2005 Pacific Life Open News
By Alix Ramsay  |  March 18, 2005

Just when Andre Agassi thought that life was slowly getting back to normal - his easy romp through the draw at the Pacific Life Open had done much to assuage the disappointment of the Davis Cup defeat to Croatia - everything goes wrong.

He was forced to pull out of his quarter final match with Lleyton Hewitt on Friday morning with a toe injury. The problem flared up on Thursday night as the big toe on his left foot swelled up to twice its size. Unable to sleep for the pain, Agassi did not have a hope of stepping on court against Hewitt the following morning. He spent Friday at the hospital having MRI scans and X-rays to assess the extent of the injury and to find the root cause. Unsurprisingly, he is making no definite plans for the Nasdaq-100 Open in Miami.

"I'm going to go see if it's possibly a tendon that connects around that joint area or just a capsule of the joint," Agassi said. "But, you know, all they can say is that that kind of quick inflammation and swelling is a result of your body trying to protect something pretty serious.

Agassi has no idea what he did to cause such a swift and violent reaction. He did not stub it, stab it or squeeze it and on Thursday he practised for an hour, as usual, and went to bed without a care in the world. That's when the trouble started. He tried moving it, propping it up on pillows and ignoring it, but still the pain would not go away.

"There's nothing I did to speak of," he said. "There wasn't a moment I felt it.  But certainly it was very disruptive all evening when I was trying to sleep and didn't really look at it till I got up in the morning.  I was pretty shocked by what I saw, for sure.

"I was experiencing a lot of pain with my big toe on the left foot. I thought it was possibly an ingrown nail, something I was not trying to wake up to assess it, I was trying to get my rest. Woke up this morning, it was blown up like a balloon.  It was twice the size.  I can't bend it or move it.  So it's quite painful when I maneuver it manually.  It's impossible for me to do anything.  It's very disappointing."

Agassi, though, is nothing is not a professional and knowing that the crowd, who had all paid good money to see him do battle with Hewitt, would be disappointed not to see him, he hobbled out on court to explain himself.

Interviewed by Wayne Brian, father of Mike and Bob, Agassi apologized profusely for letting everyone down and admitted that he "would have been beyond useless today" had he attempted to play. The only explanation he could find for the cause of his sore toe was: "My left to go back to Vegas yesterday, so I don't know.  Maybe my big toe is just feeling sorry for itself." Cue a round of sighs and "ahhhhhs" in the crowd as Agassi had them all eating out of the palm of his hand.

Invariably in professional sport an athlete is appreciated more and more the older he gets. It matters little whether he is good, bad or indifferent, the mere fact of being able to stand up at the ripe old age of 30-something guarantees adulation. But just in case anyone should forget just what sort of 34 year old legend we were watching yesterday, Wayne Brian offered a little peek at life backstage in the US Davis Cup team.

"It was so great to have Andre play in the Davis Cup team a couple weeks ago," Brian enthused. "It was a tough loss.  What an unbelievable event.  I just want to thank Andre, he's one of the greatest players to ever play.  I got a couple knucklehead boys named Mike and Bob Bryan.  They took a bitter loss.  They wanted to win, especially having Andre on the team.  They went back to their hotel room at 8:00.  There was a knock on the door, it's Andre.  He takes Bob and Mike and Andy Roddick out, tells them all the losses he had in his career.  That's something I'm never going to forget."

Roddick seems to have recovered from the pain of that Davis Cup defeat, though he had to dig deep to get past Carlos Moya. Roddick's 6-7, 6-4, 6-1 win offered a measure of Davis Cup revenge for the pasting Moya and his Spanish team-mates inflicted on the USA in last year's final in Seville.

This time, crucially, Roddick had his home crowd behind him rather than the 27,000 Spaniards that greeted him when he played in Seville. That and the fact that it was hard court rather than clay beneath his feet made all the difference. He will have the same advantage against Hewitt, who beat him in Melbourne during the Australian Open.

"I think home court affects things just as much as a basketball game, especially when you're playing against 27,000 or the whole country of Australia," said Roddick "I think the rating was 70% of the country is watching that match against Lleyton. I give credit to the fans in those places during those matches.  They were crazy and they were passionate.  Any time you see that in tennis, even if it's against you, I kind of have to appreciate it, you know, be happy that the sport's creating that kind of emotion out of people."

Agassi has always inspired emotion in those watching him. There wasn't a soul in the Indian Wells Tennis Garden who didn't share his disappointment yesterday.

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