As we’ve been reminded this week, 1997 was not a good year for Andre Agassi. This isn’t normally the case when someone gets married, as Agassi did to Brooke Shields that April. But looking back, it doesn’t seem to have been a relationship built on a rock-solid foundation. Or much of any foundation at all: Agassi started doing crystal meth before the wedding, and when he filed for divorce exactly two years later, he cited an incompatibility in “tastes, natures, views, likes, and dislikes.” I’m not clear on the details of Nevada law, but something tells me you don’t need to list quite that many reasons to go splitsville in Las Vegas.
Andre found no refuge on the tennis court. He lost seven first-round matches, one of which came, in straight sets, at the hands of Justin Gimelstob (not that Justin wasn’t a good tennis player or anything; just sayin’), through the spring and summer. This was a also period in which Agassi now says he was taking the drug. Still, he started to show signs of life in August, just before the U.S. Open, when he reached the quarters in Indianapolis. At Flushing, Agassi made his debut inside brand-new Arthur Ashe Stadium at night against Steve Campbell. Above are five or so minutes from that match.
—These are the latter stages of the 4th set. Agassi won the first two 6-1, 6-1, and dropped the third.
—Besides the drugs, the losses, and the marriage woes, this was not a strong era for Agassi fashion-wise, either. As much as we’ve mocked the spandex, the mullet, and the acid-wash of the 1980s over the years, at least it was memorable and in some perverse way original. Agassi’s black-shoed, goateed, grunge era look here makes me think of Johnny Rotten after he went back to being John Lydon. The former Sex Pistols leader could never match the bold and flashy outrageousness of his earliest years. What does a punk do when he has to grow up? Did Lydon ever try crystal meth?
—I’d say Agassi is sweating more than normal here, but that could be a combination of the shirt color and me looking for signs of drugs. From what I’ve learned this week, crystal meth is mainly pseuodephrine, iodine, and red phosphorus. It causes, as Agassi, said, a euphoric energy rush. Unfortunately, it also destroys a lot of people’s lives (I guess Agassi’s version of this was the loss to Gimel?). There’s no way I can imagine playing on the stuff or using it as a performance enhancer.
—Agassi is visibly testier here than he will be in the future. Look at the anger after a missed first serve. He’ll eventually lose in the fourth-round to Pat Rafter in four very good sets. My main memory of that match was how hyped-up Agassi was. He was over-hyped, in fact, and it was one reason he lost.
—Could this tournament have been where he tested positive? There are more tests done at Slams, and he was there for more than a week.
—Agassi’s serve is much weaker than it would become. Very little back bend or kick. He can still belt a forehand, though, as he shows on one point, but he had yet to develop the grinding consistency that he would use to wear people down once he devoted himself to getting fit. And stopped, uh, using crystal meth.
—He had also yet to develop his trademark post-victory kiss-blowing gesture. You can see that Agassi was an edgier and less lovable figure in those days. We usually think of his transformation as going from 1980s darkness—mullet, spandex, underachieving, cursing, image is everything—straight into the golden late-career light of multiple Slams, beloved elder status, ultra-fitness, fatherhood, and charity. But 1997 was a grim waystation between those two stops. There was still a negativity about his on-court persona at this point.
—This turned a lot of people off. For fans of the serene and classy Pete Sampras, Agassi will always be defined by his punk image and the nasty, blue-collar edge he inherited from his father. I went the other way; I liked Agassi’s raw humanity. He was surface rather than depth at the start, a constant seeker—remember the early Bible-reading Andre?—and a sucker for fads. He always talked about his desire to be “carried away” by something, anything. What is his crazed devotion to fitness but the flip side of his drug use? As Martin Amis said, we liked Andre because he always took it too far. Like I said yesterday, there’s something extremely American about this, and extremely American, for better and worse, about Agassi.
I don’t like knowing that he lied to cover it up. I don’t like that he played on when he should have been suspended. And I want to know who the heck “Slim” is. Those two first two things, rather than the drug use itself, will likely bother me in the future. There have been stronger reactions: Navratilova and Nadal have each said, in different words, that Agassi has damaged the sport. Nadal also wonders why he had to come out with it at all. Agassi does have a lot of books he needs to sell—his pre-recession advance was something like $4 million—though he still didn’t need to throw this fact in. I have no idea why he did it. All I can do is echo Amis: Agassi's fans loved him because he gave us so much. He's doing it again. He's still going too far.