Andre Agassi Hated Tennis. Can He Have More Fun Playing Pickleball? - After years of relative quiet, the public is meeting “Andre 2.0” — a pickleball booster, an open book and a guy eager to build a less tortured relationship with competition.

Andre Agassi, 55 years old, was dressed like a college student during finals week: black-and-white plaid pajama pants, Nike Air Force 1s, long-sleeved T-shirt, backpack high on his shoulders. It was a bright morning in April, and he reached his gate at Newark Airport just in time to board the flight. The tennis star was headed south for an ESPN prime-time athletic event with a much-hyped million dollars in prize money: the fourth annual Pickleball Slam, a splashy production held in a casino theater in Hollywood, Fla.

Agassi has taken part every year since its inception. This year, his matches were being billed as a battle of the sexes. He and James Blake, another retired tennis celebrity, would be playing doubles against two female pros: Genie Bouchard (once the top female tennis player in Canada) and the 19-year-old phenom Anna Leigh Waters (the No. 1 female pickleball player in the world, and perhaps the sport’s best-known pro). Before that, singles — Agassi vs. Bouchard, Blake vs. Waters. Matches like these are part of the broad appeal of “pickle,” the fastest-growing sport in the country: People of different generations and genders can play competitively against one another. Compared with tennis, the court is smaller, the net lower, the matches shorter, the pace of the ball slower — all things that level the playing field, making raw strength less of an advantage.

Agassi had spent months preparing for the Slam, but the flight down was testing his resolve. After settling into his business-class seat, he sent me a text, which promptly arrived at my spot back in coach. “Hi Lizzy. Andre here,” he wrote. “A lady just asked me if I was Jeff Bezos. Then followed that up with ‘Do you get that a lot.’ That totally killed my confidence for tomorrow.”

This text was coming from Fun Andre, one of a few personas I came to know over the months I spent shadowing Agassi. Fun Andre is an affable guy whose 40 years in public life have made him both deeply aware of his own image and deeply kind. Fun Andre greets fans with endless patience. Fun Andre will spend 30 minutes helping to locate the car a friend’s aunt has lost in a Palm Springs parking lot. Fun Andre is playful, self-deprecating, hilarious; he’s the one who, in the 2009 memoir “Open,” fantasizes about making a “beautiful toupee” out of his former coach’s bushy eyebrows.