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  COURTNEY STEWART/Daily Bruin Just Shoot Me's David Spade smiles while giving teammate Pete Sampras some words of advice.

By Jeff Agase

Daily Bruin Reporter

Andre Agassi steps to the baseline and serves to ... David Spade?

A joke, right? Well yes, sort of. Last night at the Los Angeles Tennis Center, tennis stars Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras joined four comedians for the Mercedes-Benz Cup’s tenth annual “Night at the Net.”

Proceeds from the celebrity-pro 21-point match went to the MusiCares Foundation, which works to insure support for musicians who often receive no health or human services after their careers end.

Spade was joined from the celebrity world by Matthew Perry, Greg Kinnear and Kelsey Grammer. Former tennis great Pam Shriver played the part of witty, abrasive master of ceremonies, while comedian Fred Willard rounded out the celebrity cast as the mentally vacant chair umpire.

The first tennis ball was not hit until over an hour past the scheduled 7:30 p.m. starting time, but the comedy was already in high gear. The six participants entered to The Alan Parsons Project’s classic adrenaline gusher “Eye in the Sky,” but any seriousness quickly disappeared when Spade ran through the tunnel with a backwards hat and soccer shoes, while twirling his racket with unapologetic cockiness.

The silliness further escalated when Shriver announced that team captains Agassi and Sampras had the liberty of free substitutions throughout the exercise in comic relief. During warmup, Kinnear’s preppy attire proved a meaningless facade when his lefty groundstrokes were revealed to have all the lethality of the Swiss Air Force.

But some of the best comedy came from Agassi and Sampras, two long-time rivals with a mutual respect but sharply contrasting comic styles. Agassi was vocal throughout the match, lamenting about Sampras, “I see him all the time. After 27 times, he gets very ugly.”

Sampras’ humor was more subtle but equally crowd-pleasing. In a rare comic performance just before serving, he asked Agassi, “How about 128 up the middle?” after which Agassi responded, “I’ll give you three serves. It doesn’t matter. You still stink.”

Wisecracker Spade was the most vocal of the participants. Clocking in at, to borrow a line from the movie “Rudy,” “5-foot-nothing and 100-and-nothing,”

From Kinnear came a startlingly accurate Monica Seles impersonation. After hitting a shot into the net, he bellowed a grunt and then pleaded to the boisterous crowd, “Don’t sound so disappointed.”

Kinnear looked to be in the best shape of the four celebrities, with Perry and Grammer a few months in the weight room short of playing shape. Perry was clearly all serve, rocketing a 98 mile-per-hour first then following it with a benign forehand into the net.

Near the middle of the match, Agassi provoked Sampras when he accused him of “serving like a girl,” to which Sampras responded with one of his monstrous triple-digit serves.

At 15-all, the two tennis pros sat down and let the celebrities duke it out alone. Grammer welcomed their gesture with a heads-up reference to current pop culture by remarking, “the weakest link is out.” Shriver dismissed Grammer’s unrealistic claim with the line, “Now is the time to go to the bathroom.”

At 17-15, Agassi and Sampras booted all four celebrities and faced off for the rest of the match themselves, to the delight of the nearly packed Straus Stadium. With the match on the line, Agassi stepped to the baseline and broke into a dead-on Sampras impersonation, to which Sampras responded with an equally accurate Agassi.

A backhand winner from Sampras during sudden death ended the match at 21-20 in favor of Team Sampras. Agassi joked in a post-match interview, “After these kind words, I hate to say this, but I blame my teammates.”