying professionals (actors, circus folk, rock musicians) to entertain you by doing what they’re good at. For myself, sometimes I can see the distinction quite clearly, and I can even uphold it with gusto; at other times, something flips in my brain and the distinction just melts away, exposing sport as quite monstrously bogus in how seriously it takes itself. The vital difference between sport and theatre, or sport and opera, of course, is that sport is unwritten; it happens for real. No authorial brain devises it before it takes place. In the world of sport, if Konstantin shoots himself in the last minute of extra time, no one has told him to, and it gets listed under the heading of unforced error. But for all this absolute spontaneity on the field of play, the relationship between sport and ‘reality’ is obviously a bit tenuous, when you think about it. Wimbledon finals do not simply break out when two terribly well-matched young people can’t suppress their competitive yearnings any longer. Sport is staged - at great expense, with great expertise, and at great profit, too. Spectators book their seats months in advance. And at home afterwards, the handsomely rewarded players pause only to light the gas with the top £50 note (from a handy foot-high stack of £50 notes) before turning the page on the calendar and looking forward to next week’s tournament, excitedly humming that great showbiz curtainraiser from Kiss Me, Kate, ‘Another op’nin’, another show!/In Philly, Boston or Baltimo’!/A chance for stage folks to say hello!/Another op’nin’ of another show!’
The money thing is so tricky. No one would want the Wimbledon champion to be asked, after his victory, in front of the crowd, whether he has specific plans for the big cheque (new curtains, that kind of thing), or even, ‘So, where will you be playing next week?’ It would break a spell. But it is nevertheless quite strange that no one involved in sport ever acknowledges the truth of the matter: that without the existence of a paying public, professional sport would not take place. There is somehow an accepted belief that all these matches, races, heats, games, rounds, bouts, legs, chukkas, rallies, regattas and rubbers just happen because they have to. Sport occurs by some imperative law of nature, for its own sake, in a pure, self-sustaining and perpetual world of competition - a world to which avid spectators may be admitted, incidentally, but only if they are prepared to fight for the privilege, and don’t demand too much by way of value for money. What sustains this idea is the genuine earnestness of the players. They really care whether they win or lose. It is their life. They put themselves on the line for reasons of personal pride. If they notice the adulation of the crowd at all, they consider it their sportsmanly duty not to let it distract them from the job in hand. As for the issue of the prize money - well, we are led to believe that any sum involved is a mere token. Look at a triumphant Wimbledon finalist and you certainly don’t see a man thinking (or not primarily), ‘Oh thank God. This means I don’t have to sell the car.’
A similar topsy-turvydom characterises the relationship between sport and sports journalism. Sport takes the line that it’s doing the media a huge favour by letting them in. The football grounds give you a nasty room to work in, and shout at you if you go the wrong way looking for the Ladies, or sit at the wrong sort of table in the canteen. Football managers give press conferences with extremely bad grace. The press is a nuisance that is barely tolerated - but no one objects that the boot is on the other foot;that without the keen and extensive publicity that professional sport receives from newspapers and other media, it would simply not exist. Again, it is the sheer seriousness with which the players take their job that elevates the enterprise. I wonder if this is why the rhetoric of sporting ‘greatness’ sticks in my craw as much as it does. True, the poetic tribute to an athlete has a great tradition, and can be stirring when it’s well done. Two and a half thousand years ago, the great lyric poet Pindar (518-438 BC) was hymning the heroes who had won mule-cart races at the ancient games - and although we now don’t know anything else about those garlanded winners, Pindar’s words are still very lovely to read. ‘Great deeds give choice of many tales,’ he wrote in his ‘Pythian IX’ (‘For Telesikrates of Kyrene, Winner of the Race in Armour’ - translated by Maurice Bowra). ‘Choose a slight tale, enrich it large, and then/Let wise men listen!’ But it just seems to me that there’s an element of credulousness in celebrating the greatness of these chaps, who are themselves the cat’s paws of the system. Every time a journalist enriches a tale of ‘great deeds’ - deeds done quite unnecessarily, of course; and in artificially created conditions, for the profit of others - it sends the message to the sports organisers that their secret is safe, that no one will ever find them out.
