Andre Agassi reveals his children did not understand the level of his & wife Steffi Graf's fame: "Jaden & Jaz were like, What's up with these people?"
Andre Agassi and his wife Steffi Graf have a combined 30 Grand Slam titles between them but according to the American, his children were still initially surprised by the level of fame the duo commanded in the outside world.
With 22 Majors to her name, Graf is the woman with the second-most Slams in the Open Era. Agassi, on the other hand, has eight to his name - the second-most (tied with Jimmy Connors) among American men in the Open Era.
However, the duo has largely remained out of the spotlight since their respective retirement from the sport, so much so that their daughter Jaz and son Jaden were stumped by people walking up to them in grocery stores.
Speaking to People magazine during his press conference at the recently concluded Netflix Slam, Agassi emphasized that Jaden and Jaz thought of him and Graf as their parents first and tennis players second. As a result, he jokingly added, his children went through a phase where fan interactions made no sense to them before they finally realized the truth.
“Somehow there's going to be this moment where they go, ‘These are my parents.’ So when people are coming up to us in grocery stores, [Jaden and Jaz] were like, ‘What's up with these people?’ So you go through a whole phase of them going, ‘Well, this makes no sense that the people are coming up as if there’s a big deal. And then they start to put together why it's a big deal," Andre Agassi said.
In a way, the former World No. 1 believed that raising his kids like that has created a healthy balance in how they view their parents and their fame.
"They start to realize they're looking behind the Wizard of Oz curtain and they realize it's not all that. So there's a healthy balance that kind of is inevitable through the whole process,” Agassi said.
"I miss having such a defined goal" - Andre Agassi on dealing with his post-retirement days
During the interview, Andre Agassi also spoke about how he is coping with life after retirement, admitting that he missed having a training regimen with well-defined goals that made his days easier.
At the same time, the American maintained that he has learned how to find alternatives to impose a similar discipline again in his life and work around that.
"I miss having such a defined goal that is so important that the rest of your day becomes just the expression of it. So for me that's gold, right? It's gold, to care about something so much that nothing else feels like a discipline. It just feels like an opportunity to get to what you really want, but then you have other expressions of it as you get older," Andre Agassi said.