Stephen Bierley in Paris Tennis
Andre Agassi, the pigeon-toed, scrub-headed Las Vegas American they call “Mr Electricity”, among more derogatory names, staged the comeback of his life to win the French Open with a remarkable 1-6, 2-6, 6- 4, 6-3, 6-4 victory over Andrei Medvedev.
By doing so he became only the fifth man in tennis history to win all four grand slam events, adding his name to an illustrious quartet: the Australians Rod Laver and Roy Emerson, his fellow American Don Budge and Britain’s Fred Perry. But in those players’ day three of the big four tournaments were played on grass. Agassi is the first man to win the titles on three different surfaces: clay, grass and hardcourt.
Roland Garros had barely recovered from the searing emotions of the women’s final on Saturday when Steffi Graf, also 29, had called upon all her vast experience to win her sixth title in Paris, and 22nd grand slam in all, beating world number one Martina Hingis of Switzerland. Graf wept tears of joy, Hingis of bitter disappointment.
It seemed too much to expect that Agassi would deliver the goods as well, thereby completing two days of almost unbearable passion and nostalgia. And when a brilliantly controlled and concentrated Medvedev took a two-set lead inside an hour, the 16 000 spectators resorted to a desultory Mexican wave to cheer themselves up.
Agassi had barely been able to hit a decent shot during that quite dreadful opening, when his thoughts flashed back to his two previous defeats in the final here and other people’s thoughts slipped back to all those desperately miserable performances in Europe over the past three years.
When he initially failed to regroup, after a brief shower had halted play for 25 minutes with the 24-year-old Medvedev leading 6-1, 1-0, the feeling of anticlimax was as tangible as the swirling, chilling wind.
Laver had expressed his fervent hopes that Agassi would achieve his goal, but after an hour he must surely have believed that he would be presenting the glittering Coupe de Mousquetaires to the Ukrainian.
“I left my heart and soul on the court. In the end Andre was simply better,” said a generous Medvedev, whose undoubted talent has been gloriously reignited over the past two weeks, highlighted by his defeat of Pete Sampras.
At number 100, Medvedev was the lowest- ranked player to reach the French final.
Two years ago Agassi, who has had lightning playing around his head (initially with flowing blond locks) for the whole of his career, slumped to number 141 in the world after his marriage to actress Brooke Shields, and he appeared to be hurtling along the road to tennis nowhere.
He made a huge effort last year to stop the rot but singularly failed to get beyond the final 16 of a grand slam event. A few weeks ago a damaged right shoulder looked likely to rule him out of this tournament, even though he claimed, after his sudden divorce, that his game was “back on track”.
Such statements had become a looped tape that nobody believed. He has proved everybody wrong with this win, which was clearly the most cherished of his life. At the end he dropped to his knees by his chair in silent prayer.
“I came up short but I never thought I would go this far in the first place,” said Medvedev, who only just made the automatic cut for the tournament, having slipped to number 100 in the rankings. “But Andre knew that by winning he was making history, and he can now argue that he is a greater player than Pete Sampras.”
This is indeed arguable, for although Sampras has never won the French Open, he has 11 grand slam titles to Agassi’s four. The pity is that Agassi, seeded number 13 here, has wasted so much of his career – one year on, one year off – and what might have been one of the great modern on-court rivalries with Sampras fizzled out almost before it began. Perhaps this achievement may help to resurrect it – and this year’s Wimbledon.
An hour after the victory the magnitude of his achievement, immediate and historical, had not sunk in.
“After those first two sets I was really embarrassed,” said Agassi, who lost the French Open final to Equador’s Andres Gomez in 1990 and to American Jim Courier a year later.
“It was real scary out there for me at the beginning,” he admitted, “but in the end it almost seemed it wasn’t really down to me. It was sheer destiny.”
The demons in Agassi’s head had been silenced.
ENDS
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