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"  What&amp;#039;s Andre Agassi been up to since ending his tennis career at the 2006 U.S. Open, exactly? There was that memoir, Open, that became a New York Times number-one best seller, in which he revealed testing positive for methamphetamine, wearing a wig on the court, and that he thought Pete Sampras was &amp;quot;robotic.&amp;quot; There are the charitable efforts \u2014 the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy, the millions of dollars raised for kids&amp;#039; education \u2014 and then there&amp;#039;s the occasional promoting of a video game, which is what we caught him doing recently for Top Spin 4. Despite being off the court and out of the game, Esquire.com learned during a brief phone conversation that Agassi still very much enjoys hitting hard with his words, whether it&amp;#039;s about tennis or his not-at-all strong emotions about the state of American education. ESQUIRE: \u2026Wait, so do you even play any video games?  ANDRE AGASSI: No. ESQ: But this can&amp;#039;t be the first video game you&amp;#039;ve been in, right?   AA: No, but now, it&amp;#039;s a bit surreal.  ESQ: Well, yeah. It&amp;#039;s in hi-def. AA: When one&amp;#039;s life is so documented in such bold terms, it&amp;#039;s a bit startling. ESQ: Says the guy with the memoir. Yet, I can now use a PS3 controller to move a very, very close approximation of you around my TV, possibly in irresponsible and/or mediocre ways. How&amp;#039;s that feel?  AA: It&amp;#039;s better than getting me to run around a tennis court. ESQ: Is PS3 Andre Agassi a better tennis player than The Real McCoy?  AA: You can move me around the screen a lot faster than I can move around a tennis court these days.  ESQ: That doesn&amp;#039;t hurt the ego?  AA: It&amp;#039;s hopefully an entry point into creating some level of interest in the sport, and giving kids the chance to play with the level of strategy and the level of attention to what goes into structuring a point. ESQ: From your mouth to god&amp;#039;s ears, though the transition from couch to court might be rough. You&amp;#039;re in Vegas right now, right?  AA: I am. I live here.  ESQ: I grew up there. I used to play tennis at the Spanish Oaks courts.  AA: With Mr. Kellogg there, huh? ESQ: Yeah. He was the instructor.   AA: Is that right? Did you keep up the sport? ESQ: I wasn&amp;#039;t great at it. I enjoyed hitting the ball too hard. You know, they have all those hills in Spanish Oaks? So they&amp;#039;d go flying over the gate and I&amp;#039;d have to chase them down the hill.   AA: I hate it when that happens.  ESQ: So did I. &amp;#039;Strange time to be in Las Vegas though, right? How&amp;#039;ve you seen it change?  AA: Dramatically. We&amp;#039;ve been living in some pretty tough times in the city. It grew so fast, obviously, it&amp;#039;s going to be the last to recover [from the recession]. But the city&amp;#039;s so small, in a certain respect. It&amp;#039;s still a city where you feel like those that live here know each other, and can count on each other. It&amp;#039;s a community that&amp;#039;s grown to stand together.  ESQ: Well, it&amp;#039;s trying to survive.   AA: Yeah, no question. It&amp;#039;s a city in the desert. If you can imagine what it takes to build what we&amp;#039;ve built here, it takes dreamers, believers, people who can stand shoulder to shoulder to do the impossible. ESQ: Like building a pirate themed resort-casino. And speaking of impossible: How&amp;#039;re you enjoying watching the game instead of playing it? Is there anything that impresses you or excites you about it anymore?  AA: When you take the kind of spin these guys are playing with now and the kind of control they have, you might as well change the dimension of a court, and once you change the dimension of a court, you now actually fundamentally change the game, because different rules apply. When I watch it now, I spend so much of my energy just trying to understand what rules they&amp;#039;re actually playing by. It&amp;#039;s pretty amazing. But the best part of it is I don&amp;#039;t have to do that anymore.  ESQ: What about the experience of writing Open? It&amp;#039;s been a little over a year now, it&amp;#039;s in paperback, everyone knows you wore a wig and did meth. Given the opportunity, would you do it again?  AA: I would. I wrote that book, and then decided if the world would be better off for having it. And the answer was very clear: This is a story that needs to be told. If this book has an ability to impact anybody, and the byproducts are certain people saying certain things who don&amp;#039;t even read the book, then that&amp;#039;s an easy price to pay. ESQ: As someone who earned a living volleying things to people, don&amp;#039;t you want to smack whatever negative things or misinterpretations people had over the book back in their faces?  AA: No. In a sense, the game of life doesn&amp;#039;t work that way. When somebody reacts [like that], they&amp;#039;re usually just communicating a function of who they&amp;#039;re not or who they wish they were or their own insecurity. They&amp;#039;re communicating themselves in a way that ultimately one wouldn&amp;#039;t be proud of, because it&amp;#039;s not an educated response. ESQ: So, no more tennis, no books left, no video games. What&amp;#039;s Andre Agassi do with his time?  AA: I want to scale my charter school. I want to figure out a way to shorten the lines. I have 650 kids in my school, over a thousand on the waiting list. There are over 3,000 kids in New York on the waiting list. ESQ: What&amp;#039;s the challenge in fixing that? The politics of education?  AA: Political would be a fair way to put it. We need to rethink our educational system as a whole, because there&amp;#039;s no question it&amp;#039;s broken. ESQ: You recently told one interviewer that you were a registered Independent. Is there any politician or movement or initiative that could help you break through the obstacles your schools face?  AA: Yeah, I think we should figure out a way to create a children&amp;#039;s union. ESQ: We should unionize kids?  AA: If we had a children&amp;#039;s union, you&amp;#039;d be surprised how much could get done. If everybody thought of what&amp;#039;s actually best for our kids, not what&amp;#039;s best for own agendas, I think we all would make different decisions as it relates to politicians, as it relates to unions, as it relates to capitalists, to society in general. Thinking about our future in every decision and every vote and every decision we make, is what we are obligated to do. They don&amp;#039;t have a voice. Making decisions that don&amp;#039;t consider our future is a crime against us. The one area that is of vital importance is education. It&amp;#039;s at the root of every problem with have. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/videos/a9518/andre-agassi-politics-5360064/>