Each summer Sports Illustrated revisits, remembers and rethink some of the biggest names and most important stories of the sport’s past. Go back all week for more Where are they now? story.
Tracy Austin took the double. It’s the spring of 2019, the pre-COVID-19 halcyon days, and Austin, once the No.1 ranked player on the WTA Tour, sits in a booth at the USC tennis facility. There to watch his son Brandon, then a junior, play a match, he glanced over and saw the familiar face, a genial, clean-shaven middle-aged man attired in a USC Trojans shirt. He was trailed by his blonde wife — wearing more elegant attire and a tight smile. She, too, was a familiar face. “It’s out of context, so it takes a second,” Austin said. “But I was like, ‘Wait, why was it Andre and Steffi?’
It was. And Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, arguably the most accomplished sports couple there ever were, have good reasons for being on campus that day. His son, Jaden, a cunning right-hand pitcher with Premier League stuff, recently committed to USC. The family came to see their friends who would come to play the afternoon games.
But the appeal of adjacent tennis facilities proved inevitable with Jaden’s parents, who had ruled the sport, winning 30 single singles titles among them (22-8 in Mother’s favor). Agassi settled in and watched. “You know how Andre and how his tennis brain works,” Austin says. “Immediately he started breaking Brandon’s game.”
And his wife? “Yes, he couldn’t be better,” recalls Austin, whose career briefly overlapped with Graf. “But you know how Steffi. I think she was quite quiet out to the burger truck and taking lunch for everyone.
Graf and Agassi will have more visits to Troy over the next few years. Jaden may have chosen a different hand-eye sport than his parents, but he, too, is an elite athlete. This spring, as a sophomore, he picked up a win against rival UCLA. He recently entered the transfer portal after leaving his head coach; regardless, he will likely be a Premier League draft pick.
That afternoon at the USC tennis facility, after Graf left, a woman who was sitting nearby, moved to another.
“Do you know who you’re talking about?” a woman asked.
“He said that his son played baseball at USC and he had a daughter in high school,” the other explained. “And she’s here with her husband. They live in Las Vegas.
“It’s Steffi Graf!” friends practically hissed.
“Ah maenya! How should I know?”
In his excellent book The Sports Gene, David Epstein, once a journalist at Sports Illustrated, tells the story of Steffi Graf going to a German sports academy as a girl. He tested on several tests, assessed on various dimensions – competitive desire, running speed, ability to support concentration. Across the board, he put first. As Wolfgang Schneider, a German sports psychologist, told Epstein, “We predict from lung capacity that he can become a European champion in the 1,500 meters.”
Whether he chose the sport or it was given to him, Graf devoted his great talent to the capacity to drive and lungs and a competitive drive towards tennis. His father, Peter, was a former football player and insurance salesman who took up tennis at age 27, relatively late in life for the new sport. But soon he was kagoda, quitting his job to give lessons, operating a local tennis club in the Rhineland town of Bruhl. When his daughter was born in 1969, Peter took little time to declare him the next champion.
Read More Where Are They Now? Stories
Indeed. By age 3, Steffi, armed with a sawn wooden racket, was beating the ball back and forth on the couch in the living room. If Steffi could go Peter’s shots 25 times in a row, she conferred the reward of ice cream and strawberries. On the same subject : 2022 NBA Draft Ratings: A selection analysis of all 58 picks tonight where the surprises began on the 1st.. “A lot of the time, on the twenty -fifth ball, I’ll hit it a lot so he can’t be awful anymore,” Peter Graf told the Los Angeles Times a few years later. “You can’t have ice cream all the time.”
At the age of 13, Steffi won the West Germany junior championship open to players 18 and under. That same year, he received a professional rank on the WTA computer. At the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, tennis was staged as a demonstration sport. Still, it draws a notable young pro field. Recently turned 15 years old, Graf is the youngest player in the lottery. She won gold.
In tennis — such as in boxing and golf and, well, as in most sports — it’s the shoulders and arms and the arms that receive all the credit. But the lower extremities, literally, do more than lift. And Steffi Graf’s feet propelled her across the court with efficiency and speed and grace. Pushing the gesture while driving into his stroke, Graf produces unbridled power, a kind of pop that doesn’t come from his slender frame. “He’s got a gymnast’s body,” Martina Navratilova said. “Then he hit the ball and, whoa, how did that happen?”
