Why pickleball GOAT Anna Leigh Waters is partnering with Andre Agassi at the U.S. Open

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Tennis legend Andre Agassi will make his professional pickleball debut at the U.S. Open Pickleball Championships next week, alongside one of the best players to ever pick up a paddle. Anna Leigh Waters, who has won 148 Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) titles, or golds, is known across her sport as the greatest women’s player of all time — at 18 years old.

Waters, who is world No. 1 in women’s singles, women’s doubles and mixed doubles and who turned professional aged 12, will team up with 54-year-old Agassi, the eight-time Grand Slam champion in tennis, for the mixed doubles event at the tournament, which begins April 26 in Naples, Fla.

Agassi and Waters are expected to play their first match together April 30, which will be shown live on CBS Sports Network. Agassi’s final professional tennis match, which he lost to Germany’s Benjamin Becker at the 2006 U.S. Open, was 19 years ago.

In a recent video interview, Waters said that her motivation for partnering with Agassi — someone who is invested in pickleball but is not best known for it — is to try to grow the sport. His explanation was rather different.

“It was very apparent that Anna Leigh was very tired of winning. She wanted to add a little spice to her life and make it quite the difficult challenge,” Agassi said self-effacingly.

“She’s right up there with the greatest ever in what she does and the idea of challenging myself to try to not screw things up for her is daunting.”

Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in the United States. An estimated 48.3 million adults dinked, hit and volleyed a small polymer ball over a 34-inch net between 2022 and 2023, according to the Association of Pickleball Professionals (APP). The ease with which anyone can play to a reasonable level is one of its biggest selling points — and also ammunition against its seriousness as a sport.

And though he hasn’t played professionally, Agassi has played a number of high-level exhibition events, including four billed as ‘Pickleball Slams’ against other tennis luminaries. In the most recent iteration two months ago in Las Vegas, Agassi teamed up with 22-time Grand Slam champion (and his wife of almost 25 years) Steffi Graf against Wimbledon finalist turned pro pickleballer Eugenie Bouchard and former men’s world No. 1 Andy Roddick.

Agassi, Graf and their two children say they took up pickleball during the height of Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, and have played ever since. Agassi and Graf are now brand ambassadors for Joola, a pickleball and table tennis company.

Waters is on a rather different level. Because of the equal prize money on the pickleball tours, Waters is currently the highest earner across men and women, with Ben Johns considered the best men’s player of all time. She cites female trailblazers Serena Williams and Simone Biles as two of her idols.

She and her mother, Leigh, were introduced to the sport by Anna Leigh’s grandfather on the very same day. Both have since turned professional — and Waters senior is now Anna Leigh’s coach and occasional doubles partner.

A contemporary and big fan of Agassi and Graf, she was overcome with excitement when her daughter made the call to ask about teaming up. Anna Leigh said she had nerves of her own while asking Agassi to play, and said that her subsequent practices with Agassi in Florida have been more of a “pinch me” moment than some of her other link-ups, which include playing with Olympian Michael Phelps, actor Jamie Foxx, boxer Sugar Ray Leonard and golfers Scottie Scheffler and Jordan Spieth.

As well as being a hugely popular sport among the general public, pickleball’s ease of adoption (and growth profile for investment) has brought it a celebrity fanbase. Casual players include Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio, while NFL and NBA legends Tom Brady and LeBron James have invested in professional teams. Roddick will feature alongside Ben Stiller in a pickleball comedy film called “The Dink.”

But it’s Waters’ journey to this point that is more significant for the place of pickleball in the world of racket sports. She played soccer as well as tennis before turning to pickleball.

“Honestly, I didn’t fall in love with tennis like I fell in love with pickleball. When I’d go play a tennis tournament, I felt that the girls and their parents were a little too… I don’t want to say mean, but super intense, at such a young age. And in south Florida, it’s super competitive in tennis,” Waters said.

The Nick Bolettieri (now IMG) and Chris Evert academies in the region have long made the area America’s tennis hotbed, with Grand Slam champions Coco Gauff, Madison Keys and Agassi himself all training in the area from a young age. Gauff grew up in Delray Beach after moving from Atlanta, while Agassi moved when he was 13; Danielle Collins grew up in the area in St. Petersburg, while Ben Shelton played college tennis at the University of Florida before turning pro.

“It was a little much for me because I was just playing tennis because I loved it,” Waters said.

“And then I started playing tournaments and I’m like, ‘I don’t really think this is for me.’

