Where Are They Now: Steffi Graf
Steffi Graf Is Still Too Famous for Steffi Graf
When the tennis legend retired from competition more than 20 years ago, it was assumed that she would keep a low post-career profile. But even that might be understating her activity in the 21st century.
Jon Wertheim
Jul 11, 2022
Each summer Sports Illustrated revisits, remembers and rethinks some of the biggest names and most important stories of our sporting past. Come back all week for more Where Are They Now? stories.
Tracy Austin did a double take. It was the spring of 2019, those halcyon pre-COVID-19 days, and Austin, once the No.1–ranked player on the WTA Tour, sat in the stands at the USC tennis facility. There to watch her son Brandon, then a junior, play a match, she glanced over and saw a familiar face, a genial, clean-shaven middle-aged man attired in a USC Trojans shirt. He was trailed by his blond wife—wearing more elegant attire and a tight smile. She, too, was a familiar face. “It was out of context, so it took a second,” says Austin. “But I’m like, ‘Wait, is that Andre and Steffi?”
It was. And Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, arguably the most accomplished sports couple there ever was, had good reason to be on campus that day. Their son, Jaden, a crafty right-handed pitcher with Major League stuff, had recently committed to USC. The family had come to watch his future teammates play an afternoon game.
But the lure of the adjacent tennis facility proved irresistible to Jaden’s parents, who had once ruled the sport, winning 30 majors singles titles between them (22–8 in Mom’s favor). Agassi settled in and watched. “You know how Andre is and how his tennis brain works,” says Austin. “Immediately he started breaking down Brandon’s game.”
Illustration by Felipe Flores
Illustration by Felipe Flores Illustration by Felipe Flores
And his wife? “Well, she couldn’t have been nicer,” recalls Austin, whose career briefly overlapped with Graf’s. “But you know how Steffi is. I think she sort of quietly went out to the burger truck and picked up lunch for everyone.”
Graf and Agassi would make many more visits to Troy over the next few years. Jaden may have chosen a different hand-eye sport from his parents, but he, too, is an elite athlete. This spring, as a sophomore, he picked up a win against rival UCLA. He recently entered the transfer portal after the departure of his head coach; regardless, he will likely be a Major League draft pick.
That afternoon at the USC tennis facility, after Graf had departed, one woman who’d been seated nearby, turned to another.
“Do you know who that was you were talking to?” one woman asked.
“She said her son was playing baseball at USC and she had a daughter in high school,” the other explained. “And she was here with her husband. They live in Las Vegas.”
“That was Steffi Graf!” the friend practically hissed.
“No way! How was I supposed to know?”
In his excellent book The Sports Gene, David Epstein, once a journalist at Sports Illustrated, tells the story of Steffi Graf going to a German sports academy as a young girl. She was put through a battery of tests, assessed on various dimensions—competitive desire, running speed, ability to sustain concentration. Across the board, she placed first. As Wolfgang Schneider, a German sport psychologist, told Epstein, “We predicted from her lung capacity that she could have ended up the European champion in the 1,500 meters.”
Whether she chose the sport or it was foisted upon her, Graf devoted her vast talents and drive and lung capacity and competitive drive toward tennis. Her father, Peter, was a former soccer player and insurance salesman who took up tennis at age 27, relatively late in life for a new sport. But soon he was seduced, quitting his job to give lessons, operating the local tennis club in the Rhineland town of Bruhl. When his daughter was born in 1969, it took Peter scant time to proclaim her a future champion.
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Illustration by Felipe Flores
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Sure enough. By age 3, Steffi, armed with a sawed-off wooden racket, was batting a ball back and forth over a couch in their living room. If Steffi could return Peter’s shots 25 times in a row, she was conferred a reward of ice cream and strawberries. “Most of the time, on the twenty-fifth ball, I would hit it too hard so she could not return it,” Peter Graf told the Los Angeles Times years later. “You cannot have ice cream all the time.”
At age 13, Steffi was winning West German junior championships open to players 18 and under. That same year, she received a professional ranking on the WTA’s computer. At the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, tennis was staged as a demonstration sport. Still, it drew a field of notable young pros. Having recently turned 15, Graf was the youngest player in the draw. She won gold.
