Andre Agassi – the womble of Wimbledon

BUSINESS DAY, 3 JULY 2003

I HAVE NOT HAD a happy Wimbledon so far. Not only, at the time of writing, are both the Williams sisters still in contention; not only did I lose my annual bet with Porky Withers when Wayne Ferreira blamed influenza for his early defeat, rather than his more usual torn muscle or twisted ankle; not only have I not yet seen a single streaker; on top of all this, earlier this week I missed out on giving Maria Sharapova the once-over to see what all the fuss is about.

It is her name, you see. Ever since an unhappy bout in my early teens wrestling with the first names, nicknames and patronymics of the cast of indistinguishable characters in an overly muffled Dostoyevsky novel, Russian names have been like kryptonite to me. I can scarcely tell an –ova from an –eva, an Anastasia from a Svetlana. When those names come up on the screen my eyes blur and start revolving in circles. How then to tell a Sharapova from a Hentushova, a Legova from a Hangova? How to tell the Queen of Scream from the Runt of Grunt from the Ally McBeal of Squeal?

I am not ordinarily much impressed by the ladies of modern lawn tennis. At one extreme are gum-chewing, jawbone-clicking loudmouths like the Williams clan; at the other are the prettily perspiring moulded plastic dolls with their eyes on the flashbulbs. In between is a legion of interchangeable chunky-legged bit players huffing and puffing and vanishing against the backdrop of billboards and bored spectators wearing sunblock. Who can tell them apart? Still, by all accounts this new Ms Sharapova could be the next big thing on court as well as before the cameras.

Personally, I rather doubt it. People are not ordinarily blessed with a double-dose of extraordinary genes, and much of the media reporting about Sharapova – a Kournikova that can play! – sounds a lot like desperately wishful thinking. Not that I would know. Having consulted the schedule and thinking I had made time to watch Sharapova play this week, instead I found myself wading through a syllabic firestorm of Svonarevas and Dementievas and even, embarrassingly, a Sugiyama. Ah well, I will just have to catch her when she teams up with Kournikova and a rejuvenated Gabriela Sabatini in Charlie’s Angels 3 – Court in the Act.

Even more disappointing was watching Andre Agassi being dispatched at the hands of Mark Phillipoussis. In a sport desperately seeking characters, Agassi is the closest thing to it, which is depressing when you consider that he has all the personality of a tennis ball that has been left out in the rain. For the past 15 years the best thing you could say about Agassi’s charisma is that he was not Pete Sampras. All his little quirks and foibles – that ghastly ponytail, those even more ghastly denim shorts, the still more ghastly body-hair and chest-wax saga – were not much more than careful attempts to put matter in a tennis-playing vacuum. Even his principal defining characteristic – a shuffling, bobbing gait that makes him resemble a chimpanzee trained to impersonate a middle-weight Eastern European powerlifter moonlighting as a bouncer at a West Rand nightclub, or perhaps just a womble – may be interesting at first but wears thin after the first set.

But the longer Andre Agassi’s career has worn on, the more compelling he has become. He may not be much of a character, but he has plenty of it. Returning from the lower 140s in the world, making a happy second marriage with Steffi Graf, fighting on past the age when his contemporaries have moved on to lives outside of tennis … the Agassi story becomes increasingly interesting. The very fact that he is still grimly playing rather than finding some other means of fulfilment may well testify to the swirling void of his inner life, but it does not really matter any more. Agassi has become a hero to the no-longer-young everywhere. With his guile and his fiery talent and fiercely competitive heart, he tells us that it is still not too late. He brings some romance to the game. I hope he does not go just yet. Tennis still needs him.