Against this background, it’s not surprising that Andre Agassi was not a darling of the press - or not until the second, humbler half of his career, when the screaming had died down and he was wearing a plain white sleeveless woolly. How do you argue that sport is not a branch of entertainment when it’s quite clear that thousands of people would pay good money just to watch this man knock a ball against a door? How do you insist it’s not about money when he owns a customised Boeing 727? Asked once what he liked about Agassi, the famously laconic Sampras said, ‘I like the way he travels’ (referring to the jet).’This child of Las Vegas’ was how the bbc’s Wimbledon commentators regularly described Agassi. ‘He’s a star, the boy,’ said Des Lynam in 1991, just before Agassi’s quarter-final against David Wheaton. ‘What a showman,’ everyone said, with a giveaway wrinkle of the nose. Disregarding the hoo-ha is something a sports writer is trained to do, because hoo-ha is irrelevant to the serious matter of bat and ball. But this was the problem with Agassi. You couldn’t extract him from the hoo-ha, and you certainly couldn’t take the hoo-ha out of him.
Why was he more popular with the crowds than Sampras? Was it because he was a shallow character with a large portfolio of advertising deals? The reason was actually a bit more respectable than that. What pleased the crowds was his miraculously quick and deep return of serve, which meant that ( just in time) he single-handedly rescued men’s tennis from being a monotonous display of one-sided power serving from a new breed of faceless middle Europeans who didn’t appeal to anybody and who wore unpleasant socks. All right, the claim ‘he rescued men’s tennis’ may be a bit of an over-statement; and the big servers didn’t all have unpleasant socks; and all right, I know I also liked the way Agassi’s shirt was cunningly cut short at the front so that it showed his hairy torso when he served. However, when I close my eyes I can picture him in the old ponytail days, standing behind the baseline, looking brave and small (at 5’11”, he is shorter than a lot of the top players), and a bit worried and decidedly pigeon-toed. He frowns a bit. The crowd falls silent. He looks like a waif. At the other end, a man twelve feet tall with feet the size of doormats (and strange hosiery) winds himself up to launch a ball at 150 miles per hour, which goes faster than the human eye can see it.
Whap. Basically this is like watching a person catch bullets between his teeth. Except that Agassi returns the bullet! With a lightning reflex whip of the wrist, he flips the ball straight down the line, or whizzes it across the court, stranding the enormous, Neanderthal server midstride as he lumbers to the net. Does a crowd like to see this? Of course it bloody does. The ability to catch the ball on the rise and whack it back before anyone knew what was happening was what made Andre Agassi so popular with tennis fans from his very first appearance on the scene. The appeal was atavistic. It was David v Goliath. It was standing up to the big bully with the thick accent and the duelling scar. And above all, it was keeping the ball in play, for heaven’s sake, which meant there was a chance some actual tennis might ensue. For all these reasons, plus the furry tum, beyond anything else you can see on a court, it made you cheer, ‘Hooray!’
All the famous contrasts to Sampras doubtless show Sampras as the superior being, sportsman-wise. Agassi loved to talk and analyse; Sampras’s favourite line in literature was supposed to be ‘Don’t ever tell anybody anything’ from The Catcher in the Rye. Andre was beloved by the crowd; Sampras was once asked whether he might ever drop his Borg-like cool, and he observed, ‘It’s worked so far.’ Sampras served; Agassi returned. Sampras had the greatest forehand; Agassi’s best shot was the backhand. Sampras had beautiful running shots; Agassi usually preferred to hit the ball with both feet firmly on the ground. In that 1999 final, Sampras dived for volleys twice, scraping his forearm quite badly in the process. Once it worked and once it didn’t, but the abiding memory is of Andre’s stunned, blank disbelief that such a brilliant drop shot could be reached. Andre never dived, did he? I can’t remember him doing it. His movements were never so extravagant. He hardly seemed even to reach very far - all his shots took place quite near his body, neat and small and tight. In a joint profile of both players in the New York Times in 1995, Sampras rather meanly told the writer Peter de Jonge that Andre ‘told me that if he ever dove for a ball, he’d look like a fool’.
