LAS VEGAS, Oct 23: Tennis legends Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, who served their first surprise be emerging as a couple two years ago, served up another Tuesday by suddenly announcing they had married.

“That was a well-kept secret - we’re delighted for both of them,” said Mayor Ralf Goeck of Graf’s German home town of Bruehl, near Bonn, while details of the wedding remained shrouded in mystery.

Graf is expecting the couple’s child - already known to be a boy - in mid-December, and the latest word before the Las Vegas wedding late Monday local time had been that the couple would wait until after the birth.

A statement through Julie Rossetti of the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation said the couple experienced it as a “blessing” to wed and “begin this new chapter in our lives”.

The wedding was conducted by local Justice of the Peace Michael Cherry at an undisclosed location in Las Vegas, 31-year-old Agassi’s home town where he has a huge villa.

The only further detail in the Rossetti statement said that the couple had tied the knot privately and in a way that “fully met their expectations”. There was no mention of a honeymoon.

For 32-year-old Graf - who retired from tennis in 1999 - it is the first marriage. Agassi was married from 1997 to 1999 to American actress Brooke Shields.

Agassi and Graf have always kept their life together as private as possible, and their emergence as a couple in the summer of 1999 took the tennis world completely by surprise.—dpa