Agassi Gets His Year Off to a Grand Start

He is an unrelenting pit bull. If he is across the net from you in a tennis match, he is unflinching, unbending, unstoppable. He is Andre Agassi, men’s singles champion of the Australian Open.

He won that title, yet another in his current march through men’s tennis, by beating defending champion Yevgeny Kafelnikov of Russia on the fast center court at Rod Laver Arena today, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4.

It marked Agassi’s sixth title in a Grand Slam event, and his third in the last four. He started the run in Paris a year ago when he came from two sets down to win the French, becoming only the fifth man in history to win all four of the Grand Slam titles at least once. He went to Wimbledon, ran into Pete Sampras in the final, and lost to a player playing his best on his best surface. Then he ran through the U.S. Open, beating Kafelnikov in the semifinals and Todd Martin in the final.

That brought him here, to a tournament that he had won once before, in 1995, and onto a stage that was set early in the tournament with bright lights and huge headlines and Sampras on the other side of the net. Seldom does this sport command the sort of worldwide attention that match brought, and seldom does the match reach the level of the hype. When it did, and when Agassi beat Sampras in a memorable semifinal, that brought the quick-handed, quick-minded Agassi to a fitting final stage: a center court recently named for Laver, the last man able to get to four consecutive Grand Slam event finals, back in 1969.

When it was over, when he served for the match and sprinkled the game with his fastest serve of the day at 122 mph, and when he closed it out with an ace on the line, he turned and faced his entourage and simply smiled and shrugged. It was almost as if he couldn’t believe it could get this good, that he could play this well for this long.

In that entourage were Coach Brad Gilbert, trainer Gil Reyes and girlfriend Steffi Graf. There were hugs all around, and afterward, in the public awards ceremony, Agassi thanked Gilbert and Reyes by name, but said nothing about Graf, to whom he apparently wants to allow as much privacy as possible. That, of course, seems a bit unrealistic, since she won 22 Grand Slam event titles, won the real Grand Slam, plus the Olympics, in 1988, and probably had her picture taken more here than any other female player, including all those in the tournament.

Afterward, when asked about his omission of Graf from his public statements, Agassi said that he had talked about Gilbert and Reyes because “they work directly with my game.” Then he added, “She’s not confused about how much I appreciate her support. I feel like most people tend to, that our relationship is sacred, it is for us and not for other people.”

Agassi lost the first set, a set in which there were five service breaks, and seemed to be having trouble dialing in his sights. But once he got his teeth into Kafelnikov’s baseline game, and Kafelnikov could see that there would be some bending but no breaking on the other side of the net, it was only a matter of how quickly Kafelnikov would become totally disheartened.

The first signs of that were some costly double faults that led to service breaks and that put Kafelnikov on the defensive, with the reality of his situation undoubtedly setting in quickly.

“It was amazing how he had the ability, from losing that first set,” Kafelnikov said, “to raise his level of play and continue to raise it in the second set and third set and fourth set and right to the last game.”

Kafelnikov admitted that he began to tire near the end of the third set, and Agassi said, “It quickly turned into a physical match, and I liked that.”

There was one exchange of ground strokes that was especially telling, when each set up on diagonal corners and whacked backhands back and forth. It went to 12, 13, 15 strokes before Kafelnikov finally hit one wide.

“There was a bit of ego there,” Agassi said. “I’m not going to back down, and he’s saying he’s not going to back down. Eventually, he had the bad wind side and could control it less and he missed.”

Agassi is No. 1 in the world and it is starting to appear that he has a stranglehold on the top of the men’s tour. At the moment, barring injury and loss of interest or the unexpected development of another player up into Agassi’s current stratosphere, it appears that Agassi is beatable at Wimbledon, by Sampras.

Period.

Which raises the subject of a real Grand Slam, all four of the major titles in a single year. The public address announcer, who had introduced him as “Andre the Magnificent” in the postmatch ceremony, raised the topic in public. Pat Cash, the Australian who won the 1987 Wimbledon title, raised it early in this tournament when he said that, the way Agassi is playing, he actually could do what nobody since Laver in ’69 has.

Agassi has called that topic “an absurd conversation.”

Kafelnikov might disagree. His ceremony speech probably summed up the way the entire men’s tour must feel about now, in the wake of the blitz with which Agassi has hit all his competitors. Agassi has, literally, driven them to drink.

“I feel like, right now, I deserve a couple of Heinekens,” he said.