In tennis—as in boxing and golf and, well, as in most sports—it’s the shoulders and arms and hands that get all the credit. But the lower extremities, literally, do much more of the lifting. And Steffi Graf’s legs propelled her all over the court with efficiency and speed and grace. Pushing off her legs while driving into her strokes, Graf generated insuperable power, the kind of pop that wouldn’t otherwise come from her slender frame. “She had the body of a gymnast,” says Martina Navratilova. “Then she hit the ball and, Whoa, how did that happen?”
Graf’s great stroke was her forehand, a fearsome blast that she often left the ground to smite. “Fraulein Forehand,” Bud Collins memorably nicknamed her. But Graf’s versatile backhand presented a sort of secret weapon hiding in plain sight. She either deployed a heavy one-handed drive, or a scythe-like slice that stayed low to the ground.
In addition to her athletic gifts, Graf’s arrival timing was excellent as well. She came along as Chris Evert and Navratilova—a tennis duopoly for more than a decade—were both north of age 30. And another ascending player from small-town Germany had recently broken through on the men’s side. And so Steffi could ride the German tennis boom created by Boris Becker, yet happily let him siphon national expectation and media coverage. If the paparazzi breathlessly followed the romantic exploits of “Boom-Boom Boris,” or reported on his every helicopter jaunt to Monaco, it meant that much less airtime and fewer column inches devoted to his female counterpart. (This pressure would exact a price on Becker; he is currently in a British prison after he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for hiding assets during bankruptcy proceedings.)
With Peter watching, as ever, intently and intensively, Graf broke through at the 1987 French Open, outlasting Navratilova 6–4, 4–6, 8–6, and winning her first major title. “I used to be a little bit scared of playing Martina and Chris,” she said after the match in a rare burst of immodesty. “Now it’s their turn to be scared of me.” She was barely a week from turning 18. After that came the deluge.
In 1988, Graf didn’t merely win the Grand Slam—all four majors in a calendar year; a feat no player, male or female, has pulled off since—but turned in the “Golden Slam” by winning the Olympic singles event in Seoul, to boot. She won three majors the following year and suddenly had a haul of eight—more than what John McEnroe across his entire career—before she was old enough to drink (in the States, at least.) Her match record that year? 86–2.
And just as saying that Graf dominated the women’s game over the next decade almost manages to sell her short, referring to Graf as “shy” or “private,” as one inevitably does, would also be an act of definitional courtesy.
When Graf wasn’t playing, she covered her face with a veil of blond hair and avoided eye contact. By her own admission, she was deeply uncomfortable in press conferences, in front of cameras and at sponsor parties and other “events.” When forced to take questions, she gave polite and politic answers. The WTA assigned a media relations worker to encourage Graf, the tour’s brightest star, to be more front-facing. The more he asked, the more she declined.
It wasn’t that Graf lacked charm or warmth behind that on-court fire. And she was not, as the lazy narrative went, boring or incurious or devoted to tennis at the exclusion of all else. She read books. She went to Michael Jackson concerts and met him backstage. (“Meeting these people is interesting,” she said, “because they are never as you expect after reading about them.”) She stayed out late at discos. She once posed for the SI Swimsuit issue. She just kept a thick membrane between herself and most of the world. “You had to respect her for it,” Jim Fuhse, a longtime WTA staffer and friend of Graf, once told me. “She never, ever wavered from just wanting her tennis to speak for itself.”
Graf did so by marrying her shotmaking—her “stroke production,” in tennis vernacular—and athleticism with an unshakeable, unbreakable will. She operated in two general modes: She would either destroy opponents, clinically and efficiently, not least at the 1988 French Open final she won 6–0, 6–0 in 32 minutes.
Or she would not be at her best, but then surge when the occasion called for it, as if simply telling herself I will not leave the court anything other than the winner. Consider: She won 107 titles in her career; she was the runner-up only 31 times. “So many times, you would think, ‘This is my day to beat Steffi.’ And then it wouldn’t be,” says Arantxa Sánchez Vicar
io, a chief Graf rival whose head-to-head record was 8–28.
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