Born on the Baseline

Andre Agassi's workout is more like batting practice than a long rally. Augusto Solano, a young Colombian player employed by the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Fla., hits the ball to the 18-year-old tennis player, and Agassi whales on it. Solano feeds him one more, and Agassi takes another vicious cut. Backhand or forehand, he swings at every ball as hard as he can, and whether the screaming line drives that jump off his racquet land inches inside the baseline or crash into the back fence on the fly, the rally is quickly over. Solano reaches back into a grocery cart full of balls and serves up another.

Agassi has raised backcourt power tennis to a new level of destructiveness, routinely producing shots of such startling velocity that an opponent waiting on the baseline doesn't have a chance to take a single step toward the ball. At 5 feet 10 inches, and only 150 pounds, his tremendous power has already won him six Nabisco Grand Prix tournaments this year and $627,000 in prize money. Along the way, he has improved his world ranking from No. 20 to No. 4 and has emerged as America's first major new tennis talent in more than a decade.

Agassi's all-or-nothing shot-making is a reflection of a personality that has never occupied much middle ground. His emotions and behavior tend to move in huge dramatic swings. In a very short time, he has gone from being a belligerent young rebel, whose court tantrums were worthy of John McEnroe, to a born-again Christian, who claims his most pressing ambition is to provide a positive role model for young players. Once so overwhelmed by the dread of losing that he briefly considered quitting the game 15 months ago, Agassi has become a nervy performer who applauds his opponents and cracks jokes at critical junctures. ''I do everything by extremes,'' he says. If he butchers a shot, he signals his disgust with a self-mocking barbaric yawp; if he unleashes a spectacular shot, he shares his delight with a smile or a raised eyebrow. Unlike Ivan Lendl or Mats Wilander, who self-consciously tweak their racquet strings even as they are being washed in applause, Agassi makes no bones about enjoying the spotlight. When he wins a match, Agassi makes his exit more like Julio Iglesias than a tennis pro, bowing, waving and blowing kisses to the crowd.

Agassi's dramatic extremes were on full view at last month's United States Open. His on-court antics escalated to tossing towels and an extra pair of shorts to spectators, until, after one late match, he handed a lucky fan one of his costly tennis racquets. His high point came on a cool evening in Louis Armstrong Stadium, in his quarterfinal match against Jimmy Connors. It was a much-anticipated contest. Connors, who at 36 is exactly double Agassi's age, invented, down to the grunts, the kind of dominating backcourt game the younger player now brandishes.

Not surprisingly, the match wasn't very close, with Agassi winning in straight sets. Outpowered and outangled, Connors had to work hard just to stay in the points, and the strain had him looking his age. In its cruel clarity, the night seemed both the end and beginning of an era in American tennis. In a postmatch interview, Agassi told the British tennis commentator John Barrett: ''I'm ready to lead the show.''

At the start of his semifinal match against Ivan Lendl, Agassi picked up where he had left off against Connors. He was hitting the ball so swiftly that Lendl, who requires a longer arm motion to generate comparable power, kept getting knocked off balance. On his second service break, Agassi took the first set, 6-4. By then, Lendl was complaining to the umpire about the distracting volume of Agassi's grunts.

But when the set was through, so, mysteriously, was Agassi. Lendl dug in, and Agassi seemed suddenly dispirited. He dropped the next two sets. There was no obvious turning point in his game; Lendl, it seemed, simply was offering stiffer resistance than Agassi was prepared to contend with that day. ''I just didn't feel it inside,'' he said later. ''He was giving up,'' Lendl said, ''hitting shots he knew weren't going in. If there was nothing wrong with him physically, I'd be very disappointed in the way he played the middle sets today.''

Thus, in back-to-back matches, Agassi exhibited flip sides of his fragile competitiveness. Either he dominates the action, pillages and plunders, thrills and delights the crowd, or he bags it. There's nothing in between.