I went and played my first pickleball tournament and I had so much fun … I was good at it and I was having fun so as a 10- or 11-year-old you want to do what you know is fun — and I was able to do it with my mom so that was even more special.”

Pickleball has long been seen as a poorer relation to tennis, largely an on-ramp or off-ramp to and from the real deal. Agassi himself is very clear that “tennis demands the most of any racket sport — mentally emotionally, physically.” In a recent interview with The Athletic he called tennis the “Mount Everest” of racket sports.

“Anna Leigh probably experienced at a very young age, just how daunting tennis is and how lonely it can be out there against somebody that far away from you on the court, yet you’re so connected to,” he said.

Waters says she does receive some snobbishness about pickleball’s standing compared to tennis, but like Agassi she thinks the two can complement one another. The conflict between the two sports often centers on the fact that tennis courts can be repurposed into multiple pickleball courts.

“While tennis is growing, it’s much less expensive to repaint a tennis court into two pickleball courts than to build new ones from scratch,” the United States Tennis Association (USTA) chief executive Lew Sherr told The Athletic in February.

“That’s where you tend to see some conflict on the professional side of the sport.”

For Agassi, the partnership between him and Waters, and the friendship that they’ve developed, is evidence of the social benefits of playing pickleball, which he believes is one of its biggest selling points.

“I don’t know if this says more about me than I care to admit, but through pickleball my wife and I are actually making friends and that’s not an easy thing to do at this stage of life,” he said.

They’ve already practiced a bit together in Florida ahead of the Championships, and part of Waters’ role has been reassuring Agassi that he’s good enough to compete.

“I was like, ‘Andre, you’re insane at pickleball. Stop doubting yourself. You’re so good,’” she said. As the far more experienced pickleball player, Waters has taken the lead on things like strategy and opposition analysis. Both she and Agassi are naturally aggressive players in their respective sports, and Waters says that broadly the approach will be “grip it and rip it”. This is in line with a shift towards more aggressive play — speeding up, as it is known in pickleball — away from the more conservative, long rallies involving short, angled shots called dinks.

Anna Leigh Waters is the biggest women’s star in pickleball. (Bruce Yeung / Getty Images)

Agassi, meanwhile, has been imparting some of the wisdom he’s acquired over the last five decades, while trying to adapt to his new sport.

“I have no barometer for where to direct my blood pressure on a pickleball court,” Agassi said. “In tennis, I know that very well. So it’ll be challenging for me to perceive and understand my role and stick to it in its clarity of purpose, but I look forward to the challenge.

“I’m hoping that we can get so comfortable together even before we start that Anna Leigh understands that I process information really fast and, if there’s something I need to be doing or there’s something I’m doing that I shouldn’t be doing, I’m good with being told, ‘Get your head back in it.’”

“Yeah, you’ve been in a big moment once or twice before,” Waters said, smiling.

Agassi’s presence will undoubtedly be a major boost for the U.S. Open, which already typically hosts around 50,000 people and will be broadcast this year on CBS Sports Network and the Pickleball Channel. The big challenge for pickleball is turning it from a booming participation sport into one that’s similarly popular with spectators. Tennis has at times had the reverse problem.

Whether or not young, popular athletes like Waters choosing pickleball over more mainstream sports like tennis will lead to a meaningful demographic shift in the years to come, it’s certainly become a viable profession. More and more tennis players are switching to pickleball in retirement — former world No. 8 Jack Sock and one-time world No. 38 Donald Young are among them. For Waters, who was homeschooled from the third grade, she’s decided to eschew college for now to focus on her playing career in a sport that’s becoming increasingly global: The tennis Australian Open this year hosted the “AO Pickleball Slam.”

Sherr said that there won’t be any kind of pickleball event at the U.S. Open anytime soon, but the sport’s growth means that Waters estimates that she plays in around 25 tournaments a year, and her success has made her one of few stars of the sport who did not come to it from tennis.

For now, though, her focus is on the U.S. Open and her partnership with one of the most gifted people to have ever picked up any racket. Going into their first match, Waters will be “hyping Andre up,” while for him, the feeling of opportunity will outweigh any nerves.

“When was the last time in your life you did something for the first time?” Agassi asked.

“That gets really rare and sort of further apart as you get older. And so it feels exciting for me to stretch my skin and put myself in an area that I can honestly say is slightly uncomfortable … But not so uncomfortable.”

(Top photo: Handout)

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