But the main difference between them, always acknowledged by Agassi, was this huge psychological contrast: Pete Sampras knew he was good, while Andre Agassi was a mass of self-doubt. And again, crowds sensed this, and responded to it. Did it have a lot to do with their respective childhoods, you ask. Well, I’m hardly qualified to say, but I would suggest that if psychologists were hoping for a field day, they’d be disappointed here, if only because it’s all so clear and straightforward. Sam Sampras, Pete’s father, always took the view, ‘Whatever makes Pete happy makes his mother and me happy.’ And whenever I read that, it makes me sniff. The nightmarish Mike Agassi, on the other hand - who had started training Andre’s hand-eye coordination in the cot, and who drove away Andre’s older sister Rita with his appalling, trouble-making tennis-parent ways - greeted his 22-year-old son back from his Wimbledon triumph in 1992 with the barked question, ‘Why did you lose the fourth set?’ What chance did poor Andre have? ‘My father put a lot of pressure on me to not accept losing,’ Agassi said on cbs’s 60 Minutes in 1995. ‘I never felt pressure to win. I felt pressured just to not accept losing.’ As for the difference between him and Sampras, he said, ‘The one thing that Pete has over me - or I shouldn’t say over me - that I wish I had - is such a simple approach and raw belief that he is just better than everybody. With me, it’s different. Even at the level of number one…I still could convince myself that, Geez, maybe I’m just not as good as I think I am.’
It is probably clear from all this that I loved Andre Agassi. From start to finish, I knew I was being quite cynically taken in by something that wasn’t strictly tennis-related, but I didn’t care. ‘Come on, Andre!’ I yelled. His propensity for dropping sets at key moments simply made his matches more dramatic; the sense of a man conducting a desperate internal psychodrama made every match a drainingly cathartic experience (except when it inexplicably didn’t). His unauthorised biographer Paul Bauman, in his 1997 book Agassi and Ecstasy, has a convincing explanation for some of those strange not-playing-any-more stretches in Agassi’s matches: that if you deliberately don’t play, you can tell yourself you weren’t really beaten. This is the sort of immature and unprofessional attitude to one’s sport that can really wear out the patience of the people paid to write about you. You fight your way to a quarterfinal and then you piss it away? Why? The word ‘tanking’ comes up all the time in accounts of Agassi. I thought it might have connotations of chucking a game, but it seems to mean only losing when you shouldn’t - which, I have to say, makes other people’s annoyance with him for doing it all the more interesting. Whose business was it, besides his own, if he lost matches that appeared to be in the bag? Well, it seems as if it was everybody’s. Early in his career, Agassi caught the attention of the American sports writer John Feinstein, who was then writing his book Hard Courts (1991). ‘He has become the most blatant tank artist in the game,’ Feinstein wrote. In 1988, Agassi had infuriated John McEnroe by tanking; by dropping a set against him in a semi-final in Los Angeles. McEnroe called it ‘insulting, immature, a cop-out’.
