Agassi Keeps the Show Going

A 36-year-old man with a tank running on empty and a desire-needle still pointing to full put on a show Monday night at the U.S. Open tennis tournament that will long be remembered.

If it is the last we see of Andre Agassi at this level, it will suffice.

The show was Jimmy Connors-esque, a first-rounder for the ages. Agassi took a record crowd of 23,736 in the Arthur Ashe Stadium of the U.S. Tennis Assn.’s Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and gave them more than three hours of goose bumps.

Perhaps not since Connors made his heroic run to the semifinals here in 1991, at age 39, has there been that much emotion for a player, or a match.

Agassi, like Connors ever the showman, played off the New York crowd like somebody who has been here for the last 21 years, which he has.

“The loudest sound in the world is 23,000 New Yorkers,” he said afterward.

Agassi is playing in his last tennis tournament. He is ready for the retirement watch and the rocking chair. He has won this Grand Slam event twice, has won six other majors and enough money and fame to expect nothing but sunny days in his future. He is here to try it one more time, to take one more shot at that feeling when they hand you the big trophy.

Nobody expects that. Everybody in tennis is just grateful for one last chance to see him on the big stage. That apparently is enough for everybody except Agassi.

On this night, there was no goodbye in him. No way. No how. He wouldn’t let it happen.

He was playing a decent Romanian player named Andrei Pavel, who is 32, been around a long time and has plenty of game. Monday night, it looked as if he had more than enough, as he took the first set in a tiebreaker, lost the second in another tiebreaker after having a set point and then ran out to a 4-0 lead in the third.

But Agassi, as he always seems to do in big moments, figured it out, got back into the third set and won a tiebreaker before cruising through the fourth for the win.

There was so much difference in what was at stake for each. Pavel just wanted to get into the second round, something he has done only three times previously here. Agassi was playing to prolong the end, to make them put the watch back in the drawer, at least until Thursday, his next match. He was playing to keep alive that dream of the big trophy.

For a while, Pavel hit every line and returned every Agassi offering. But in the end, as has been the case throughout his career, Agassi simply refused to go away.

And what he achieved, on the stage he achieved it, was further evidence of what a sad day it will be, for tennis and sports fans, when it does end. That made Monday night’s match, for all its drama and subtext, one of the most important and intriguing first-rounders ever played.

When Agassi got to match point and the stadium rose as one, 23,736 people pumping adrenalin into his service arm, the TV close-up showed that he was near tears.

He told them in the on-court interview afterward: “I want to leave my best stuff out here on the court.”

They knew that. They had witnessed it.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.