Andre Agassi certainly does not look old. At 35, he remains perhaps the fittest man in tennis, as his new outfit of choice – a tight, sleeveless Adidas shirt – attests. The sciatic nerve that knocked him out of last year’s French Open and robbed him of a visit to Wimbledon remains in check, and he is moving well – seemingly as well as he ever has.

Unfortunately, Agassi is not playing up to his looks, at least in his seven appearances since a sprained ankle during a friendly game of racquetball last fall ended his 2005 season. Against Tommy Haas late Monday evening at the Pacific Life Open in Indian Wells, Calif., Agassi had no timing whatsoever in a 7-5, 6-2 third-round loss. The American made 35 unforced errors and frittered away a 5-3 lead in the first set, including two set points on his serve. Afterward, he expressed frustration with his progress.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve felt good on the court,” he said. “It’s just getting tiring, that’s all.”

While years of experience – and astonishing results – tell us that it is unwise to count Agassi out, this season may prove more difficult than years past.

First the positive. Agassi usually needs little time to polish the rust off his game. After he came up lame in the first round of the French Open last year, he missed two months. He promptly returned to action in Los Angeles, where he dropped just one set on his way to the Mercedes-Benz Cup title.

After seven matches, and now another week to practice before the Nasdaq-100 in Miami, one might reasonably expect better results, and soon.

Better still, Agassi has concocted a superb plan for 2006. He will skip the claycourt season and the French Open, as he no longer has any chance of winning on clay, the slow, grueling surface that makes for marathon matches and lots of stress on the body. Instead, he will rest, train, and practice on grass, hoping for another Wimbledon title. He also might play Davis Cup, on grass, for the United States against Chile, if captain Patrick McEnroe will have him.

Now for the negative. For years, Agassi has been the most precise player in the game. His timing is usually exquisite, his hands quick and ever at the ready, and his feet always close to the baseline and in the proper place on the court, even if they are not the fastest pair in the world. To watch Agassi shank forehands and allow his opponents back into points with short groundstrokes that lack punch is disconcerting enough; to hear him talk about how uncomfortable he feels on court is even worse.

As Agassi tries to find his way, his ranking will fall. At the moment he is no. 9, and he may fall out of the top 10 if Lleyton Hewitt ever finds his game and James Blake, now at a career-high no. 14, continues to win (good performances by Blake almost certainly will keep Agassi off the Davis Cup squad at a time when he could use a weekend of live matches on grass to prepare for Wimbledon). The further Agassi falls, the more difficult his early-round opponents will become, and the sooner he will face top seeds.

As good as Agassi can be at this stage in his career, he will not win many (or any) titles if he has to defeat several of the game’s elite players along the way. Consider his last three seasons, from 2003 to 2005. In that span, he went 14-16 against players ranked inside the top 10, a very respectable record on the men’s tour. In those years he won six titles: four in 2003, including the Australian Open, and one each in 2004 and 2005. He did not play a single top-10 opponent in four of those tournaments (including Australia), and in another he played just one (Andy Roddick on clay, which might as well be the Pacific Ocean for the hard serving Roddick). At the remaining event, in Cincinnati in 2004, Agassi defeated three top-10 players. What about last year’s thrilling run to the U.S. Open final, you ask? In Flushing, Agassi played only one man inside the top 30 – no. 1 seed, and eventual champion, Roger Federer.

This is, of course, what happens with age in tennis. A player needs a high ranking to earn a decent draw, but he has to be too careful with his body to play as often as he should to maintain his technique and his ranking. For Agassi, the only way to solve this problem is to win – a lot – in the few tournaments he enters. Last year, he reached the semifinals of the Nasdaq-100, and he will have to repeat that performance, or better it, this year if he wants to considerably improve his chances at Wimbledon or during the summer hard court season.

The odds are not good. Agassi will turn 36 in April, and right now 2006 seems like a strong candidate for the third season of his career without a title (the first was in 1986, his first year on the tour, and the second was in 1997, when Agassi began a long climb from no. 141 near the end of the season to no.6 in 1998).At the moment, he plans to play through 2007, though it would not be surprising if he reconsidered should this season continue to disappoint. Then again, Agassi has beaten longer odds before. Beginning in Miami next week, we may learn a lot about whether he is capable of surprising us once again.

tperrotta@nysun.com