Andre Agassi

Andre Agassi

Andre Kirk Agassi is an American retired professional tennis player and former world No. 1. He is an eight-time Grand Slam champion and a 1996 Olympic gold medalist. During his 20-plus year tour career, Agassi was known by the nickname ‘The Punisher’ He is the founder of the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation, which has raised over USD 60 million for at-risk children in Southern Nevada.

About Andre Agassi in brief

Summary Andre AgassiAndre Kirk Agassi is an American retired professional tennis player and former world No. 1. He is an eight-time Grand Slam champion and a 1996 Olympic gold medalist. Agassi retired from professional tennis on September 3, 2006, after losing in the third round of the US Open to Benjamin Becker. During his 20-plus year tour career, Agassi was known by the nickname ‘The Punisher’ He is the founder of the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation, which has raised over USD 60 million for at-risk children in Southern Nevada. He has been married to fellow tennis player Steffi Graf since 2001. His father is a former Olympic boxer from Iran and his mother is a breast cancer survivor. He was given the middle name Kirk after Kirk Kerkorian, an Armenian American billionaire. He won the 1982 National Indoor Boys 14s Doubles Championship in Chicago. In 1988, he set the open-era record for most consecutive victories by a male teenager. He also won 17 ATP Masters Series titles and was part of the winning Davis Cup teams in 1990, 1992 and 1995. In the Open Era, he was the first male player to win four Australian Open titles, a record that was later surpassed by Novak Djokovic when he won his fifth title in 2015, and then by Roger Federer in 2017. In addition to not playing the Australian Open for the first eight years of his career, he chose not to play at Wimbledon from 1988 through 1990 and a Wimbledon public statement was made in 1990.

In 1994, he became the first man to win all four Grand Slam tournaments on three different surfaces, and the last American male to win both the French Open and Australian Open. In 1996, he won the 1996 Olympics gold medal in the men’s singles. He met his wife, SteffI Graf, at Tropicana Las Vegas, in 1963 and they have three older siblings – Rita, Philip and Tami. In 2001, the Foundation opened theAndre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas,. He won his first top-level singles title in 1987 at the Sulaparica Sul American Open and ended the year ranked No. 25. In December of that year, he had won six additional tournaments by the time he had reached the top of the ATP rankings. It was the fastest anyone had reached that level in his career after playing in just 43 tournaments in history. In 1998, he reached No. 3, behind Ivan Lendl and Mats Wilander, and was second-ranked behind Ivan Ivanlendl. In 1999, he achieved the Career Golden Slam, the first of two to achieve the Career Grand Slam and the only man to achieve a Career Super Slam. In 2002, he also won the US$1 million prize money in just three tournaments. In 2004, he broke the world record for the most consecutive wins by a teenage male player by winning six tournaments in a single year. In 2006, he surpassed that record with six wins in a row at the U.S. Open.