Graf’s great shot is his forehand, a terrifying explosion that he often sends ground to attack. “Fraulein Forehand,” Bud Collins memorably nicknamed her. But Graf’s versatile backhand presented a sort of secret weapon hiding in plain sight. She either deployed a heavy one-handed drive, or a scythe-like slice that remained low to the ground.
In addition to the athlete’s gift, Graf’s arrival time was also good. She came along as Chris Evert and Navratilova — a tennis duopoly for more than a decade — were both north of age 30. And another rising player from small-town Germany had recently broken through on the men’s side. So Steffi can ride the German tennis boom that was created by Boris Becker, but happily let him meet national expectations and media coverage. If the paparazzi breathlessly followed the romantic exploits of “Boom-Boom Boris,” or reported on every helicopter his jaunt to Monaco, it meant that much less airtime and fewer column inches devoted to his female counterpart. (This pressure will definitely price on Becker; he is currently in a British prison after he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for hiding assets during the bankruptcy process.)
With Peter watching, as usual, intently and intensively, Graf broke through at the 1987 French Open, outlasting Navratilova 6-4, 4-6, 8-6, and winning his first major title. “I used to be a little bit afraid to play Martina and Chris,” she said after the match in a rare burst of immodesty. “Now it’s their turn to be afraid of me.” He was barely a week from returning 18. After that came the flood.
In 1988, Graf not only won a Grand Slam — all four majors in a calendar year; an achievement no player, male or female, has pulled out since — but turned in a “Golden Slam” by winning the Olympic singles event in Seoul, to boot. She got three majors the following year and suddenly had a haul of eight — more than what John McEnroe throughout his entire career — before she was old enough to drink (in the United States, at least.) Her match record that year? 86–2.
And just as saying that Graf dominated women’s games over the next decade almost managed to sell her short, referring to Graf as “shy” or “personal,” as one inevitably does, it would also be an act of definitional kindness.
When Graf is not playing, he covers his face with a veil of blonde hair and avoids eye contact. By his own admission, he was not very interested in press conferences, in front of the camera and at sponsoring parties and other “events”. When forced to take questions, he gave polite and political answers. The WTA assigned a media relations worker to encourage Graf, the brightest star and people, to be more front-facing. The more he asked, the more he refused.
It’s not that Graf doesn’t have the charm or warmth behind the fire in the field. And he doesn’t, such a narrative is lazy, boring or scary or devoted to tennis to the exclusion of all. She read a book. She went to a Michael Jackson concert and met him backstage. (“Meeting these people is interesting,” he thinks, “because they’re not what you imagine after reading about them.”) He stays late at the disco. She never posed for the SI Swimsuit issue. He only maintains a thick membrane between himself and most of the world. “You have to respect him for that,” Jim Fuhse, a longtime WTA staffer and friend of Graf, once told me. “He never, ever woke up from just wanting the tennis to speak alone.”
Graf does so by marrying his shotmaking — and “stroke production,” in vernacular tennis — and athleticism with unshakeable, unbreakable will. He operates in two general modes: He will destroy opponents, clinically and efficiently, at least in the 1988 French Open final he won 6-0, 6-0 in 32 minutes.
Or he won’t be the best, but then jumps when the opportunity arises, as if only to tell him that I will not guide another court who is the winner. Consider: She won 107 degrees in her career; he became runner-up only 31 times. “A few times, you’ll think, ‘This is my day to beat Steffi.’ Then it won’t, ”says Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, head of Graf’s rivals whose head-to-head record was 8-28.
Graf was still in his mid-20s, when he eclipsed Navratilova and Evert and won his 19th degree, destined to be remembered as a GOAT. All in all, he would set a 377-week record, more than seven years — ranking No.1. Agreement to her versatility, she will win each of the four majors at least four times, something no other player, male or female, has done. As Navratilova once memorably put it, Graf so often reduced the WTA Tour to “Steffi and the seven dwarfs”.
Her rare career dips, tellingly, had little to do with resistance on the court. Peter Graf was implicated in a series of scandals that included tax evasion, for which he eventually served 25 months in German prison. (Steffi claims to have been unaware and exonerated.) Her father’s contretemps exacted the price on her results, not least in 1990 when she won the first major then, with Peter in the tabloid-lost the next three. “I can’t fight like usual,” he put it to The New York Times in the ’90s.