I would say that Agassi’s whole career hinged this way and that on how he handled the flight or fight question. As a kid, he was always threatening to quit; as a young man on the tour he swore and spat at umpires; later, he was forever being fined for skipping press conferences and getting the hell out of there (by large private jet, with ‘Air Agassi’ on the tail fin). He pulled out of tournaments at the last minute. ‘I don’t have to do this,’ was the obvious feeling behind it. He was famously addicted to junk food, and memorably quipped, ‘You can never beat anyone too badly or go too far for a Taco Bell.’ He dressed like a rebel, but was a born-again Christian. It is fascinating to me that his one championship win at Wimbledon should have been against Goran Ivanišević, a man whose mental well-being was even more visibly on the line than Agassi’s own, but who was at the other end of the scale in his commitment to the game. When Ivanišević lost to Sampras in the final in 1998 (he had lost to him in 1994 as well), his despair was Miltonic. Instead of playing the role of plucky runner-up, he sat on his chair with a towel over his head for a very, very long time. Asked afterwards if he would be cheering Croatia in the World Cup, he said, ‘I cannot cheer anybody now. I go kill myself.’ By contrast, when Agassi was asked after his Wimbledon win whether his kneeling down in thanks had been a deliberate (or even rehearsed) gesture to remind the crowds of Bjorn Borg, he was so insulted he said, ‘If I find myself having to defend that, I’ll leave the game.’
But by July 4, 1999, it seemed that the fight-or-flight question had been resolved in Andre Agassi. He had evidently decided to fight, after all. You might say this was his new, new, new, new, new, new attitude - and for once, you could believe it. In his personal life, divorce from Brooke Shields was safely behind him. The hair was gone. The clothes were conventional. Brad Gilbert - famous for preaching the philosophy of ‘winning ugly’ - had been Agassi’s coach for five years, and their relationship was surprisingly firm considering how much unattractive losing Agassi had done under his guidance, especially in 1997-98. Gilbert’s coaching is often contrasted with that which Sampras received first from Tim Gullikson (who died from a brain tumour in 1996) and then from Paul Annacone. While Sampras appreciated minimum intervention from his coaches, preferring to play instinctively and to practise in virtual silence, Agassi went on court with his head brimming with a zillion strategic instructions implanted directly from ‘the best brain in tennis’. Gilbert’s combative credo is that you must force your opponents to play ‘shots they don’t like from positions they don’t want’. And by all accounts, he is not a man who keeps his ideas to himself. Sampras told the New York Times in 1995 that he could never work with Gilbert because, ‘I couldn’t take all that talking, discussing every angle, every shot. Whenever we used to practise together, I’d say, “Brad, would you just shut the fuck up for 30 minutes?”’
Tennis was glad to see Agassi back on form, but hadn’t it been caught that way before? Well, here is one of the great strengths of sports journalism (and of sports fanhood in general, actually): while the memory for facts and figures may be fierce, foolproof and astonishing, the scars from even quite deep emotional wounds melt away instantly in the presence of the tiniest little flame of hope. Thus, Agassi was welcomed back to Wimbledon and seeded fourth as if nothing had happened. In the Daily Telegraph, the veteran tennis writer John Parsons was thrilled to bits when Agassi won the French Open in the month before Wimbledon. Without him on the scene, ‘the game had lost its attractiveness’, he wrote. Sampras was interestingly quoted as saying, ‘I don’t know where he’s been.’ Steve Bierley in the Guardian was equally generous, equally pleased for Agassi’s historic win in Paris, which made him the first man to win all four Grand Slam titles on three different surfaces: grass, clay and hardcourt. ‘The pity is that Agassi…has wasted so much of his career - one year on, one year off - and what might have been one of the great on-court rivalries with Sampras fizzled out almost before it began.’
