Friday, April 3, 1998 | 10:23 a.m.
He has won Wimbledon and been ranked No. 1 in the world.
He has won the U.S. and Australian Opens.
He has won a gold medal in the Olympics and married a famous Hollywood starlet.
And if he can defeat Russia's Marat Safin today in Stone Mountain, Ga., at the same International Tennis Center court where he won his gold medal, Las Vegan Andre Agassi can add another impressive item to his resume.
With a win over Safin, Agassi will tie Bill Tilden's 72-year-old Davis Cup record of 16 consecutive singles victories.
Agassi, who has a 24-4 singles record in Davis Cup and hasn't lost since 1990, has won 15 in a row. Two wins this weekend and he'll eclipse Tilden's mark set between 1920-26.
Not bad for someone who as recently as last November had dropped all the way to No. 141 in the ATP player rankings and was playing in USTA Challenger Tournaments --- the equivalent of a major league baseball star playing in Triple-A --- just so he could get his confidence and game back on track.
Agassi has made a dramatic turnaround since November. After losing to No. 1 ranked Marcelo Rios of Chile in the finals of the Lipton Tournament last week, Agassi has moved all the way back up to No. 22 in the ATP rankings.
He has won two of his last four tournaments, beating Pete Sampras in the San Jose Indoor finals and Jason Stoltenberg in the finals at Scottsdale before losing in the finals to Rios last week.
The man who once made a camera commercial uttering, "Image is Everything," has once again put some much-needed substance back into his tennis game.
"Intensity ... preparation ... fitness ... quickness ... hitting good shots," Agassi said Thursday when asked why he's turned things around. "On an accomplishment level, I want to win a (Grand) Slam this year."
That might not have been his No. 1 priority in 1997, a year that included his storybook wedding to actress Brooke Shields.
"Andre is a very diversified person," said brother Phillip, executive vice president of Agassi Enterprises. "He has a lot of things going on. Tennis isn't always No. 1 for him. He's not a guy who eats, drinks and sleeps tennis. He has a wife, a family, a foundation ...
"Being a top-notch tennis player is not something you can just turn on and turn off. He had to get to a point where he could overcome "those." What "those" are I don't know. But it's not easy to stay on top in professional tennis, especially when you're as diversified as Andre is."
It could be easy to point to Agassi's marriage to the glamorous Shields as perhaps one of the big reasons for his downward spiral. After all, he was ranked No. 29 in the world before the wedding last April and appeared to become slow and pudgy as he steadily sank to his Nov. 10 ranking of 141, his lowest since turning professional 12 years earlier.
And who could blame the 28-year-old Agassi if he decided to put his marriage to Shields ahead of his tennis for a while? What warm-blooded American male in the United States wouldn't?
"Tennis is a year-round sport," Phillip Agassi said. "You just can't take two weeks off for a vacation. You've got to keep right on training. ... of course the (marriage to Shields) was a major adjustment. Obviously, he wasn't training as hard as he is now. He had other priorities."
But thanks to some hard workouts with veteran conditioning coach Gil Reyes and a strong focus to return to the top of the ATP Tour marquee, Agassi is back playing the kind of tennis that made him such a household name in the late 80's and for much of the 90's.
"It sure does seem like he's back," said Phillip Agassi.
"It seems as though he's playing his best tennis right now. I'm extremely proud of what he's done and for the professionalism he's shown in doing what it takes to get back to the top."
Safin will be making his Davis Cup debut against Agassi, so it would seem there's a very good chance Andre will at least tie Tilden's mark. If he does, he'll go for the record Sunday against veteran Yevgeny Kafelnikov.
"(The record) is the second priority in each match this weekend," Andre Agassi said. "Getting the (U.S. Davis Cup) team to move on to the next round, that's what we are here for.
"In hindsight I will look back and either feel good that I got the record or be a little pissed that I didn't. But, either way, the focus is to win this weekend and win for the sake of what we are here for."
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