Agassi’s Buzz Quotient Is Light-Years Ahead

If Andre Agassi wins this week’s Mercedes-Benz Cup tennis event at UCLA, he will be known as two things:

1. Champion.

2. The man who saved the tournament.

The rescue effort by the veteran superstar, who has as much name identification and marketability as the other 31 players here combined, continued Thursday. Agassi beat unseeded Kevin Kim in the second round, 6-2, 7-5, and will join the following in the quarterfinals: Paradorn Srichaphan, Xavier Malisse, Juan Ignacio Chela, Gilles Muller, Robby Ginepri, Ricardo Mello and Dominik Hrbaty.

Yes, those are tennis players, not questions in a spelling bee.

They are all good players, although any resemblance between these guys and Roger Federer is purely delusional. But their ability to create a buzz or attract some late-week ticket movement for the ATP event that ends Sunday is limited. You’re not going to hear a lot of talk around the office water cooler today like this: “Hey, whaddya think? Mello or Malisse in the final?”

That leaves the 35-year-old Agassi, just back after a long injury layoff, to shoulder the burden. He is still ranked No. 6 in the world, still takes the ball off the ground about half a second earlier than anybody else on the tour, except maybe Federer, and still has that swagger, charisma and connection with the fans that tennis wishes it could bottle.

The total Grand Slam event titles among those in this quarterfinal field is eight. All Agassi’s.

When somebody couched a question carefully to Agassi about his feelings on the need to go deep into this tournament, he replied, “I want to go deep for my sake. It’s a treat for me to play in front of [the fans]. This has always been a great tournament for me.”

Agassi then addressed this year’s situation, acknowledging that the event had been hit by “unfortunate pullouts” and “odd circumstances.”

The highlights, or lowlights, of that included losing Andy Roddick to an injury on the night of the draw last week; having only two seeded players, No. 1 Agassi and No. 2 Hrbaty, get through the second round; having last year’s runner-up, Nicolas Kiefer, pull out after five games in his first-round match; and having last year’s winner, Tommy Haas, lose to the 62nd-ranked player, Malisse, in the second round.

But the real backbreaker was the night-of-the-match double withdrawals of two American players, Mardy Fish and Taylor Dent, who were to play each other in the second night match Tuesday. Tournament Director Bob Kramer was forced to fill with two players, known as lucky losers because they got in the main draw despite losing in the pre-tournament qualifying event. They had signed a sheet and hung around, hoping for a miracle.

And their prayers were answered when Fish said his sore wrist was still sore and Dent -- apparently missing that part of the tennis players’ manual where it says that summer events are often played outdoors, where there is sun and heat -- withdrew because he was still suffering from the effects of the heat at last week’s tournament.

That left Agassi, who had been taking shots to relieve the pain of a nerve injury in his hip and hadn’t been able to practice hard until the Monday before this tournament. And after brushing away another lucky loser in the first round, and getting past Kim, a former UCLA player who has struggled for years on the tour to get his ranking under No. 100, Agassi now will face No. 44 Srichaphan in a 2 p.m. quarterfinal today.

“I have real issues with him,” Agassi said. “This guy hits the ball real big.”

He also had a few issues with Kim, with whom Agassi practiced occasionally when he was married to Brooke Shields and lived in Los Angeles.

“He stepped it up in the second set,” Agassi said. “The overall quality of the match picked up.”

Kim’s view: “I learned a lot out there today. I learned I have plenty of weaknesses in my game.”

The other quarterfinal matchups have Hrbaty facing Mello, Muller facing Ginepri and Malisse facing Chela.

Ginepri made it into the quarterfinals with a 6-3, 7-6 (2) win over James Blake, whose star has slipped to the point where his ranking (108) couldn’t get him into the tournament draw. So the organizers gave him a wild card, and he reciprocated with a competitive and entertaining effort in the featured night match against No. 63 Ginepri, who won last week’s tournament in Indianapolis.