Andre Agassi Says His and Steffi Graf’s Children Understand Their Fame Is ‘Not all That’ (Exclusive)
Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf might be the ultimate tennis couple, but to their kids, they’re just plain old mom and dad.
Jaden Gil Agassi, 22, and Jaz Elle Agassi, 20, have parents with 30 combined Grand Slam wins, so Andre says he understands why people might think they had a moment where they realized their mom and dad are stars.
“I can imagine how somebody looks at that from the outside,” Agassi, 53, tells PEOPLE exclusively at a press conference on Saturday for The Netflix Slam tennis match in Las Vegas. “Somehow there’s going to be this moment where they go, ‘These are my parents.’”
However, the tennis legend says that didn’t really happen, as Jaden and Jaz always saw Andre and Graf, 54, as their parents, first and foremost.
“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,” he explains.
Still, as people paid attention to the two tennis stars, he shares that it helped his kids understand the difference between how fame is perceived and what their lives are really like.
“They start to realize they’re looking behind the Wizard of Oz curtain and they realize it’s not all that,” Andre says. “So there’s a healthy balance that kind of is inevitable through the whole process.”
Although Andre was one of the greats in his day, he marvels at the modern-day tennis game and its players, including Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz, who are playing Sunday in The Netflix Slam at Las Vegas’s Mandalay Bay.