Graf and Agassi had their first child, Jaden, now a baseball prospect, in 2001, and a second, Jaz, in 2003.
In 1993, Graf’s rising rival, Monica Seles, was stabbed in court during a match. Not only did the crime occur in the German tournament, the criminal, a Graf fan, told authorities that he was acting to preserve his idol’s place at the top of the sport. (Seles had beaten Graf in four of their previous seven matches.) Some friends and former colleagues of Graf say that she never quite knew how to process this pivotal moment in tennis history. “I think she felt guilty benefiting in [Monica’s] absence,” says Pam Shriver. “But I think he’s also angry that people are holding it against him.”
What will happen to the Graf / Seles rivals — and the extended, history of women’s tennis — why not for that scary stab? It’s a great sport, counterfactual tragic. Tennis fans and historians can — and do — debate how causal and how correlated. But here’s the fact: In Seles’s absence, Graf won 10 of the next 13 majors she entered, cementing her place as an unrivaled and grande dame of all time.
By the late 1990s, the trails that turned on Graf began to take in considerable foot traffic. A cohort of new players began to match her strengths. Unlike Graf, this new breed of players wants the trappings of celebrities. Publicity. Red carpet and green room. The financial rewards of — dare we say it? —Be a brand. Williams sisters, Anna Kournikova, Martina Hingis … you can argue that they are “Steffi’s daughters.” But they are many things that are not graph.
Graph seems warm to the challenges of this generation. At the 1999 French Open, after recovering from a back problem, he blazed through the draw. At the time Graf, with dignified calm as usual, was in a disturbing position Hingis outspoken, tantrum-throwing teenager in the final, the entire stadium at Roland Garros was squarely in the corner of Graf, cheering her for victory, giving her a level of affection. that never came when he dominated. (Reman in Paris returned the next day to cheer on the sentiments of champion-to-be man, Andre Agassi.)
The following month at Wimbledon, Graf beat six players, including young Venus Williams, during the run to the final. There, he lost to Lindsay Davenport. The graph was 30; she was No. 3 in the rankings and more than held her own against this extroverted young opponent.
But then, in August 1999, Graf entered the WTA run-of-the-mill event outside of San Diego. In the first round, she played Amy Frazier, a Michigander whom Graf had beaten in each of their previous five matches. They split the first two sets. Graf walked off the court in the third, citing a hamstring injury. He retired from the match and, the day after, from professional tennis. She will rarely be seen in public again.
In addition to retirement, Graf experienced important life events in the summer of 1999. That season he began dating Andre Agassi. On the surface it is most unlikely couplings. Though they were both tennis titans, less than a year old, their paths didn’t cross much on the circuit. As Agassi tells it in his bracingly honest open autobiography, he has long admired Graf from a distance, but when he once asked her to hang out, he didn’t bother to respond.
Beyond that, the surface difference was previously such an Agassi neon dress. He had the celebrity wattage of his hometown of Las Vegas. Best known for the catchphrase, “Pictures are everything,” he is the most public figure. She’s the introvert’s introvert. He would rather eat the Wimbledon grass than write a confessional memoir such as the Open.
Finally, in 1999, Agassi, recently divorced from Brooke Shields, had the courage to ask Graf to train with him in the tournament. They found that their similarities were many, including their ambivalence about tennis and the complexities of having an overbearing father. (The first time they met, Mike Agassi and Peter Graf reportedly came to blows arguing about tennis). And Agassi and Graf also find that the difference can be complementary.
Soon, to the shock of the tennis republic, they were dating intensely. They married in 2001 and had two children, Jaden, now 20, and daughter Jaz, 18. After settling briefly outside San Francisco, they moved to Las Vegas. Graf’s mother, Heidi, moved in there as well. (Peter Graf died in ’13.) A sort of rebrand, Graf now goes by Stefanie, not Steffi.
Graf’s versatile backhand presented a sort of secret weapon hiding in plain sight.
