We’ll get to the all-important atmospherics of Andre Agassi’s 60 Minutes sitdown with Katie Couric quicker than you can say “break point!” But first, let’s dispose of the surprisingly profound implications of the interview’s one and only genuine news nugget. The nugget was not that Agassi used crystal meth for most of a year and lied about it. Factoids like this are always safely leaked well in advance, the better to be able to focus at air time on the tight shot of the interviewee squirming under Couric’s toothy interrogation.

No, in this case the nugget was the reaction to Agassi’s revelation. Fellow retired tennis great Martina Navratolova blasted Agassi and compared him to baseball’s Roger Clemens, the all-but-positively-ID’d perjurer, and Katie wondered what Andre thought about that.

And subsequent to the broadcast, Marat Safin, another tennis star who called it quits earlier this year, said he thought Agassi should give back his millions in earnings and his Grand Slam championships.

On 60 Minutes, Agassi took an unusual tack. The confessional script was built around his domineering father and his hatred of tennis, and that part played out intact. But denunciation by others of one’s drug use and dishonesty is the point in the redemption story where the memoir-hustler is supposed to suck it up and take responsibility for his detour down the tulgey path of dissipation. By definition, this includes accepting some ex post facto, and somewhat pointless, potshots.

But Agassi went a little bit off script. His return volley to Navratilova was: “The one thing that I would hope is not that there aren`t rules that need to be followed, but along with that would come some compassion that maybe this person doesn`t need condemnation. Maybe this person could stand a little help. And I had a problem. And there might be many other athletes out there that test positive for recreational drugs that have a problem.” A recreational drug, Agassi argued, is not a “performance enhancer,” but a “performance inhibitor.” It doesn’t give the user a competitive advantage; quite the contrary.

“Compassion” for the rich and famous is an intriguing defense. Despite my accompanying observation that the source of the defense was sending sending backhanded self-pity over the net, it may even be a compelling defense.

In Agassi’s account, crystal meth triggered “sadness” initially, “ followed by, you know, the energy and a chemically-induced reconnection to life.” Here’s where it gets a little more complicated. Since a “reconnection to life” arguably contributed to his rebound from No. 141 in the world back to No. 1, maybe the line between “inhibitors” and “enhancers” isn’t so clear. Think about baseball players’ use of amphetamines during the 162-game grind of their season. Recreational or occupational? As Agassi noted in a TV commercial in his purportedly less forthright earlier life, “Image is everything.”

An ancillary moment of Agassi narcissism came when he discussed his doomed marriage to Brooke Shields. A gentleman might have put across the base narrative that he was living a lie, yet taken pains not to pin the mismatch on himself. Unfortunately, Agassi protected his ex not a bit. His only proactive kind wqrds were reserved for his current wife, Steffi Graf.

Still, all in all, a fine day’s work for a 60 Minutes plugathon – a variation on the Oprah Winfrey plugathon utilized most recently and prominently by Elizabeth Edwards. It’s an American rite of passage.

Getting back to the necessary folly of drug-testing in sports, the only reason I’m not sure how I feel about Agassi compassion barometer is the very small chance that he is, even now, telling anything very close to the full truth. On the other hand, he has done good philanthropic works (his private charter prep school, targeting at-risk kids on scholarship, was the piece de resistance of the 60 Minutes report), and that counts for something.

We’ve already watched the noses of World Series champion New York Yankees teammates Alex Rodriguez and Andy Pettite lengthen considerably as they pulled off their their carefully worded “limited hangout” confessions of brief experimentation with steroids and growth hormone. And, of course, there’s Bill Clinton, who “didn’t inhale.”

On 60 Minutes, Agassi told Couric, “It wasn`t an option for me to write a book about my life and leave out one of the central points of it, one of the turning points of it. And it certainly wasn`t an option for me to write a book called Open and not be.”

Well, don’t know about that one, Andre!

Regular Beyond Chron contributor’s new book is CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death (http://benoitbook.com). Follow Irv at http://twitter.com/irvmuch.