Agassi defends men's tennis during Las Vegas appearance

A few hours before Andre Agassi played his coach Brad Gilbert in a charity tennis match at the All-American SportPark on Tuesday night, Agassi returned a few vollies toward tennis commentator Mary Carillo.

In an interview with Scripps Howard News Service this week, Carillo maintained that women's tennis is a better product than men's tennis these days. And Carillo also said that longtime Agassi rival Pete Sampras was without peer in his sport.

A smiling Agassi politely disagreed with Carillo's assessment of the game of tennis.

Said Carillo: "I think the women have a better product than the men right now. They've got a lot of extremely talented players with full tennis vocabularies. All those people from (Martina) Hingis to the Williams sisters to Lindsay Davenport, all those at the top, they can play from anywhere on the court. They're all young and they're all confident.

"In men's tennis, Pete (Sampras) hasn't had a real rival in years, a real consistent rival. Sports like tennis needs rivalries. A lot of people point to Andre as some kind of manifest destiny, if Agassi came back everything would be fine again. Agassi isn't like that. He's not a grinder day in and day out. You can't count on him to revive the sport the way some people think he can."

Agassi on the subject of men's tennis vs women's tennis: "I think the disparity between men's and women's tennis has closed. It no longer is one or two people playing for the championship and everybody else playing for third. And there are a lot of good young players coming up. There is better quality. But if they played the women's and men's Grand Slam events at separate locations, I'd like to see how many people showed up."

On the topic of Sampras dominating men's tennis, Agassi replied, "It's 1999 and (Sampras) has won 11 Grand Slams through the 90's. I've got to think that that's not exactly a brilliant statement on her part."

Can anybody catch up to Sampras?

"As he gets older I think someone can," Agassi said. "But he's been the best week after week for a long time."

Agassi says he has put a lot of time in the weight room in recent weeks to better prepare for the upcoming Grand Slams.

"I've been training hard," he said. "I'm as strong as I've been in a long time. If you're stronger, you can do things a lot easier out there."

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