I am putting off a description of the match itself, partly because I wasn’t there, but partly because I know it is beyond me. I’m so sorry I didn’t mention this earlier, but describing tennis in such a way that it is recreated in the mind of my reader is something I absolutely can’t do, despite taking loads of notes and paying proper attention and everything. If you don’t believe me, here is a taste of the 1999 Wimbledon final between Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras - one of the great matches of my lifetime. ‘Ace’, I write, next to the score, 15-0. You can really see that, can’t you? ‘Baseline rally.’ ‘Ag lobs; S smashes.’ ‘Cross-court b’hand ret from Samp - v shallow angle.’ When I write these daft things down, I do so in the belief that they will later transport me to a specific memory, that they will trigger some mysterious ‘replay’ mechanism in my head; but, well, I actually wrote these yesterday, while watching the match on tape, and I’m quite sure they will conjure up quite as much in the mind of the cat currently asleep on top of my printer as they do in mine. ‘At net, with bounce’ I see here, in my record of the seventh game of the first set, served by Sampras. Good grief. Skipping ahead I find, ‘Volley, leap, smash’, ‘F’hand winner down line’, ‘Great half-volley!!’, and (I think I do remember this one), ‘Let cord (NO APOLOGY).’
Luckily, I have also taken notes of what the bbc commentators said as they watched this match - stuff about how Sampras, in the first six games, hit more baseline winners than Agassi (which must have been demoralising), and how Sampras served ‘three boomers in a row’. This is the best Sampras has played this summer, says John Barratt. Agassi is fighting; he’s playing brilliantly. He has even improved his first-serve percentage. But Sampras has responded by raising his own game to unprecedented heights. He is now playing ‘unbelievable tennis’ and is ‘in the zone’. The commentators point out that when Agassi serves down the middle, he stands a better chance of winning the point - but then Sampras notices, too, and does something about it. This is ‘near faultless tennis from Sampras’, they say, as he takes the second set. ‘There’s not a hope of Agassi breaking back,’ they say in the third. And as Sampras wins with an ace (on a second serve) to gain his sixth Wimbledon title, they declare him, happily, ‘the greatest grass court player of all time’.
Of course it was Sampras’s day. And of course he won. In the years of their ‘rivalry’, the overall outcome was Sampras 20: Agassi 14, but when they met in Grand Slam finals, the ratio changed markedly. They played six of these in total, and Sampras won them all except the 1995 Australian Open - when it was quite clear to everyone that the hospitalisation of his coach Tim Gullikson had hit him very hard. Agassi said after that match that Pete’s courage had been inspiring. ‘He’s a class act,’ he said. ‘I think he’s shown these past couple of weeks why he is No 1 in the world.’ But Agassi’s determination to give Sampras a great game at Wimbledon in 1999 was quite classy, too. His new, new, new, new, new, new attitude was starting to be apparent. He was getting serious. On court, he had always been quick, but he was now quite alarmingly impatient to get on with it, serving (‘Whack!’) with minimum ceremony (‘Whack!’), as if he had a car on a meter outside (‘Whack! Whack!’). Just as he had always taken the ball disconcertingly early, now he was playing matches in the same way, not waiting for the normal number of breaths between points; catching everyone off-guard and bulldozing the game, not necessarily to his own advantage.
What Andre Agassi did, eventually, was try to turn his back on entertainment. For the next seven years, he stuck with grim determination to the bat-and-ball stuff. In some ways, this was quite sad; like watching Tigger being pitilessly de-bounced. But the alternative was unthinkable, obviously: it was being beaten by David Lloyd’s mum. And the more seriously he took the tennis - and the balder he got - the more respectful the press were: he was playing the game, at last. In the past, he’d had various interesting exchanges with the press, which (as is the way of these things) he could never live down. Once, at Wimbledon, he was asked whether he knew his shorts were transparent, and he enjoyably riposted, ‘No, but obviously you are.’ In Peru, as a very young man, he asked, ‘What’s an Inca?’ At a joint press conference with Jimmy Connors in 1993, a reporter reminded them both of a stupid remark Agassi had made about beating Connors years before, and he blew up: ‘I knew one of you jerks would mention that. I was 18 and thrown into an environment. Let’s put your life under a magnifying glass.’ (As it happens, there was no need to get defensive on this matter, as Connors had already publicly, and hilariously, got his own back on Agassi by saying, ‘I enjoy playing guys who could be my children. Maybe he’s one of them. I spent a lot of time in Vegas.’)
