CHARLOTTE, N. C. _ In the second act of his life, Andre Agassi believes he has found his true calling.
Agassi, the former U.S. tennis star and No. 1 player in the world, now builds schools for at-risk children. You may have heard about the public school he founded in his hometown of Las Vegas in 2001, which has been a huge success.
You may not know that Agassi and his business partner Bobby Turner have now built 79 other charter schools across America that serve approximately 40,000 students (and plan to build another 85 by 2020). Agassi came to Charlotte on Friday to visit the latest school that his and Turner's partnership have built _ the KIPP Change Academy in east Charlotte, which serves about 360 students ranging in age from kindergartners to fifth-graders.
Force-fed tennis by his father and focused almost entirely on tennis and hedonistic pursuits as a youth, Agassi never came close to finishing high school himself. He said he regrets that now.
"I was pretty much an eighth-grade dropout," he told me in an interview Friday. "But listen, I don't think anything happens by accident. ... My lack of education has led to so many children having education as a result."
