Coulda been a contender

Don't ever engage Times reporter Kurt Streeter in a friendly tennis match. He trained as a teenager with 14-year-old Andre Agassi, and made the future champion cry. He writes in a first-person piece today in Sports:

"Hey, I'm Andre," he said. "Nice to meet you."

I had just arrived. It was nearly midnight. After a long flight, I'd made my way inside the dorm, laid down my rackets and fallen into a bottom bunk, hoping I wouldn't wake anybody up.

A light came on. There he was, a kid looking down at me from the top bunk.

He had floppy brown hair, a wide smile and bright eyes. Andre Agassi was my first roommate. He was only 14, and it didn't last long. About two weeks later, I moved into another dorm with kids closer to my age. But during those two weeks and for the next few months, I got to know an Andre Agassi that many would not see until his career was nearly over.

Junior tennis operated on a caste system. The very best players tended to stick with the very best � and the tomato cans with the tomato cans. Most of the top dogs were white, wealthy, sure of themselves. I was none of those. I was good, not great. Middle class, not wealthy. Shy, not sure. Black, not white. It was hard to fit in.

But Andre, the son of an Iranian immigrant who worked at the casinos in Las Vegas, went out of his way to help me. Maybe it was because by birth he was something of an outsider himself.

Lifetime earnings from tennis, Streeter: $15,000 or so
Lifetime earnings from tennis, Agassi: $31 million, give or take