AGASSI IS SCHEDULED TO COMPETE next on Nov. 30 at Madison Square Garden in the Nabisco Masters, the elite season-ending tournament with a field consisting of the year's top eight performers.

Agassi is ranked No. 3 in Grand Prix points going into the competition, and the last few months have shown that when he's in good form, he doesn't just beat his opponents, he finishes them off with the most aggressive backcourt game since Connors took tennis by the throat in 1974. And although Agassi has a long way to go to prove he's worthy of the comparison, there are marked similarities in the two players' games and also in the pressures they have faced.

Not only do both possess two-handed backhands, two-handed backhand volleys and only adequate serves, but both have built their game on the exceptional timing, eye and audacity needed to throw all their strength into a shot at that exact instant before the ball has reached the height of its bounce. By the physics and geometry of tennis, hitting the ball early lets a player hit it harder and angle it more sharply, which means the opponent has just that much farther to go to track it down and just that much less time in which to do it.

By hitting the ball early, Agassi, like Connors in his prime, often seizes control of a point with his first groundstroke, and once he has it never relinquishes it, chasing the opposing player back and forth until the ball stops coming back or he makes an error himself. ''He dictates the play completely,'' says McEnroe.

''I enjoy seeing somebody run,'' says Agassi, ''working them and working them until they can't do it anymore.''

Connors' and Agassi's styles were even forged under similar circumstances. Both learned the game on backyard cement courts isolated from the tennis world - Connors in Belleville, Ill.; Agassi in Las Vegas. Both had parents who saw themselves as coming from the wrong side of the tracks and who from the very beginning, maybe to wreak a kind of vengeance, coached their children to be world champions.

McEnroe, who was teamed with Agassi in America's Davis Cup victory over Argentina in July, told Sports Illustrated: ''Andre's timing - his eye, picking up the ball - is incredible. His mix of shots, the drops and lobs, the way he clocks the forehand - phenomenal. He's still a kid, but he has that confidence, the attitude, the feeling of a champion.''

Yet unlike Connors, who out of defiant pride has never changed his game, Agassi, under the tutelage of Nick Bollettieri, is constantly adding to his arsenal. Most impressive has been Agassi's ability to push himself up to the net even though he is just starting to be comfortable there. ''If you can hit winners from the baseline for a few games and then come in and put away some volleys,'' says Agassi, ''you get a guy thinking, 'What can I do?' You put a blister on his brain.''

YOU CAN TEACH A kid to read and write, and teach him proper grammar,'' says Mike Agassi, while closely monitoring his son's workout. ''But a father alone can't make him a doctor. For that he has to go to medical school. The Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy is medical school.''

Mike Agassi sent his son to the academy at the age of l3. A smallish, thick-waisted man who was born in Armenia, he boxed for Iran at the 1948 and 1952 Olympics. He has taken time off from his job as a captain in the showroom at Bally's Casino Resort-Las Vegas because, after reviewing, seven or eight times each, the tapes of his son's recent matches, he has spotted some flaws - ''something in his serve, something in his overhead, and something I'd rather not say.''

After finishing the workout, Agassi sits, still dripping with sweat, in the small office of Gabriel Jaramillo, the academy's director of tennis. He jokingly describes how he ended up at the academy: ''My father saw this story on Nick on '60 Minutes' where it showed him making these little kids cry and everything, and thought that was the place for me.''

The laugh is Agassi's way of acknowledging that before he ever got to the academy, he already had experienced a formidable tennis coach. Mike Agassi, who learned to play tennis from Americans in Teheran, has dedicated his life to fulfilling a dream he nurtured even before he was married: that one of his children - he has two sons and two daughters - would become a great tennis champion. Since immigrating to Chicago in the early 1950's, the most elemental decisions of his life have been made in terms of his children's tennis. He left the Midwest because it lacked a suitable climate. Unable to find a decent job in California, he settled on Las Vegas, reconciling himself with the fact that there, one could play 330 days a year, and that his night job would let him coach his children every afternoon. As the youngest and last best hope, Andre came in for special attention.

