“I hate tennis,” Andre Agassi wrote in his 2007 autobiography Open, a sentiment that makes Sunday’s shock announcement all the more stunning: Novak Djokovic, who’s been in a tennis free fall since winning last year’s French Open and recently purged his entire team including his longtime coach, announced that Agassi, the mercurial tennis star of the 1990s and 2000s, would serve as his coach at next month’s French Open.
Djokovic made the announcement after his latest disappointment – a straight-set loss to 20-year-old Alexander Zverev in the Rome finals, a tournament Djokovic had dominated right up until Sunday’s struggle.