Agassi eyes night Grand Slam tie

Andre Agassi’s decision to play this week’s Stella Artois Championships for only the second time in his career is testament to his unquenchable desire to claim a ninth Grand Slam title which he says would rank as perhaps the greatest of them all.

Agassi marks his first Queen’s Club campaign in three years with his 1,000th career match against Australia’s Peter Luczak tomorrow. He is only the seventh man in the Open era to achieve the milestone.

And he is relishing his extra time on a surface which he once scorned because he believed it could never showcase the finer points of his game.

The long-haired Las Vegas kid who famously refused to trade his colourful costumes for Wimbledon’s whites for three years got over his aversion and now looks back upon a career on the green stuff which is as triumphant as it is tinged with a little regret.

Agassi told PA Sport: “If somebody had told me 14 years on that I would still be coming back and looking forward to [the grass court season], I would have had a tough time believing it.

“Ultimately the reason for me not playing was a real immature approach towards what I felt was best for me at the time.

“I didn’t want to make those adjustments and I wanted the time off so I joked about the colour and the white stuff. Really that wasn’t part of it.

“I just didn’t have the belief that I was going to do well and it was a short season so I could afford to just put all my hopes on clay.

“It was my loss because every year that goes by is a year gone and I wish I would have played it even more.”

That a man of Agassi’s calibre once possessed such a defeatist attitude is hard to believe now, 11 years after his 1992 Wimbledon win which finally helped him banish those grass-court demons.

These days the 33-year-old Agassi is acutely aware that he must seize all his chances. He is the oldest player at Queen’s Club and will be only the seventh player in the Open era to reach the thousand milestone.

But the advancing years have done nothing to curb his enthusiasm for more of a game which has provided him with 16 years of record-breaking glory and entered him into an exclusive five-strong club of players to win all four Grand Slam titles.

“I grab these moments a lot tighter than I used to, and when I won Australia this year it proved all over again that truly every moment out there can become more special,” Agassi said.

“I approach this month as the same thing, an opportunity to do something that will possibly be the most special one of them all.

“I’m the first one to call something as I see it. I don’t have a lot of time left regardless of how long I can stretch it.

“The question to me is not how long I have, it is where I stand now and what my goals are what I am still able to accomplish.

“I do believe that as you get older you have a stronger ability to embrace the rare moments and you become more aware of how rare they are. To win Wimbledon again would be a quite incredible accomplishment for me.”

Those rivals with designs on a similar kind of dominance will be disappointed if they hoped Agassi might choose to follow the path of his great rival Pete Sampras and leave the way open for youth by sliding gradually towards a non-commital kind of retirement.

Marriage to Steffi Graf, the birth of their first son Jaden Gil two years ago and the second one on the way have only served to make Agassi more determined to succeed for their sakes and for that reason he insists that defeats such as his quarter-final loss to Guillermo Coria in Paris last week are as tough as ever.

“They hit me harder these days and I think that’s better,” Agassi added. “I think it is a function of knowing that my opportunities are getting less. Every time a loss feels painful I think it is a good thing.

“There is much less of a chance of me putting in an average performance when I’ve dragged my family half-way across the world to be somewhere.

“Being able to come here after a disappointing loss in Paris is a perfect example of what my little boy can offer me.

“I have greater clarity and focus and I find myself being able to get away from the game pretty easily because you go home and forget your day for better or for worse. Damn it, it doesn’t matter as long as we’re together.”

The family will be racking up the air miles for some time to come. Agassi says he has no idea of when or how the time will come to admit that he can no longer cut it at the top level.

He has no dream of going out with the champagne taste of more Grand Slam glory lingering on his lips; neither has he envisaged falling down the rankings and flailing away just for the sake of sticking around.

“For me it’s not about going out on top. It’s about feeling like I can still get the most out of myself, that I still have more I can do.

“So by definition how my career ends will be completely news to me. I’m going to keep pushing myself until I just wake up one day and realise I can’t do it to the same standard any more.

“I wake up every day with a belief and hope that I will be better than I was the day before. I want to believe I can keep getting better and when I can’t I hope I’m the first one to realise that.

“As of now every match I play I know I can always play better. I am always searching for that perfect game.

“I have an asset in my experience and when I’m done I’ll tip my hat and pass over whatever there is to pass over.

“But at the moment I deal with what’s inside those lines. There’s no age when you’re inside those lines.”