Speaking very deliberately in a thick accent, often using his fingers to emphasize how accurately he is relaying the details, Mike Agassi describes Andre's first few lessons:

''As soon as Andre could open his eyes, I got a tennis racquet, attached it to the ceiling, and tied a ball to it with a string, so that it hung down above his crib. Then, whenever I walked by, I would just give the ball a little tap and it would swing back and forth over him. That was to develop his eyes and get him to follow the ball. ''When he could sit in a highchair, I took a Ping-Pong paddle and split it down the middle so it was very thin and light, and taped it into his hand. Then I'd take a balloon and put a little bit of water in it, and toss the balloon at him until he learned to meet it with the paddle. That teaches the timing.''

Mike Agassi proved to be an inspired tennis teacher. On the cement court in the backyard, with 11 ball machines spitting every kind of shot with every kind of spin, he gave his young son his game. And because they were striving not for best in the neighborhood or the state but for world champion, he imparted a most daring and farsighted piece of instruction. ''Don't just try to get it in,'' he taught his son. ''Smack the ball. Crunch it. Hit it as hard as you can. We'll worry about keeping it in later.''

By the time Agassi was 3 or 4, he was a prodigy, attracting the same kind of attention on the courts as little kids on big Steinways. When the Alan King tournament came to town, more people gathered by the practice courts to watch Agassi than to watch the stars, which may explain his natural rapport with the crowd today. The pros themselves were intrigued by the sight of a toddler hitting topspin forehands. On Andre's fourth birthday, a 22-year-old Connors hit with him for 15 minutes. Before he was 12, he'd hit with half-a-dozen pros, including Bjorn Borg, whose coach said Andre was far more advanced than the Swedish star had been at that age.

This is not to say that Mike Agassi never pushed his son too hard, or that his obsessiveness didn't have its price. Some of Agassi's peers on the national junior circuit recall the elder Agassi as somewhat agitated on occasion. Despite his Olympic credentials, he once lost a fistfight to the father of another top player, and after Andre lost in the quarterfinals of the 14-and-under National Junior Indoor Championships in 1983, he was so mad he took his son home before the awards presentation.

''Mr. Agassi never thought Andre was playing well enough,'' says David Kass, who also competed that day in Chicago and who, like him, came to the academy, where the two became very close friends. ''He always thought Andre could play better. But I guess that's just because he believed in him, and he was right.''

''My dad is so blunt,'' says Agassi, ''and his English is still not that good. And the way he expresses things, it was easy for people to think he was very disappointed in the way I was playing, to misinterpret. My sisters couldn't deal with it, they took it personally.

''It just wasn't his way to say you had done something good, not that he was disappointed in the way you played, he was just always moving on. My brother [ Phillip, who travels with him on tour ] said that when he was younger, he always misinterpreted my father, and that it hurt his attitude and made it hard for him to improve. So often, he would help me understand what my father was trying to do.''

WORKING HIS little strip of clay at the edge of the court is Bollettieri. A sun-baked bandy-legged maverick who hasn't looked back since dropping out of the University of Miami Law School 30 years ago to give tennis lessons for .50 an hour, Bollettieri pumps up Agassi in a whisper worn thin by decades of exhortation. ''That's right, come after the ball. Just like that, perfect. Great practice man, we don't miss.''

Bollettieri was arguably the first coach in America to respond institutionally to the fanaticism of the tennis parent. When he opened his academy in 1978, he offered parents the surety that nothing would prevent their sons and daughters from getting as good as possible as quickly as possible.

So that a young player's development would never be hampered by climate, he set up his camp on the Gulf Coast of Florida, first on Longboat Key and then in Bradenton. To insure that the legal and social pressure to give a child an education would never crimp a forehand, he arranged with two local private schools to offer his students a streamlined academic day that leaves room for five hours of tennis every afternoon.

