For the veterans, it’s all a matter of timing

This is not a scene 32-year-old Agassi would have pictured for himself a decade ago, or even more recently. ‘‘I would be surprised if you had told me when I was 25 years old that I would even still be playing at this age,’’ he said. Yet there he was an hour before a match, like so many of his peers, learning to blend the end of a tennis career with the beginning of the rest of a life.

When the US Open begins on Monday, Pete Sampras will show up with a pregnant wife and a balding head; Michael Chang will try to remember every hallway and court surface in what could be his last turn at Flushing Meadows. Todd Martin will apply ice to every imaginable part of his body in the hopes of coaxing it through a few more night matches; Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario will trying to piece together an up-and-down year in which she took five weeks off for ‘‘extreme exhaustion’’ as her ranking slipped out of the top 30. Each will be asked about retirement plans — more than once.

Each will be reminded that the players perched atop the tennis rankings are Serena Williams, who is 20, and Lleyton Hewitt, who is 21.

No one, perhaps, has had as difficult a time leaving behind his days as a young lion as 31-year-old Sampras. He dominated so soundly for so long that when he slipped from the apex, it sent his confidence plummeting even more quickly than his actual game.

At a warm-up tournament in Long Island last week, Sampras acknowledged, ‘‘the days of me dominating and being No. 1 are over — I have to get my confidence back and you need to win matches for that to happen.’’ But he hasn’t made it past the third round of a tournament since April and hasn’t won a title in two years — and when he lost in the second round in Long Island to 20-year-old claycourt specialist Paul-Henri Mathieu, he sounded particularly out of touch.

‘‘You have to remember who I am and where I’m playing next week,’’ he said. ‘‘The US Open is where you shine and that is where I hope to shine… I’m still one of the favorites.’’

Certainly, Sampras’s performance at the US Open last year was a wake-up call to those who thought his game had deserted him for good. With a serve as forceful as ever and a suddenly perky backhand, he rolled through a difficult draw, upsetting three previous Open champions before falling to Hewitt in the final.

Yet it is difficult to see such a run happening again, especially now that eager young players see Sampras as upset fodder. ‘‘When you’re not winning the same way anymore, it’s important to cope with reality, which sometimes stinks,’’ said Martina Navratilova, who at 45 plays doubles on the WTA circuit. ‘‘Everyone else sees you differently, so you need to do that. When I was getting older and things just weren’t happening as well as they used to, it was frustrating because I didn’t feel different, but the result was different.’’

This is not to say Sampras should retire, as some critics have suggested, just that ‘‘the key is to be able to make adjustments,’’ Navratilova said. ‘‘You have to adapt.’’ Navratilova has found that a challenge, and many never figure out how to redraw road maps that have pointed them in the right direction for so long. Chang was a star at 17 when he won the French Open, and he won title after title by mixing breathtaking court speed with an extraordinary willingness to fight out each and every point.

But as he shifted into is mid and late-20s, the men’s game moved toward a style that favored bigger, stronger hitters. Eager to keep up, Chang turned to weightlifting, packing pounds of muscle onto his 5-foot-9 frame ‘‘But then I lost a lot of the speed that made me a good player,’’ said Chang, now 30. ‘‘I just couldn’t move the way I was used to, getting to shots, and I wasn’t winning.’’ These days he tries to keep the few parts of his power-based game that worked while salvaging some measure of his quickness.

He has having a little more fun now, he said, ‘‘just teeing it up and putting a few less miles on the speedometer,’’ but wins are elusive, and for the first time, he has talked of retiring. ‘‘You’re used to playing at a certain level, used to beating certain players… and it’s frustrating at first when that isn’t what’s regularly happening anymore,’’ said Chang, who has won five matches all year. ‘‘The thing is, you don’t want to walk away with any regrets. Because you can’t come back in a few years, not really. Once you let it go, it’s gone.’’

There are times, as an older player, when your head knows exactly what to do. It’s your body that can’t quite get there. ‘‘I go through some matches now, and as a player, I can see things that when I was younger, I just didn’t see,’’ Martin said. At 32, the Illinois native has a 23-14 record this year, but more often than not, his accessory of choice is an icebag, or several, bound to his knees and chest. ‘‘It can be frustrating when you think you know the game better than you ever have, but you just can’t make the shots work the way you once could,’’ he said.

“Sometimes, if I thought about it rationally, I’d retire tomorrow,” Martin said. “There are the days where the body or the mind isn’t quite as sharp as it used to be, and that’s sort of when you’d like (a coach) to send someone else in for you, but this isn’t a sport where you have that luxury.’’

Others have the physical endurance, but not the results. Earlier this year, Sanchez-Vicario was shattered after winning just one game in her first-round match at the French Open, and while she rebounded slightly after a five-week break, she has faltered again of late, losing in the second round in one tournament and the first round of two.

On one hand, she has said she doesn’t enjoy losing; on the other, she is not ready to end a career that has been the steadying force in a sometimes tumultuous life. In some ways, she seems to be searching for what Graf achieved in 1999: a graceful exit.

“She was really clear, absolutely decisive,’’ Agassi said of his wife, who at 30 won the French Open, reached the final at Wimbledon and retired a few weeks later. Agassi seems to only become increasingly at peace with himself and his game, piling up a 40-7 record this year along with four titles. Along the way, he enjoys his fledgling family and sticks to a fitness routine some might view as Draconian.

To Agassi, his workouts are the absolutely necessary ingredient to continue competing for Grand Slam titles. ‘‘I’m really aware that I can’t settle for any less than that, that I don’t really have a choice, unless I stop playing,’’ he said.

‘‘In truth, that’s been the easier part — it’s easy for me to know when to dig in. I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to let go. …That’s the thing about growing older, you have no idea what’s going to happen until you get there.’’

(LA Times-Washington Post)