And, in one of the great upsets in tennis (sports?) History, Graf-Agassi’s marriage is … no big deal. Just discussed. Almost a compound. It’s, by all rights, the ultimate sports power duo — with a collective working body and a celebrity halo to match this Jay-Z and Beyoncé side post — and they cut the figure of, simply, a happy suburban couple. There are no paparazzi. No gossip sites. There are no events under construction. No podcasts. Don’t mind the picture is all. They encapsulate the phrase: You are only as famous as you want to be.
By every account, they are a marriage that is rich, fulfilling, lasting. But also fiercely conventional marriage. “I tell you,” said the friends to each other, “you never see a more normal family. You never know who they ever are. It’s ‘Honey, we need a light bulb. I’m going to pick up on the way to earth.’ And they are proud of it. “
Tracy Austin uses an analogy of a sport other than tennis. “You know on cycling you have a front runner, wearing a yellow jersey, receiving attention and being loved? Then you have a platoon, people in the back, arranging? They’re perfect together because Andre is out there, he’s charismatic, he talks to people. Stefanie just It’s very comfortable to be in the background and very happy there. It works well for them. “
When Graf retired, he told confidantes that he had become a public figure. No more interviews. No more awkward sponsor grab-and-grins. No more contractually obligated appearances. He is not the retired athlete who first made this statement. He was among the few who remained faithful to his promises.
When the German tournament offered him a seven -figure appearance fee basically for a photo and cutting the ribbon, he refused. When the producers asked about the documentary, they politely declined. @StefanieGraf hasn’t tweeted yet.
At Wimbledon in 2013, the WTA held its 40th anniversary gala and invited all former No.1 players and that. From Billie Jean King to Navratilova to Evert to Austin to Jennifer Capriati, they came to this sisterhood festival. Some were in their 80s and needed walkers. Evonne Goolagong flew from Australia. She hit it off with Ana Ivanovic, a recent No. 1, nearly 40 years her junior. Yet the woman who holds the longest rank is not present.
Last fall, when Novak Djokovic was on the threshold – finally failing – to become the first player since 1988 to win a Grand Slam, the US Open committee hoped the last player to pull the feat would be there. Steffi Graf declined the invitation.
Same for this article. Backstory: For years, I tried to write this story with Graf’s participation. In 2016, when Agassi was swung by the SI office. We joked about the hardships I was having landing the audience with his wife. “Good luck with that,” he said, good-naturedly laughing at this quest.
Finally in 2018, through Longines, the French watch company Graf and Agassi represent, I got a 30 -minute window to interview Graf at Roland Garros. A few days before the sit-down, a publicist informed me the time had whittled to 15 minutes. OKAY. A few days later, word came that the “team” would appreciate if I could send questions in advance. Unable to accommodate that, I was told that the interview was off. (For the story you read, in March, Graf’s manager shared with Agassi with the words that Steffi “asked me to know that he appreciated the theme you wanted, but he respectfully declined your offer.”)
Graf and Agassi prefer to make anonymous appearances at sports events and children’s dance events for posing for photos.
Image by Ethan Miller / Getty for Keep Memory Alive
For some in the tennis world, it’s a disappointment that such towering champions have such peripheral presence. “I want to choose my words carefully here,” Shriver said. “It’s too bad if players don’t give back to the sport what they get out of the sport.” But, when the name Graf appears, the phrase in the heaviest rotation is as follows: You must respect his belief …
Graph is not to be the total cipher in the world of tennis. In 2004, he was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. She chose her husband to present her. In a speech worthy of your YouTube bandwidth, he began: “The words that have not been created are big enough, colorful enough or true enough to express the heart and soul of this woman I love.”
Top players — often associated with Adidas — come to Las Vegas to train. Agassi’s longtime fitness teacher and surrogate father, Gil Reyes, put them on paces. Agassi sometimes swings for technical support. And a woman in her early 50s, limber as usual, is known to appear as a pair of strikes, clubbing the forehand, showing the calmness and precision that have opponents only half-tempting him to go back.
Rarely, however, Graf sightings are usually sought with Children for Tomorrow, a charity she has long quietly — of course quietly — supported. Per its website it addresses “the mental health of children and their families who have been affected by violent atrocities, war and hardship.”
She is even more committed to two special children: her own. When Jaden didn’t take tennis, it was nothing – broadly even – to his parents. When, at the age of 5, he fell into baseball, Steffi did her best to learn this foreign sport and its nuances. She is regular at the stand, full of positive encouragement, all strawberries and ice cream.
