Indian Wells, California : Former tennis greats Andre Agassi and Martina Navratilova stole the limelight with their wit while playing in exhibition matches on Friday to raise money for victims of the Haiti earthquake.
Navratilova and Justine Henin beat Steffi Graf and Lindsay Davenport 8-6 in a light-hearted women's double encounter before Pete Sampras and Roger Federer overcame Agassi and Rafael Nadal by the same margin.
After the two matches finished in front of a capacity crowd of 16,100 at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden, venue owner Larry Ellison presented a cheque for $1 million (Dh3.67 million) to the American Red Cross Haiti relief and development fund.
"We hope it's going to be more than a million dollars," Ellison, the billionaire software mogul and chief executive of Oracle, told a news conference.
"What we guaranteed was at least a million dollars but people are continuing to make contributions. With a little bit of luck, we'll tally everything up and we'll go over the million dollar target."
Live entertainment
Each of the eight players competing in the "Hit for Haiti" charity matches wore a microphone so the stadium crowd and television viewers could hear the banter as play unfolded.
Serve-and-volley maestro Navratilova set the tone in the women's match with a barrage of quips and verbal jabs.
After Graf lost her microphone while scampering back to retrieve a lob, Navratilova said: "Your mike fell off when you were running back. Does that mean you're faster than the speed of sound?"
Agassi delivered a virtual stand-up comic routine that would have earned him high praise in his glitzy home town of Las Vegas.
"You know what everyone here is thinking: Who are those two bald guys playing with Federer and Nadal right now?" he jested to Sampras, who compared Agassi to American television character Kojak.
Agassi directed most of his humour at his long-time tennis rival Sampras, who he berated for being a poor tipper.
After Sampras had challenged a call by a linesman, Agassi, as quick as a flash, said: "You know what goes first Pete? The eyes are the first thing to go."
