thanks to hometown pasadena, i found out about andre agassi's book signing appearance at vroman's bookstore and so i decided to stop by yesterday. the line was pretty massive (as seen in the photo below), and i had no interest in buying his book simply to get an autograph. however i was very happy to snap off a few pictures of the tennis star before security kindly asked me to remove my camera from their store. he seemed genuinely happy with the people he spoke to. were any of you able to meet him yesterday?
no skywatch this friday, but i'm sure i'll be back with more pasadena sky next week.
9 comments:
Ben, I'm glad I'm not the only one running into "camera issues" in a store! What's with that?? Regards from EAGAN daily photo
Ohh, I missed it! :(
I would love to meet him one day. I am a big tennis fan and I want to try to talk in German to him. He is married to Stefanie Graf and I am always wondering how his German is!
Maybe next time. Thanks for showing your "forbidden" picture!
Heike
Good one! I'm not a tennis fan but I'm a Vroman's fan. It was probably Agassi's security and not Vroman's. What do you think?
Good question Petrea - I think the person was wearing a Vroman's shirt, but maybe I'm building that fabrication in my mind. He did seem to have a number of people surrounding him.
My favorite tennis star of all time. So cool you got the shot! We started watching tennis when he won his 1st French Open - just so adorable. I listened to him on NPR interview - I was sad about all his troubles which seems so typical of the profession (but I guess that's reality) but even with those, he is so very likable and comes across as a genuinely good person. The tennis school for underpriveleged children he has in Vegas is really commendable.
Hi there,
Thanks for the write-up on this event. I work at Vroman's, and I was one of the people who had to tell everyone not to take photographs. I just wanted to clarify that this was NOT Andre Agassi being a diva, nor was it us just being mean. The reason for the no photos policy at the event is that we had a lot of people to get through and a very strict time limit to do it in. Andre had a flight to catch that required him to leave by 1:30, meaning we had less than 2 hours to get through 350+ people.
If we'd let anyone take photos, we'd have to let everyone take them, and there's simply no way we'd have gotten through the line. We felt it was more important to have as many people as possible meet Andre, so we made the decision. Given more time, we would've gladly facilitated photos (In fact, at our last huge event, Kathy Griffin, I personally took photos for anyone who wanted them -- over 600 of them).
Anyway, thanks for the post, and I'm glad you got at least this clandestine photo!
Thanks for that clarification! It totally makes sense, although I see some difference between taking photos in line, and taking photos from a distance. But I hear you. It looked like the line was moving extremely smoothly.
Great work!
I get it, it really does make sense. I can see how it would have been a madhouse otherwise.
I know a lot of people criticized Agassi for coming forward with his use of illegal drugs, but I find him to be a very genuine person that is admitting mistakes and trying to move on with his life. He has devoted a lot of his time to helping kids, and I hope he continues his good work!
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