Asia Muhammad Settling Into Life As a Pro

Asia Muhammad finally sat down, took a deep breath and bit into her grilled-cheese sandwich.

“You must be starving,” someone said.

“Yeah, I am. It feels like I haven’t eaten all day.”

It was 2:30 p.m. on middle Sunday at the US Open and Muhammad, a 17-year-old from Las Vegas, had just posted a nice win over No. 14-seed Johanna Konta of Austria in the first round of the Open junior tournament.

A round of interviews with the media and a video shoot for US Open Live followed the match before Muhammad was finally able to dig into her sandwich, potatoes and peach smoothie in the player’s lounge.

So goes the life of a professional tennis player. Yes, that’s right, a professional tennis player. Just before the Open, Muhammad announced she would forgo her dream to play college tennis at USC and make the move into professional tennis, much like her doubles partner at the Open, Sam Querrey, did just two years ago. She will be managed by Andre Agassi’s agent Perry Rogers’ company Prism and trained by Agassi’s longtime friend Gil Reyes.

It’s a move many in tennis development circles feel is the right one, even if Muhammad’s father, Ron, took a little while longer to come around. “She really wanted to do it,” said Ron, a former basketball player at USC. “I held out as long as possible.”

Said Asia: “I always wanted to go to USC, but my dream was to play professionally. It was kind of a hard decision but at the same time it was kind of easy.”

There are a lot of people to credit for Muhammad’s rapid development and rise to the pro ranks. At the top of the list is Agassi, her coach Tim Blenkiron and the Agassi Boys and Girls Club in Las Vegas, the site where Muhammad first started playing tennis at the age of 9.

Blenkiron, originally from Australia and a former NCAA champion in doubles from UNLV in 1997, left a cushy country club job to take over the coaching duties at the Boys and Girls Club four years ago. The site of the three courts sits near the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Washington Avenue and is in one of the poorest sections of the city.

Muhammad was born in Southern California and moved to the Vegas suburb of Henderson, Nev., as a child. Her mother, the former Faye Paige, was a basketball and track athlete at Long Beach State, and Ron first took Asia to the Boys and Girls Club because her cousin Jasmine played there and he was interested in the basketball program for his sons. Jasmine currently plays tennis for Howard University.

Ever since Blenkiron arrived, he has refined her game and gotten her ready for the pro level. It also hasn’t hurt that she’s sprouted to 5 feet 10 ½ inches tall.

“I believe she has a very bright future,” Blenkiron told The New York Times columnist Harvey Araton in a front-page column after Muhammad’s first-round match.

Ryan Wolfington, the executive director of the USTA Nevada section, said, “Asia told The New York Times that without the Agassi Boys and Girls Club, she’d be nowhere. She is always quick to credit Andre and what he has done for tennis in Las Vegas.”

Muhammad, currently ranked No. 414 in the world, lost in the first round of the main draw to Aravane Rezai of France, 6-2, 6-4. Muhammad said she knows she can play with players like No. 74 ranked Rezai who holds career wins against Maria Sharapova and Venus Williams.

She played her first US Open last year in the juniors so felt more comfortable this time around. “I kind of knew what to expect,” she said. “It’s been great. Signing the autographs are always fun and I got to get some new clothes from Adidas and some stuff from Prince.”

She lost in the first round of the main draw women’s doubles with Melanie Oudin and was forced to withdraw from the mixed doubles with Querrey because he was cramping.

She plays Romana Tabakova of the Slovak Republic Tuesday in the second round of the junior singles in an 11 a.m. ET match on the Grandstand court.

Muhammad, whose hobbies include shopping and going to the movies, is not hard to spot walking around the grounds at the Open in her favorite-color pink Adidas tennis outfits and actually received some nice pre-tournament publicity for the racquet she is using. Famous Las Vegas jeweler Michael Minden custom-fitted her racquet with two diamond A’s above her grip.

“This is the first time I've actually put diamonds on a piece of athletic equipment,” Minden said. “We came up with a special process to affix it to the racquet, with a special technology to transfer the letters to a new racquet, when Asia wears out the first one.”

In the juniors, Muhammad is in Oudin’s bottom half of the singles draw and the doubles partners could meet in the third round. The pair won their first-round doubles match Monday.

Muhammad was enjoying some big-time results this year before a left hamstring injury kept her off the courts for eight weeks during the summer.

She beat two players in the top 100 as a wild card at the ITF $50,000 Hilton Cup in Las Vegas which ran concurrent with the Tennis Channel Open, which Querrey won. She beat Julie Coin, who ousted Ana Ivanovic in the US Open, and then Oudin 6-2, 6-3 at the MovieGallery Pro Classic. She then beat world No. 177 Raquel Kops-Jones 6-2, 6-2, before suffering the injury in the second round of her 6-4, 6-3 loss to eventual winner Bethany Mattek, 6-4, 6-3.

Muhammad is well aware that Agassi put Las Vegas on the map as far as tennis goes. She knows that Agassi’s name will come up a lot when stories are done on her and that’s okay. “People are starting to look at Las Vegas tennis a little closer now,” she said.

Agassi was at her final at the Vegas Challenger but Muhammad didn’t know it until after the match. She gets to hit with Steffi Graf whenever they’re both in town. “She’ll say some things while we’re on the court, but it’s mostly just for fun. She doesn’t let lecture me.”

There may or may not be future work for her in the Agassi house. “They haven’t asked me to baby sit yet,” she said