Blue-Collar Agassi Looking For Gold Considers Today’s Medal-Match One Of The Biggest Tournaments Of His Career

If there’s any doubt Andre Agassi is serious about winning an Olympic gold medal, consider where he and fiancee Brooke Shields, one of the games’ glamour couples, have been spotted.

For a late-night dinner, Agassi took a table at Shoney’s coffee shop. And Shields was seen doing her shopping at a Kroger’s supermarket.

“I would say it’s been pretty much a focused goal to win these matches, and to prepare myself as much as possible to win them,” said Agassi, who plays for the gold medal today.

“So I haven’t allowed myself the luxury of getting to appreciate all that’s here in Atlanta.”

Agassi, with Shields among the enthusiastic fans at the Stone Mountain tennis venue, said he hasn’t gotten to see any other Olympic events, or even made it into downtown Atlanta.

“When things haven’t been going so well and you finally start doing things right, you don’t want to get sidetracked,” said Agassi, a former No. 1 who began Olympic play having lost four of his previous seven matches.

Agassi, who faces unseeded Spaniard Sergi Bruguera in the best-of-five final, has been buoyed by the “active and energetic” crowds of 16,000 to 17,000 a day. Even though most of the other top male tennis names skipped the Olympics, Agassi has called his first Olympics one of the biggest tournaments of his career.

“Certainly, this could send me into a new groove,” he said. “I feel pretty confident at this moment and this is a great place to start.

“It’s as big a match as playing any Grand Slam final,” Agassi said.

Even losing won’t be a disappointment, insisted Agassi, whose father was a two-time Olympian as an Iranian boxer. He dismissed as “ridiculous” a suggestion that silver would be a letdown.

Winning the silver today, by losing to the Dream Team in the men’s basketball final, will also be satisfying for Yugoslavia.

Center Vlade Divac, of the Charlotte Hornets in the NBA, called the Dream Team “the 99.9 percent favorite.” But after beating Lithuania in the semifinals for their seventh straight victory, some of the Yugoslavians declared that taking the silver is equivalent to gold, given the Dream Team’s dominance. At Olympic Stadium where the track and field action is taking place, the U.S. men and women run their 400 and 1600 relay finals today. The shorter women’s relay features 100-meter gold-medal winner Gail Devers and bronze medalist Gwen Torrence.

In women’s volleyball, Cuba plays China for the gold, and there are six gold-medal boxing matches.