When Agassi retired from Wimbledon in 2006, I watched it on TV, and wept a bit. When he retired, for good, at the US Open on September 3, I was on holiday with friends on Cape Cod, paying no attention to sport any more - and only vaguely aware that the tournament was on. But on the day of his last ever match (against a low-ranked Benjamin Becker, in the third round) a spooky, tiny, vestigial bit of sports writer triggered the laboured train of thoughts, ‘US Open…hang on…Agassi . . . retired from Wimbledon…hang on…retired from Wimbledon …this could mean…hang on…what day is this…I think I heard he beat Baghdatis, so that would mean he’s still…hang on…I wonder if I should…would anyone mind…’ - and finally I thought ‘Oh sod it’ and put the TV on, and by amazing luck I caught the whole thing. It was a weird afternoon. From time to time, I would urge my uninterested friends to watch it with me: ‘This could be history, you know. If he loses, this is it. No more Andre!’ But this wasn’t the sort of history they cared about, and besides, they had kayaks to row and bikes to ride (which is the point of being on Cape Cod, after all).
Of course, he lost that day. And he made a farewell speech designed to wring the heart, thanking the crowd for their support down the years. Arguably, it was the love of the crowd that had fatally undermined Agassi’s career, distracting him from his main purpose; but, luckily for him, he was never going to see it that way. His speech at Flushing Meadow - in the context of a sensational ovation that went on for half an hour, with constant close-ups of that little tear-stained face with those deep brown puppydog eyes - was admittedly a bit sick-making, even for me, but it was exactly how you would have wanted it all to end, with this heart-felt tribute to the fans. ‘The scoreboard said I lost today, but what the scoreboard doesn’t say is what it is I have found. And over the last 21 years, I have found loyalty.’ Oh, Andre! I sniffed. I never deserted you! I mean, I did sort-of lose track a bit latterly, but I was always yours, you know that. Was it really 21 years, though? Didn’t you turn pro in 1986? That makes it more like 20 years, surely? ‘You have pulled for me on court and also in life,’ he went on. And that was certainly true. I had pulled like mad for Andre. Without stint. At great personal expenditure of emotional energy. Drained, I was, sometimes. Drained.’ You have willed me to succeed sometimes even in my lowest moments.’ Yes, I have. Although to be fair you made that necessary a bit too often, didn’t you, with all that tanking and stuff ?
But there was no point resisting this thing. It was going to get everybody in the end. Oh Andre! ‘You have given me your shoulders to stand on to reach for my dreams,’ Oh, [sniff ], that’s too much, really, stop it, ‘reach for my dreams’, stop it. ‘Over the last 21 years, I have found you’ - Sob! - ‘and I will take you and the memory of you with me for the rest of my life.’
Afterwards, he was asked what he would remember about his last tournament. Would it be the amazingly tough second-round victory over Marcos Baghdatis (seeded eight)? Well, would it fanny. No, it would be the applause he would remember - ‘the applause from the fans, the applause from my peers. That was [sic] the greatest memories I’ve ever had, memories I’ll keep for ever.’ Pete Sampras would never have said that, would he? He would never have thanked the fans for their support, or told them they had inspired him. If he even heard the applause of the people whose money made the whole shebang possible, he considered it completely irrelevant to what he was doing. When it came to Sampras’s own time to retire, he didn’t even make an occasion of it. He won the 2002 US Open (against Andre), then said no, he wasn’t retiring yet, wasn’t retiring yet, oh no, might play next month, no definite plans at all to retire - until finally the penny dropped the following spring that he’d retired already without mentioning it. Agassi was a great player of tennis, but he had to work twice as hard as Sampras to get the world to see him as a sportsman, just because he loved the applause so much - applause that is essential, but must never be acknowledged as such. ‘Do you have any questions for us?’ someone asked at that final press conference. And he said, ‘Are you guys really going to miss me or are you just acting like that?’ At which he got his last - and most hard-won ever - standing ovation.