Head-Shot for Haiti

It may have been the last thing anyone expected, or even wanted, out of an evening of charity tennis, but the Hit for Haiti got suspiciously interesting last night. Leave it to the loudest and baldest of its participants, Andre Agassi, to make it happen, by taking the whole event one step farther than necessary.

This, as you know if you’ve read this column before, is a reference to my go-to quote about all things having to do with Andre. It came, as a lot of tennis-oriented quotes do, from Martin Amis, and it went something like, “What we love about Agassi is that he always goes too far, whichever direction it is.”

Whether Andre took it too far Friday night will depend on the perspective—or prejudice, if you prefer—you bring to the match. Were you an Andre fan, or a Pete fan? What do you like in an athlete, energetic personality or quiet class? We can agree on one thing: Once they wire these guys up to a mike, at least one of them needs to talk, and that duty was always going to fall on Agassi. In his years with World Team Tennis and as an in-demand retiree, he has become an all-star of corporate, hit-and-giggle, exhibition tennis, right up there with professional entertainers like Yannick Noah and Mansour Bahrami.

But it’s not a talent that every, and even many, champion owns, and that goes double for Pete Sampras, who looked less-than-totally comfortable right from the beginning. It’s also true of Nadal, who is hardly effusive or even all that happy in English. Plus, there was a weird subtext that I didn’t remember until those three guys took their places on center court. Didn’t Nadal just rip Agassi, pretty seriously rip Agassi, for revealing his hushed-up positive drug test? And didn’t Pete recently punch back at Andre for calling him cheap and boring, all in the name of selling a book? And while we’re at it, didn’t Agassi just make the rounds of every media outlet imaginable and unimaginable, telling us in chastened tones about how much he hated tennis and how much he regretted half the things he’s done in his life?

Well, yeah, but you wouldn’t have known there was any tension at all from the way Agassi took the court. He came to play—I could see in the warm-ups that he had his strokes clicking—he came to entertain, he came to try to plant a ball in Roger Federer’s chest. It took him all of two seconds for his enthusiasm to bubble over the top. When Justin Gimelstob asked him before they began playing, “What did you think of you wife’s performance [referring to Steffi Graf in the previous doubles match], Andre responded, “You mean on the court?” When the crowd let out a collectively embarrassed giggle, he yelled, “Get your mind out of the gutter!” The Hit for Haiti was off to a very crass and very funny start.

As an Andre fan, I enjoyed the performance. I thought he was right to call out Sampras for not saying anything—I know it’s not Pete’s thing, but his silence over the course of the set was pretty conspicuous. Nadal and Federer had at least made stabs at countering Andre’s chatter-dominance. And when Andre mocked Pete’s cheapness again by pulling his empty sweats-pockets out, I didn’t think it was malicious. I got the impression that he thought Pete would find it funny, because he’d recently called Pete to try to put the book situation behind them. I thought Pete’s serve at Andre’s head was equally funny. But it was also a little too close to Agassi’s dome for comfort, and the moment got a little too real for comfort. Some of the air went out of the stadium after that, as we all asked each other, “What was that about?” Seeing it again later on TV, and seeing Sampras’ face up close, it didn’t look quite as serious, but there’s no question that neither guy knew exactly how to act afterward.

Andre kept talking, with the same borderline-crass humor. Asked by  Gimelstob on the next changeover how the evening was going, he answered, a little too glibly for the moment and the topic, “It’s all for Haiti, baby”—the line made me laugh, even if it wasn’t in the most appropriate somber taste. As for Pete, he got more serious. As on most occasions, let his racquet do the talking late in the set, when he came up with a couple bomb serves that reminded everyone of why he was on this court in the first place. Two people I talked to thought this was poetic justice for Sampras. My prejudices firmly in place, I was more impressed—knocked back, really—by a forehand that Agassi had hit earlier in the match. He snapped his wrist and drilled it with such high-velocity precision at Federer’s feet that  the greatest player in the world couldn’t do anything but dance out of the way. It was eye-popping, and just what the crowd came to see. But it also seemed to make Federer a little uncomfortable—was this bald, drug-snorting maniac trying to hurt him? No, it was Andre, overenthused frat boy and world-class philanthropist, meth-head and career Grand Slammer, going too far again.