YEREVAN, AUGUST 24, ARMENPRESS. Andre Agassi's body will always bear the scars of 21 years on the unforgiving tennis circuit, the days when he pounded his opponents into submission with his relentlessly aggressive baseline game, CNN reported.

"I'm 46 years old and occasionally I have a hard time putting my shoes on in the morning," Agassi said in an interview with CNN in Umag, Croatia in July, where he played his old friend Goran Ivanisevic in an exhibition event. "No question that my body is older than its years."

The transition from professional athlete to retiree can often be challenging and the American-Armenian realized he had to find a new focus once he stopped playing and he's now devoting most of his time to his new passion: building schools in the United States.

Agassi's wife and fellow multiple grand slam winner, Steffi Graf, runs a foundation aimed at helping children who have been traumatized by war or violence.

The way he has adapted to life away from professional tennis is a source of pride to Agassi, especially as the prospect of retirement had filled him with dread.

"It's like preparing for death," said Agassi. "Nobody knows what it's going to feel like and nobody knows when it is going to happen and when it does, it's your time."

Yet retirement also came as "a relief," said Agassi, who lives and works in Las Vegas with his family -- he and Graf have two children -- and devotes most of his time to education. "I had accomplished what I wanted. I pushed myself as far I could go."

Coached by his father Mike, a volatile former Olympic boxer from Iran, Agassi was a child prodigy who grew up playing hustle matches in Las Vegas.

In his 2009 autobiography "Open" Agassi recalls Mike Agassi once pointing a handgun at another driver while he was in the car and remembers beating former NFL star Jim Brown at the age of nine to win a $500 bet, arranged by his father.

Having taken the tennis world by storm as a young upstart with long hair, denim shorts and lightning-quick reflexes and footwork, Agassi wrote in his autobiography that at times he hated tennis "with a dark and secret passion."

He regained his love for the game in his late 20s and would leave the sport as one of its most popular competitors and most eloquent spokesmen.