Andre Agassi Reflects: His and Steffi Graf’s Children Grasp Fame Isn’t Everything (Exclusive).

Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf might be the ultimate tennis couple, but to their kids, they’re just plain old mom and dad. Jaden Gil Agassi, 22, and Jaz Elle Agassi, 20, have parents with 30 combined Grand Slam wins, so Andre says he understands why people might think they had a moment where they realized their mom and dad are stars.

“I can imagine how somebody looks at that from the outside,” Agassi, 53, tells PEOPLE exclusively at a press conference on Saturday for The Netflix Slam tennis match in Las Vegas. “Somehow there’s going to be this moment where they go, ‘These are my parents.’” However, the tennis legend says that didn’t really happen, as Jaden and Jaz always saw Andre and Graf, 54, as their parents, first and foremost.

“So when people are coming up to us in grocery stores, [Jaden and Jaz] were like, ‘What’s up with these people?’ So you go through a whole phase of them going, ‘Well, this makes no sense that the people are coming up as if there’s a big deal. And then they start to put together why it’s a big deal,” he explains.

Still, as people paid attention to the two tennis stars, he shares that it helped his kids understand the difference between how fame is perceived and what their lives are really like.

“They start to realize they’re looking behind the Wizard of Oz curtain and they realize it’s not all that,” Andre says. “So there’s a healthy balance that kind of is inevitable through the whole process.” Although Andre was one of the greats in his day, he marvels at the modern-day tennis game and its players, including Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz, who are playing Sunday in The Netflix Slam at Las Vegas’s Mandalay Bay.

“When you really talk about these guys now from a speed standpoint, from a spin standpoint, from technology standpoint, athletic, I mean the science behind their training, I mean they’re changing the geometry of the game and one of the things I always counted on was my geometry,” he says. “There are a lot of guys out there that I would say I would have inroads against and I would like this challenge, but there’s so many that I say no thank you. I have no chance against them.”

Are Nadal and Alcaraz two players who he’d have no chance against? “Yes, they are,” he says.

Meanwhile, when it comes to whether the former player misses the training regimen involved in playing at a top professional level, Andre is reflective.

“I miss having such a defined goal that is so important that the rest of your day becomes just the expression of it. So for me that’s gold, right? It’s gold is care about something so much that nothing else feels like a discipline. It just feels like an opportunity to get to what you really want,” he says, adding, “but then you have other expressions of it as you get older.”

Indeed, over time, he has found that getting older has changed his perspective and helped him realize what he does miss about tennis.
“So you also think back and think to yourself, ‘I can’t believe what I put myself through.’ And so that’s an inevitable part,” he says, adding, “But actually, if there’s anything I miss about the game, it’s about knowing your body so well that you actually were driving it like a Ferrari at 3,900 RPMs.”