TENNIS / BILL DWYRE : He’s No. 1, and Not Just in Computer

Andre Agassi became No. 1 in the world of men’s tennis this week, but much more is involved in his march to the top than merely some computer saying it is so.

It wasn’t so long ago that Agassi, now 24, was a child with adult strokes, a man’s forehand attached to a 17-year-old’s acne.

The press had a field day with this youngster from Las Vegas. It wasn’t that he was dumb and dumber, just young and younger.

In the sports spotlight, he was fair game. And he was game for all that was fair and some that wasn’t. He loved the bright lights and center ring. But then, how could he not have, having grown up just a roll of the dice from strip queens, slot machines and a shark named Tark? This was his life, not a mirage.

For a while, his television commercial was his reality. Image is everything, it said. And so did he, by the way he dressed for matches, played to the crowd instead of for it, and established his priorities.

It appeared that, to him, marketing was bigger than matches. When he won, he gloried in stripping to the waist and tossing his sweaty top into a crowd of groupies, then marching off the court shirtless. Headline writers eagerly awaited his first tournament in Seattle.

But as the losses accumulated, his act wore thin.

More and more, he came through less and less in crucial matches. Some in the press dubbed him “Andre Agony.” Others called him “the Tinman,” especially after such heartless shows as his two-day, five-set loss to Boris Becker in Munich in a Davis Cup match in 1989 that he should have won half a dozen times. A few months later, after he’d won a tournament match and tossed his shirt into the crowd, somebody threw it back.

Even when he won at Wimbledon in 1992, his first try there after having previously snubbed the sport’s most prestigious event, it looked like a fluke. As incredible as it was for a player who returned serves much better than he hit them to win on a surface that promotes one-way bullets, it was explainable. Agassi had, after all, won the final against Goran Ivanisevic, who is from Croatia, by way of Mars.

Then Agassi slipped away from the tennis scene as he rehabilitated a surgically repaired wrist. And when he returned in the spring of 1994, he was different. His tennis was better, and so was his head.

There was a mind there now, an adult thought process. There was a perspective that said being able to play tennis was a God-given gift not to be taken lightly nor abused; that said his longtime confidant and coach, Nick Bollettieri, had used him as a pawn and dumped him easily when a younger, firmer backhand had walked into the party; that said the United States Tennis Assn. was mostly a bunch of middle-aged white guys named Bumpy who were sending him off to play Davis Cup in some jungle while stuffing their own money clips.

Right or wrong, he said it all, chin up, straight on, with strength of conviction. Like an adult.

Soon, he was taking New York by storm with a U.S. Open title, then the Australian Open the same way. And suddenly, men’s tennis had its best rivalry since Borg-McEnroe, as Agassi and No. 1 Pete Sampras swapped important titles at Indian Wells and Key Biscayne.

And now, the computer says that Andre Agassi is No. 1.

But real life beat the machine by about a month. After his loss to Sampras in the Indian Wells final March 13, Agassi took the microphone at center court and said he had wanted to win the match for his father, who was about to undergo open-heart surgery. Three or four years ago, it had appeared that Agassi wanted to win only for whoever was making the next commercial.

Agassi, playing in Japan this week, was quoted on his No. 1 status as saying: “You work for something like this all your life, and even if you have it for only an hour, it is something to cherish.”

Pretty adult-sounding, huh?

*

Tennis Notes

This year could be one of the best late summers of tennis in Los Angeles. First, two Japanese car companies have picked up sponsorship of sometimes-struggling pro events, probably stabilizing each. The L.A. Open, long the Pacific Southwest and more recently the Volvo L.A. Open, will be held once again at the UCLA Tennis Center, but this year’s July 31-Aug. 6 event will be called the Infiniti Open. The next week at the Manhattan Tennis Club in Manhattan Beach, the women’s event that was long the Virginia Slims, will become the Acura Classic.

And it may get better. It was learned this week that what had first appeared to be a done deal for Las Vegas to hold the Davis Cup semifinals against Sweden Sept. 22-24, is now a five-site race among Las Vegas; Key Biscayne, Fla.; Hilton Head, S.C.; La Costa, and UCLA. . . . Also, Pete Sampras probably will play a Forum exhibition series Sept. 14--the Thursday after the U.S. Open--against none other than John McEnroe.

Looking for future Samprases and Andre Agassis? Take in the Ojai Collegiate tournament April 27-30. This will be the event’s 96th year, and more than two dozen Wimbledon champions--from Jack Kramer to Alex Olmedo to Jimmy Connors--have played in quaint little Libbey Park on Sunday afternoon finals day. . . . The women’s tour Fed Cup, with a format looking more and more like the Davis Cup, opens with first-round play this weekend. The United States will play Austria at Aventura, Fla.