“Meeting Your Match,” by Dodie Kazanjian, was originally published in the August 2004 issue of Vogue.
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From their hilltop estate in Tiburon, Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf can look across the bay and see San Francisco preening itself in the sun, while one tower of the Golden Gate Bridge rises magically above a puffy cloud bank. The tennis world’s royal couple—the most spectacular example of a marital merger between two number-one athletes—have spent the whole morning being photographed for Vogue. In their mid-30s, tanned and fit, they both project the silky, contained energy of great athletes, athletes who, though blissfully young by ordinary standards, are already considered old in their chosen profession.
The most dominant woman player of her time, Steffi won 22 Grand Slam titles before she retired in 1999, at the age of 30. This July, she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. Andre has won eight Grand Slams so far, but at the astonishingly advanced age (for tennis) of 34, he could yet win another. Tennis is increasingly a young man’s game these days, and the odds against Agassi are daunting, but it’s still too early to count him out. His phenomenal comeback is already a tennis legend. In 1997, having slipped to 141 in the rankings, he remade himself through an all-out regimen of rigorous physical training; by 1999, he was number one in the world, and he’s been at or near the top ever since, winning the Australian Open last year and more than holding his own against the newest generation of power hitters. “I have an insane amount of respect for him,” Andy Roddick said recently. “The way he competes—he treats every match like it’s Armageddon.”
Andre, his coach Darren Cahill, his lawyer and close friend Todd Wilson, and Gene Marshall, a Las Vegas friend who is also helping him train, are barreling over the Golden Gate Bridge in Andre’s Lincoln Navigator, with me following anxiously in my rented Pontiac, trying to keep them in sight. Andre, who drives with the same speed and confidence he brings to the court, is headed for the Olympic Club in San Francisco. He’s getting ready for the French Open, which starts in two weeks, and he needs to practice on a clay surface like the ones at Roland Garros. His own court in Tiburon has a hard surface, and there aren’t any clay courts in Las Vegas, his real home, in good enough shape. We park on the road above the tennis courts at this famous club, whose golf course has often been host to the U.S. Open. For the next hour and a half, Darren feeds him backhands and forehands, and Andre rockets them back, clipping the lines in the corners, grunting vigorously on every shot. “That’s great tennis,” Darren says more than once. (Not great enough, apparently; in the weeks after my visit, Agassi got knocked out in the first round at the French Open and two other European tournaments—the first time since August 1997 he’s lost three straight opening-round matches—and then withdrew from Wimbledon, citing a hip injury.) But Andre is not entirely happy with his game today. His rhythm is a little off, he says, and the surface is too powdery.