Steffi Graf retired 25 years ago: Wonderful family happiness with Andre Agassi

Exactly 25 years ago, an era in German tennis success story ended: On August 13, 1999, Steffi Graf (55), just 30 years old, announced her retirement from active tennis at a press conference in a hotel in Heidelberg – and thus decided to pursue her private happiness. This has apparently continued unabated for 25 years now. A look back at perhaps the most important decision of her life.

Now she is chasing Andre Agassi privately around the tennis court

Unlike her colleague Boris Becker (56), the other German tennis superstar of her time, Steffi Graf has never made negative headlines, and she successfully keeps her private and family life largely out of the public eye. She has managed to “escape from the public eye,” wrote the newspaper on the occasion of her 50th birthday. She lives completely inconspicuously with her husband in Las Vegas, and every now and then she plays “a round” with him on the private tennis court: “Again and again she chased him around the court. And her forehand always gave him trouble.”

With her sporting record, she surpassed everyone at the peak of her career – even the tennis talent Boris Becker. He won Wimbledon three times, she seven times. She triumphed in 22 Grand Slam tournaments, he in six. Becker led the world rankings for twelve weeks, Graf for 377 weeks – a record. She is also the only person in the world to have won the Golden Slam: in 1988 she won all four Grand Slam tournaments and won the gold medal in singles at the Olympics in Seoul.

There was no peace or stagnation for her, wrote sports journalist Hans-Jürgen Pohmann, himself a former tennis professional: “there was only the obsession to play perfectly… Behind her was always her father Peter, who whipped her forward, isolated her from the public, enjoyed his daughter’s fame, made headlines with easy girls and finally ended up in prison for tax evasion.”

Andre Agassi made her more relaxed

She eventually emerged from the shadow of her overpowering father; Peter Graf died of cancer in 2013. His daughter had changed long before that, when she realized in 1999: “I don’t need to prove anything to anyone anymore.” A circumstance that apparently made her look to the future with serenity and composure. Andre Agassi (54) probably played a part in that.

In the 1990s, the American was considered the crazy rock star of tennis (eight Grand Slam victories, 1996 Olympic gold in singles, 101 weeks number 1 in the world rankings). The fact that this bird of paradise and the cool German, who had the reputation of a “tennis robot”, became such a close couple could be described as a miracle of love.

Both were in different relationships when they got to know each other better. Steffi Graf was in a relationship with the German racing driver Michael Bartels at the time, while Agassi was married to the Hollywood actress Brooke Shields (“The Blue Lagoon”) from 1997 to 1999.

Agassi had apparently been secretly raving about the blonde “Countess” with whom he had fallen in love during the French Open in 1998 for some time. Andre Agassi writes in his biography “Open”: “I was thunderstruck, absolutely enchanted by her modest grace, her natural beauty.” This was followed by joint training and several dates with shared dinners and walks.

After Steffi Graf retired from tennis shortly before the 1999 US Open, she attended a boxing match in Las Vegas with Andre Agassi. It was their first public appearance as a couple. “The next day a photo of the two of us appeared in the newspapers, holding hands and kissing,” Agassi recalled.

The two children were born in 2001 and 2003

Then things went very quickly in the relationship: wedding on October 22, 2001, birth of son Jaden Gil (22) four days later, daughter Jaz Elle (20) was born on November 3, 2003. Steffi Graf gave up her beloved apartment in Manhattan (New York City) for this, the family moved to Agassi’s birthplace Las Vegas in the Nevada desert and has led a normal family life there ever since: This includes tasks such as taking children to school, separating waste, and an ecologically correct household.

In 1998, Steffi Graf founded the charitable foundation Children for Tomorrow in Hamburg, which cares for traumatized refugee children on the grounds of the Eppendorf University Hospital. These are the events where she is in public. She rarely sets foot on a public tennis court.

She owes the love of her life to tennis

Her self-imposed end to her career has made her a tennis legend to this day: in 2003, Steffi Graf was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. In his eulogy, husband Andre Agassi found moving words for his wife: “I realize that words have not yet been invented that are big enough or true enough to express the heart and soul of this woman I love: Stefanie!” When he then said that she had brought “a great deal of light” and “a dignity” into his life like no other person before, she replied tearfully: “Tennis has given me an incredible journey. The best thing about this journey was that it led me to you.”