Agassi Is Picture of Tenacity : U.S. Open: Unseeded former Wimbledon champion outlasts No. 6 Chang to reach quarterfinals.

When it was over, when he had finally beaten Michael Chang in five sets, Andre Agassi rolled up one of his shirts and threw it into the crowd. It wasn’t the one off his back, since he’d already given them that.

For Agassi, unseeded in the U.S. Open and uncertain of his future, a masterful 6-1, 6-7 (7-3), 6-3, 3-6, 6-1 victory over his sixth-seeded longtime rival was a sign of many good things. It was a match that took 3 hours 5 minutes of focus and concentration against the master of those things. And it was a match that meant winning a fifth set against the master of that.

Agassi’s Monday afternoon, played out before a national television audience and a packed Stadium Court crowd estimated at 20,000 on a warm day in Flushing Meadow, was truly a day of labor. His blood, sweat and tears were poured into 5,000 pinpoint forehands and two-fisted backhands against a player whose game plan it is to return 5,001.

This time, Agassi persisted against the master of persistence.

And suddenly, a U.S. Open badly thirsting for some star quality other than two brothers who clown with the crowd and double fault a lot, had one. He wasn’t Broadway Joe yet, but Big Apple Andre has a nice ring to it. Times Square isn’t, and neither is Agassi, who wears his hair long, covering his earring, and dresses like a Raider fan in a sport where off-white is considered wild and crazy.

Although Agassi’s victory advanced him only into the quarterfinals, where he will face Austria’s Thomas Muster on Wednesday, it was an advance of some significance for the high-roller from Las Vegas.

His current ranking of No. 20, after five consecutive years in the top 10, is the result of a 1993 season in which he played only 13 tournaments and had wrist surgery Dec. 20. Ever since he won at Wimbledon in 1992, a shocking result for a backcourt player, he has been no factor in the Grand Slam tournaments. This year, he wasn’t healthy enough to play the Australian Open, lost in the second round of the French Open to Muster and went out in the round of 16 at Wimbledon against Todd Martin.

So a quarterfinal match with a beatable Muster, on the side of a draw that opened up early with the first-day departures of second-seeded Goran Ivanisevic and seventh-seeded Boris Becker, is a very healthy spot for Agassi, especially an Agassi bolstered by such a hard-fought thriller as Monday’s victory over Chang.

“I felt like I’ve been playing well and been focusing well and really wanting this, but you don’t really know that for sure until you are pushed like that,” Agassi said. “And to get through it is everything to me. It allows me to believe I can win the tournament.”

He also said, “This is a perfect example of the kind of a match I never would have gotten through a year ago.”

For that, he credits his new coach, Brad Gilbert, the man who made a career out of winning ugly and wrote a book about it with that title. “Brad spent his whole career winning matches that he shouldn’t have,” Agassi said. “I have kind of done the opposite. I lost a lot of matches in my career that I should have won.”

Agassi, 24, and Chang, 22, have been blasting shots over the net at each other since Agassi was 11 and Chang 9. The first time they played was in a junior age-12 tournament at Morley Field in San Diego.

“I think he stayed at my house,” said Chang, who grew up in Placentia, resides for the most part in Coto De Caza now, and who recalled that there was a lot of showman in Andre, even back then. He would hit underhand serves, things like that, but he had very short hair back then,” Chang said. “He didn’t bleach his hair until later . . . but as years went by, he grew his hair long and got the earrings and gradually started to go. . . . so. . . .”

Chang never finished the sentence, nor did he finish the match in the fashion many have come to expect of him. But then, Agassi had lots to do with that.

Early in the final set, Chang lost eight consecutive points, including one thriller in which he sent Agassi scrambling wide to his right with a short volley and saw Agassi slap a winning forehand around the right side of the net post, a perfectly legal shot and one that earned Agassi triple break point. Agassi took the break on the next point, then attacked Chang relentlessly in Chang’s 1-3 service game and got the second break when Chang missed a backhand volley by inches.

For Agassi, all that was left after that was picking which shirt in his bag to throw to the crowd, giving some bows to a suddenly adoring crowd, and adding some perspective of his own to what it all meant.

“This is, yeah, the best I have ever hit a tennis ball, absolutely,” he said.

And how will he prepare for Muster, a veteran left-hander?

“I’ll just think backwards for three hours,” he said.

In New York, that’ll work fine.

Notes

Thomas Muster, seeded 13th, advanced to the quarterfinals by ousting third-seeded Sergi Bruguera, 6-4, 7-6 (7-4), 6-4. . . . The rest of the bottom half of the men’s draw includes ninth-seeded Todd Martin and unseeded Bernd Karbacher of Germany. Martin advanced in the evening session, when unseeded Richey Reneberg, having won the first set at 6-3, suffered a pulled hamstring muscle and quit at 0-3 of the second set. Karbacher got the spot in the quarterfinals against Martin by beating qualifier Gianluca Pozzi of Italy, 6-2, 4-6, 6-3, 6-4.

The women’s quarterfinals were completed Monday with No. 1 Steffi Graf of Germany sailing past Zina Garrison Jackson, 6-1, 6-2, No. 4 Mary Pierce of France beating Iva Majoli of Croatia by the same score, No. 7 Jana Novotna of the Czech Republic beating No. 16 Magdalena Maleeva of Bulgaria, 6-0, 6-4, and No. 11 Amanda Coetzer of South Africa ousting Mana Endo of Japan, 6-3, 6-0.