And to guarantee that no young phenom like Agassi, cultivated outside the major tennis centers, would wither for lack of competition, he recruited as many of the best juniors in the country as he could get his hands on. It got to the point where many of this country's top players felt that to stay competitive they had no choice but to attend. ''Nick had all the players,'' said Aaron Krickstein, who left Michigan for Bradenton in 1981.

During Agassi's three years at the academy - he still returns to train - eight of the top 10 nationally ranked players his age often lived in the same 22-acre 46-court complex.

Bollettieri was perhaps also the first coach to realize how valuable such a student body was - that he could sell to sporting-goods manufacturers his influence over what amounted to an entire generation of future tennis stars, in exchange for their sponsorship. It's the money from Prince racquets and Penn tennis balls and others - whose highway-size billboards pop up all over the center and whose products often are used by the students - that allows every top recruit to attend the academy on a full scholarship (tuition is $20,000 a year). These revenues also have helped make a wealthy man of Bollettieri, now 57; he was broke when he opened the academy. And although it is clear that he invests all his enormous energy and enthusiasm in his top players -''Bollettieri makes you feel like you can fly,'' says one former protege - his system is based on dispassionate arithmetic. He simply recruits as many top players as possible, throws them all on the backcourts and sees who turns out to be the best. If a few players crack up and go home, so be it. When one player falters, there is always another 14-year-old one court away, with a hellacious forehand and a proud father, to take his place. The only problem with the plan so far is that none of the academy's stars have been able to stay near the top for much more than a year.

Jimmy Arias got as high as No. 5 on the Association of Tennis Professionals computer rankings, but now, at age 23, he's in the low 100's. Aaron Krickstein, once No. 7 in the world, hasn't won a tournament in four years, although he made it to the quarterfinals of this year's United States Open. Carling Bassett, after cracking the top 10 as a teen-ager, is now the 144th-ranked women player. Until he proves otherwise, Agassi will have to contend with the occasional speculation that his own arc may be short.

Some critics claim that Bollettieri erred with Arias (Continued on Page 76) and Krickstein, sending them up to the pros with games that were too one-dimensional and pushing them too hard too soon. If so, it's apparent he won't make the same mistakes with Agassi. Agassi didn't compete at Wimbledon, for example, staying home to practice instead. Despite talk of emotional bonds between Agassi and Bollettieri, there's no escaping the bottom line at the academy, and Agassi, who spent three very difficult years there, understands that as well as anyone.

Asked why Bollettieri is now spending much of his time with Agassi rather than dividing his attention among a group of prospects as formerly, Agassi responds: ''Nick wants to sit in the champion's box. He's already proved he can take someone and get the most out of them, and that he can produce a lot of players. Now he wants one champion. And he told me, if it's not going to be me, it's going to be Monica,'' referring to Monica Seles, the 14-year-old Yugoslav Bollettieri considers such a sure winner that he has been playing host to her entire family at the academy for two years.

WHAT'S SURPRISING about Agassi's career, given his precociousness, is that he has learned to win only very recently. Just 13 months ago, there were few indications that he might soon become one of the world's most dominating players. It wasn't even clear that he was going to survive. Instead of a teen-ager on the verge of fame and wealth, he looked more like another casualty of junior tennis.

During his years at the academy, from age 13 through 15, Agassi never got higher than the middle of the pack. Although he produced bursts of spectacular tennis and offered glimpses of his rare physical skills, he gave far more evidence of a precarious state of mind.

The impossibility of living up to his father's outsized expectations turned him into a moody, erratic, nervous little monster, according to fellow students. About the best thing that could happen to a player unlucky enough to draw Agassi during those years was to have him give up and let himself be beaten easily. Even so, he might spend the entire match verbally abusing his opponent.

''A player had to be willing to take a lot not to get in a fight with me,'' Agassi says about that era, during which he estimates that he was destroying his factory-supplied Prince racquets at a rate of 40 a year - grinding them into the ground, throwing them into the pool, smashing them against the very walls of the academy.

