One, Two, Three, Here Comes Agassi

Once a day away from not playing here and two points from a second-round dismissal, Andre Agassi suddenly had other numbers to ponder after his impressive fourth-round French Open victory Sunday over defending champion Carlos Moya.

Un, deux, trois.

Translation: Three victories from winning the French Open.

Agassi punctuated that message by pounding his chest three times in front of a deliriously happy sellout Court Central crowd after Moya tried--and missed--an improbable between-the-legs shot on match point to seal the American’s victory.

Agassi, the master of reinvention, turned this match around in time to defeat the fourth-seeded Spaniard, 4-6, 7-5, 7-5, 6-1, in 2 hours 31 minutes at Roland Garros. Strangely, Moya went wandering--mentally, that is--after he held a 6-4, 4-1 lead.

The 13th-seeded Agassi seized the opening, hoarded it, and never gave it back.

Through Agassi’s various starts and stops of late, success in Grand Slams had eluded him until this fortnight. This is his best Slam showing since he reached the semifinals at the U.S. Open in 1996. He almost did not make the trip to Paris because of a shoulder injury, one day away from not playing.

At 29, Agassi has become the sentimental favorite, and a sympathetic figure too, because of the end of his marriage to actress Brooke Shields.

“The satisfaction comes just feeling I can still do it,” he said. “That’s important. You can believe all you want, but until you do it, it’s just a bunch of talk.

“To actually go out there and do it certainly establishes to me that I have a platform to accomplish more dreams. I don’t think about my age until my body is in pain. Sometimes I’ve been forced to think about it.”

Sunday, the years melted away. Agassi was the one with the bounce in his step, the one sprinting to his courtside chair on changeovers. Moya, 22, was moving slowly and seemed exhausted just changing his shirt.

“I was thinking everything was done,” Moya said. “When Agassi plays really well, you get crazy.”

Moya usually does not lose his cool or at least his concentration. Oddly enough, the one-sided match worked against him, he said.

“The problem was that I was leading pretty easily,” Moya said. “You know, 6-4, 4-1 with two breaks [of serve].

“If it was more tight, more close a match, I would have been focused, but I started thinking about something else. When I wanted to play well again, I couldn’t. That was the problem.”

Perhaps he was looking ahead in the draw, to the quarterfinals.

“Anyway, you have to give a lot of credit to him,” he said of Agassi. “He played great. Then I tried to do my best and I couldn’t. He was playing very well, hitting very hard. If everything was going the way it was supposed to be at 6-4, 4-1, it should have been 6-4, 6-2, 6-3 for me. But I’ve been making the stupid [shots]. He’s very dangerous, you cannot give him any chance to get in the game and I gave him many.”

Agassi began to pick apart Moya’s game, working his backhand and forcing him to bend low, something Moya does not like doing. Since this was their first match, it took Agassi some time to figure out Moya.

“Tactically speaking, I was getting him to slice a lot of backhands and I felt like his backhand was starting to break down,” Agassi said.

The crowd was backing Agassi, favoring the Las Vegas showman over the telegenic Spaniard. During the changeover before the 12th game of the second set, the spectators started doing the wave, holding up play and rattling Moya. Agassi broke his serve and took the set, 7-5, and Moya was never the same.

Which is probably why he tried a low-percentage shot on match point after Agassi flipped a lob over his head into the corner.

“I don’t think that’s a shot you should be trying too often,” Agassi said of Moya’s between-the-legs’ effort. “He was in a position where he didn’t have a choice, so once I saw him going for it, I liked my chances there.

“The fact that he didn’t blow it by me made me feel even better.”

Agassi caught another break when his nemesis Vince Spadea lost in the third round to qualifier Marcelo Filippini of Uruguay. Spadea dealt Agassi a tough defeat in the fourth round at the Australian Open in January.

The 31-year-old Filippini, ranked 140th, continued his own improbable run by defeating 12th-seeded Greg Rusedski of Great Britain, 7-6 (10-8), 6-3, 6-4, in another fourth-round match, despite suffering from an abdominal strain and virus.

In the other two fourth-round matches, ninth-seeded Marcelo Rios of Chile defeated Alberto Berasategui of Spain in five sets after losing the first two, and Dominik Hrbaty of Slovakia beat Marat Safin of Russia. Safin did not attend the mandatory postmatch news conference and was fined $2,500 by the International Tennis Federation.