Apple and Tree

It's T-minus two sets - and counting - for Andre Agassi and what probably will be his final appearance as a main-draw singles competitor at the U.S. Open (Martina Hingis and Virginia Razzano are just starting to unlimber for the warm-up). This got me thinking about the first time I interviewed Andre, back in the good old "Image is Everything" days. My first long sit-down with Andre happened in Munich, Germany, at the ill-fated Grand Slam Cup.

Andre and John McEnroe, who had been playing Davis Cup (I think), got into the official hotel at roughly the same time as me - very early in the morning. In fact, I was sitting in the restaurant, trying to get a handle on the buffet (what should I go with, the pickled herring, the head cheese, or the Salidor Dali-esque mound of melting Gorgonzola, yummy!) when "the boys" came rolling in to eat.

They looked like a bunch of kids just returning home from a rock concert. McEnroe featured the ultimate Denim Downmarket look, in rumpled jeans and matching jean jacket. He was wearing red canvas Chuck Taylor Cons. Andre was all hair; it was during the "Image is Everyhing" period (Agassi's answer to Picasso's blue period, which began with those unforgettable stone-washed denim-look tennis shorts. Don't laugh - you once were young too, and you can't even blame Nike!).

Anyway, I suppose they confirmed every early rising European's worst image of Americans. They were all pose and swagger, a couple of smart but not-as-smart-as-they imagined kids, trying hard to be cool (today, they'd be "keeping it real"), when all they really were was loud, demanding and juvenile.

"Now this isn't real good," I remember thinking, knowing that I had an appointment with Agassi later that afternoon for our long interview.

When the time came, I walked down the eerily dark corridor of the hotel and knocked at the door. He opened up and invited me in. It looked like he's just rolled out of bed. But from the moment we started talking, I noticed that he was focused, paying complete attention to every word I was saying. As usual, I'd done a fair amount of reading up and jotted quite a few notes before coming up with a rough outline of 25 or so questions or topics that I wanted him to address.

The interview went well; I found him a willing subject. This was gratifying,  given that my instincts at the time were telling me that Andre couldn't be nearly as shallow, insolent, and bratty an individual as his general press suggested. This was at the heyday of the Andre bashing era, and I still don't believe I've ever seen a pile-on of the dimensions that Andre was experiencing. It was a Tsunami of bad press, with my friend John Feinstein happily surfing its very crest, and a part of me simply thought, "They ought to lay off, this kid is just an 18-year old mall rat, being milked to the max by Nike and Canon, with no idea whatsoever of how far in over his head he really is."

In fact, the theme developing in my mind was an assault on the "Image is Everything" trope. For the unfortunate (except for Canon) slogan had become the ultmate "gotcha" moment for Andre's legion of critics. Every strident pundit and punk-hating pontificator siezed on the ad campaign as the final, irrevocable, airtight proof that Agassi was nothing more than an insubstantial lout. Where I saw urchin, they saw degenerate. Where I saw dumb kid, they saw precociously cynical nose-thumber. But one thing kept sticking in my mind, and it seemed a glaringly reality of which his critics, in their lust to string Andre's multi-colored scalp on their belts, seemed  inexcusably ignorant:

If a person really was cynical to believe and trade on the fact that  "Image is Everything", he would have to be a deeply manipulative person. And someone like that would never in a million years be stupid enough to play his hand so openly, for any number of reasons, starting with the fact that it would automatically alienate a large number of people.

So, I figured, Andre was either helping advance something that turned out to be an inside-joke gone wrong, or thumbing his nose at. . . himself.  And neither of those comes close to being a confession of belief in that catch-phrase.

Anyway, I left that interview feeling that my theory was accurate, but for one glitch. Andre had been blind-sided by that slogan; for all of his posturing and rad-hair days, he actually thought that Image is Everything was just a playful, borderline cheesy pitch.

As I left him that day, Andre thanked me for dropping by and said that he was impressed that I had done my homework on his life and career. I appreciated that, and ever since then Andre and I have always enjoyed a solid, pleasant relationship.

Now Andre is, to use the inescapable word, an "icon." And to tell you the truth, I sometimes miss the old Andre - the puckish kid who freely insulted the suits who ran the game and never met a flourescent color he didn't like. The boy sure tried hard, didn't he? And I always have a soft sport for those types, I suppose it's my Inner Loser, experiencing a pang of empathy.

Anyway, there's one person wandering around the grounds here this week who reminds me hauntingly of the "old Andre", and that's the loose Canon named Mike Agassi. I've never read the book he wrote, but I will. Gruff, frank, undeniably impish despite what appears to be seventy-odd years, Mike has been interviewed here and there (a Google search should bear fruit), and my overall feeling is that for all the heartache Mike caused young Andre, and mature Andre may have caused Mike, the apple didn't fall far from the tree. It's just that somebody picked up the apple and put a heck of a polishing on it over some two decades of success and celebrity.

Jon Wertheim had a conversation with Mike last year about Nick Bollettieri, and I'm offering Jon dinner at the restaurant of his choice in New York (Bright Lights, Big City, Tres Expensive restaurants, Jon, think about it), if he posts what Mike told him, either here or at his own SI Mailbag site. During that chat, Mardy Fish happened to walk by and Mike, in his inimitable fashion, hollered out, "Fish, you're a punk!"

Anyway, a little bit of Mike has been a welcome antidote to the sentimentality and oh-so-earnest hagiography that's underway here; somehow it enhances the human aspect of the proceedings in a way that no further tribute to Andre, no matter how well deserved, could provide. For Mike is a little like that down-at-the-heels character you sometimes see hovering just beyond the velvet ropes and exploding flashbulbs, the person whose very presence is a testament to the good fortune and glory of the man or woman of the hour, but also to the absurdly fine that separates the winners in life from the losers and, in the big picture, how arbitrary and unpredictable that process really is.

Anyway, the other day I had nice chat with Andre's mother, Betty, who's been here helping to promote breast cancer awareness on behalf of The Pink Ribbon foundation. Betty is a brunette with striking blue eyes, a ready laugh, and a disconcerting way of cutting right to the chase on any given subject. This, you can tell, is a woman who's nobody's fool.

Anyway, she said of Mike, "He's a black-and-white kind of man, a man of Spades. We've been married 47 years. We were born married."

They met on a blind date, in Chicago. Mike picked her up in his car and drove her around. They were driving so long, she said, that it made her nervous and she contemplated jumping out of the car. But eventually, Mike took Betty to a restaurant and the rest, as they say, is tennis history.

"The Lord closed my eyes," she said, with eyes wide open and twinkling. "I was, like, 21 or 22. You think you know it all at that age, but you know nothing."

It was hard to get Betty going on the subject; she's very wary of the press, but not in the customary way. She's guarded because she is compulsively honest, and a person like that usually prefers saying little to lying a lot (At one point, talking about Andre's wife, Steffi Graf, she said, "She plays the role of parent a lot better than I did.")

Betty, you may remember, raised four children of her own, plus a grandson, Skylar, born of the short-lived marriage of Andre's sister, Rita, to Pancho Gonzalez.

The overall impression I got is that Andre is the offspring of a pair of very strong-minded parents, each of whom, deep down (or not so deep down) probably doesn't give a hang what the world thinks. So Andre's evolution into a man of elegantly sculpted opinons and nuanced observations - the quintessentially diplomatic man - is probably every bit the "journey" he says it has been.

Hey, maybe Barbra Streisand was right after all.