She tells friends that she often catches herself thinking how happily random life can be. He never thought that he would be here, these crazy people from a small German town, behind the wheel of a hybrid car, equipment around Vegas, in the early 50s. Then again, she never thought she would win 22 majors, marry another tennis player, or, for that matter, drive a car that doesn’t run solely on gasoline.
And when he goes to a traffic light or goes to the store and occasionally can recognize him as the Steffi Graf tennis champion. Be that as it may. That’s a fame tax. More likely today, they will identify him as Andre’s wife or Jaden and Jaz’s mother. And he likes it better.
Read more of the ‘Where Now?’ Story:
• Pete Sampras Is Doing Just Well • Katie Hamilton Will Speak For Herself, Thank You • There Is Still Chlorine In The Soul Of Michael Phelps
Is Steffi Graf the greatest of all time?
Steffi Graf will always be the legendary standard for women’s tennis. Read also : 10 Video Games With Safe Mode. For many fans and observers who watched his entire career, he was the greatest player of all time with 22 major titles scoring records for the Open season.
Who is the greatest tennis player of all time? No list of tennis greats is complete without him. After becoming a pro in 1998, Roger Federer has mesmerized the tennis world with his silky touch and breathtaking game that has seen him win 20 Grand Slam titles, a record matched only by his rivals – Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.
Is Steffi Graf the greatest tennis player of all time?
| single | |
|---|---|
| US Open | SF (1986, 1987, 1988, 1989) |
| another double tournament | |
| Final tour | SF (1986, 1987, 1988) |
| Olympic Games | SF (1988) |
Is Boris Becker still married to Steffi Graf?
Becker’s divorce was the result of a so-called “sex in a closet broom” scandal with an illegitimate child that his quickie and Russian model produced. On the same subject : Simone Biles and Megan Rapinoe have won the Independent Medal of Independence as an advocate for Independence.. – Boris and Steffi, different as night and day.
Saha Lilian de Carvalho Monteiro? Lilian de Carvalho Monteiro (born b/w 1977-1980; Age: 42-45 years) is a well-known model, political risk analyst, celebrity couple, and media face from São Tomé and Príncipe, Africa. He was famous in the country for being the girlfriend of Boris Becker. As everyone knows, Boris is a famous tennis player.
What religion is Boris Becker?
Boris Becker was born in Leimen, a town in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, the son of Elvira and Karl-Heinz Becker. He was raised as a Catholic. His father Karl-Heinz, an architect, founded a tennis center in Leimen, where Becker learned to play tennis.
Is Boris Becker still married?
She also said that she and Becker are still married after the couple was the subject of a divorce report in May 2018. â € œI am very much still his wife, â € she said. â € œThe estranged wife is so probably, but we are still very married and have been since we went our separate ways.
Who is Monica Seles husband?
Finished married to businessman Tom Golisano, who is 32 years old. They started dating in 2009. They both announced their engagement on June 5, 2014.
What did the man do to Monica Seles? Top women’s tennis player Monica Seles was stabbed by a crazy German man during a match in Hamburg. The assailant, fans of German tennis star Steffi Graf, apparently hoped that by injuring his idol Seles Graf would be able to regain the No. 1 ranking.
How rich is Monica Seles?
| Net Worth: | $ 50 Million |
|---|---|
| Gender: | Women |
| Height: | 5 ft 10 inches (1.78 m) |
| Profession: | tennis players |
| nationality: | United States of America |
How old is Monica Seles today?
How many Grand Slam finals did Steffi Graf lose?
| career finals | ||
|---|---|---|
| discipline | type | missing |
| single | Grand Slam | 9 |
| Year -end championship | 1 | |
| Mandatory WTA Premier * | 6 |
Why did Steffi Graf win a Grand Slam?
How old was Steffi Graf when she won her last Grand Slam?
In 1988, 19 -year -old Steffi Graf won the Golden Slam, and to this day, remains the only player in tennis history – male or female – to achieve that achievement.
Who did Steffi Graf lose to in 1988?
Steffi Graf entered the 1988 Australian Open with a maiden slam title already under her belt, Roland Garros 1987. She is 18 years old and number one in the world. He lost in the final in the last two slams. At Wimbledon, Martina Navratilova beat Graf to win her sixth consecutive title.
