Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf raise $300,000 for charity with 20 luxury watches

Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf turned 20 limited-edition watches into $300,000 for charity(Getty Images)

Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf celebrated 10 years with Swiss watchmaker Longines in 2018 with a fundraiser that brought in $300,000 for their charities. The tennis legends marked the anniversary with a limited-edition watch collection, but the real story was where the money went.

The auction supported Agassi’s education foundation and Graf’s Children for Tomorrow, which helps children and families affected by war, exile and violence.The project brought together two causes the couple had supported for years. Agassi focused on educational opportunities for disadvantaged young people in the United States, while Graf’s foundation worked with children dealing with trauma. Later that year, Graf explained how the Longines partnership had helped her charity reach more children and expand its work into schools.

How a limited-edition watch auction raised $300,000 for charity

Longines unveiled the special Conquest V.H.P. collection at a charity gala at Paris’s Musée Rodin on June 2, 2018. The event honoured Agassi and Graf and celebrated a decade of partnership with the Swiss watchmaker. The collection featured 10 men’s watches and 10 women’s watches, created in limited numbers for the occasion.Longines then held an online auction throughout June. The company kept the first numbered set, marked 1/10, for its museum in Saint-Imier, Switzerland.

Buyers acquired the remaining nine sets, and the auction raised $300,000 for the couple’s foundations.The proceeds went to the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education and Children for Tomorrow. Agassi’s foundation works to improve educational opportunities for disadvantaged young people, while Graf established Children for Tomorrow in 1998 to help children and families affected by war, violence and persecution.The fundraiser also reflected how the couple’s relationship with Longines had grown beyond a commercial partnership. Per Las Vegas Sun, Agassi said, “It was built around an overlap of shared values.” He explained that Longines first supported his former Grand Slam for Children event in Las Vegas before the relationship grew over the years.

Steffi Graf says Longines helped her charity reach more children

Graf offered a closer look at the impact of that support in the same Las Vegas Sun interview. At the time, she said Children for Tomorrow helped a little over 1,000 children each year, mostly through therapy.“We’ve been able to raise more funds and continue to grow, and now we are able to go into schools and work with teachers and train teachers to understand trauma. We just have a bigger reach now,” Graf said.Along with therapy, it had begun reaching children through schools and training teachers to recognise trauma. Graf also spoke about the sharp rise in refugees arriving in Germany over the previous five or six years, which brought new challenges involving different languages, cultures and the experiences children had endured.Graf, who founded the charity in 1998, continued to travel to Germany every couple of months to support its work. Longines’ backing helped the organisation raise more funds and extend its reach, she explained.Agassi pursued a different route through education. His charitable work in Las Vegas included the college preparatory campus he established in 2001 to help disadvantaged students access better educational opportunities.

The auction brought their separate missions together through one fundraising effort. The $300,000 raised from the watch sale supported both foundations, giving the couple’s anniversary a purpose beyond tennis and luxury watches.The fundraiser continued beyond the June auction. In Nov. 2018, Agassi welcomed winning bidders to Democracy Prep at the Agassi Campus in Las Vegas. They met students before Agassi personally handed over their numbered watch sets, linking the auction to his education work.