''If Andre got a high ball, you knew exactly where he was going to hit it: at your head,'' says David Wheaton, a former top player at the academy. ''If he could, he'd put it in your mouth.''

On top of all this, Agassi was in some ways a typical teen-ager, tired of having people tell him what to do, and he chose rebellion in the form of a series of radical, confrontational haircuts. He started with a buzz cut -''you know, a crew cut with a quarter-inch on top sticking straight up,'' he says. When school administrators said he could keep it, Agassi went right out and put a blinding streak of color down the middle. During the finals of a junior tournament in Pensacola, he played the entire match wearing an earring, eye makeup and jeans.

But for someone carrying around the kind of expectations Agassi was, playing junior tennis was an utterly no-win situation. If he beat some other hot 14-year-old, it hardly got him any closer to the goal that had been set for him, and if he did anything less than obliterate his opponent, it was a disgrace.

When Agassi turned professional on May 1, 1986, two days after his 16th birthday, it was more because he was sick of losing to players his own age than because he had outgrown the competition. There were several other players at the academy who were far better candidates for the pros at the time. ''Andre had just had enough of the juniors,'' Wheaton said. ''He blew it off.'' Turning pro gave him a couple of giddy weeks, when, for the first time he could remember, he wasn't expected to win every tournament. In his first two tournaments, he won $11,000, getting to the finals of one, and beating Tim Mayotte, then the 12th-ranked player in the world, in the other. But that pressure drop was quickly replaced by the even weightier win-or-else pressure of the pros. And now there was no place else left to go.

''Here was this kid who had turned pro at 16,'' says Mary Jane Wheaton, David's mother, ''who didn't even have a high school diploma. Who had been geared to do one thing his whole life. Can you imagine? If Andre didn't make it in tennis, he was stuck.''

From mid-August 1986 to mid-April 1987, Agassi won only two matches. By the time he lost in the first round in a Washington tournament last July, he was thinking of quitting the game. After that loss, a minister who travels the tour and who had already played a part in Agassi becoming a Christian saw him in a park across from the courts, slumped over a table, crying. The minister strongly urged him not to quit, telling him that God didn't care if he won or lost, as long as he tried to get the most out of his talents.

Bollettieri delivered a similar message:

''Andre, I promise you - myself, your brother, your father, no one is going to leave you, I don't care if your ranking falls off the computer.''

As usual, instead of making minor adjustments, Agassi tried something drastic. Since trying to win wasn't getting him anywhere, he vowed to play his entire next match, against Luke Jensen, at Stratton Mountain, Vt., without the slightest concern for who won the points. (It was in this carefree mode that he picked up his famous habit of applauding when he was passed at the net or an unhittable serve blazed by. Having noticed that this gesture tended to put the crowd squarely in his back pocket, he kept it.) Even though Agassi lost the first set and was losing the second, he stuck to his plan. As he tells it, it was in the second set, when Jensen put away a ball to go up 3-1, and celebrated with one of his own gestures, a standard ''in-your-face'' macho fist pull, that he had his competitive epiphany: ''Something in me clicked. I decided that I was not going to let myself lose to that guy.''

Somehow in that instant, Agassi says, he was transformed from a very self-destructive athlete to a viciously destructive one. He attributes this attitude in part to his newfound religious beliefs.

''I am blessed with a talent and I have an obligation to the Lord to make the most of it,'' he says. ''I kind of get a kick out of the fact that a lot of my so-called friends can't accept this and think it's something I have forced myself to do.'' For Agassi, religion is the perfect competitive balm, letting him be a lot easier on himself, but even harder on his opponents.

''Andre always wanted to put the ball in your face,'' says Fritz Nau, the academy's fitness coach. ''Now he punishes you first and then puts the ball in your face.''

No longer paralyzed by the possibility of losing, Agassi is comfortable on the court. His older brother and traveling companion, Phillip, who has seen him in desperate times as well as now, has a simple explanation: ''It was a gift from God.''