Agassi to the Rescue Again

Just when you think tennis is working its way to the back pages with the Nerf ball scores, the pigeon-toed bald guy from Las Vegas rides in on his white horse and saves the day.

If you watched Andre Agassi beat James Blake in a five-set thriller that went late into the night Wednesday in New York City at the U.S. Open, and if you have a heartbeat, you have a sense of what Agassi continues to do for his sport. To succeed, any sport needs drama and charisma. Class helps too.

Agassi brings it all.

And it has started to rub off. If the way Blake played, and conducted himself in the aftermath, isn’t a precursor of great days ahead for him and his sport, then we all need to junk our crystal balls.

In a sport that continues to try to find itself in the midst of too many tournaments that don’t matter, too many players who don’t care, and too much whining and pulling out of events with hangnails, there always seems to be the U.S. Open.

It is the Grandest of the Slams, the one time and place where the civility of tennis gives way to the animal magnitude of the city in which it is playing.

The Australian Open is a gentle sail on clear blue waters in an uncrowded land far, far away. The French Open is great restaurants and culture. Wimbledon is tea and crumpets and all that British stiff-upper-lip stuff.

The U.S. Open is hot, ugly, crowded and let’s go kick the other guy’s butt. It’s about as subtle as one of its city’s cabbies, cutting off another and acknowledging the maneuver with an extended middle finger.

Agassi’s five-set victory -- at 35, he rallied from two sets and one service break down and went for it all with a huge forehand on match point -- was manna from heaven for the sanctioning United States Tennis Assn., which generates more money during this two-week event than the gross national product of some small countries.

It isn’t so much that these USTA guys are great organizers or have some sort of formula for success. They have the right place and the right time of the season for fireworks. The U.S. Open is tennis’ Fourth of July.

Agassi-Blake was Pete Sampras throwing up all over the court and going on to win. It was Jimmy Connors, at 39, fist-pumping to a night crowd of beered-up stockbrokers and most of them fist-pumping back.

It was what the sport needed so that the guy at the water cooler the next day could forget for a moment whether Mike Scioscia should have yanked a pitcher or whether Kobe can carry the Lakers all the way back.

Tennis isn’t mainstream. Agassi is.

The reality of that usually sends a collective chill down the spine of tennis, because the next question always is: For how long?

It is a premise that we all accept as doctrine: He is 35, he has had some injuries, he is at the end.

But, maybe, Wednesday’s match taught us a lesson we’d previously missed. Maybe there is more of this left than we think. Maybe we shouldn’t take every Agassi loss in a major event as the book closing, the curtain coming down. Maybe he doesn’t know it, and we don’t know it, but tennis may have several more years of riding on his shoulders.

Asked about retirement during his news conference in the wee hours of Thursday morning, Agassi said, “When I get asked that question, I’m just a bit numb to it. All I can say is what I feel, and it’s been the same, it’s no different. I don’t know what is going to happen.”

Another way to answer that, although Agassi clearly couldn’t and wouldn’t, is that Connors was a U.S. Open semifinalist at 39 and, suffice to say, Connors, although fit, never ran up and down hills on Christmas Eve in conditioning drills.

Roger Federer will probably win this tournament. At 24, he is so good that he is rapidly earning his way into the same paragraph as Rod Laver, Sampras and Roy Emerson. Agassi might not even get past another red-hot young American, 22-year-old Robby Ginepri, in today’s semifinals.

But for his sport, he has come through again in its time of need. They are paying attention again around the water cooler. The guys on “SportsCenter” are actually talking about tennis. The TV ratings for Agassi-Blake were off the charts, and now that people are paying attention, the ratings ought to be high for the entire weekend of semifinals and finals.

And the Nerf ball scores are still on the back pages.