November 19, 2021
Mike Agassi, the father and long-time coach of tennis star Andre Agassi, died at the age of 90 in Las Vegas September 24.
Born in Iran, Emmanuel Agassi was an Olympic boxer for his homeland in 1948 and 1952. He followed his brother, Samuel, to Chicago. He changed his name to “Mike” upon immigrating. In 1963, he moved to Las Vegas to take a job at the Tropicana hotel-casino.
Agassi quickly took note of the hotel’s largely inactive tennis courts. He was a novice player, but had a passion for the game and offered to spruce up those courts and coach guests for free.
Agassi and his wife, Elizabeth, had four children: Rita, Phillip, Tami and Andre. Mike found young Andre especially talented and pressed him hard as his coach. He famously developed a tennis machine called “The Dragon,” which fired balls at Andre to teach him proper stroke technique.
Agassi swatted back 5,000 balls a day against that machine. He would become one of the game’s all-time great returners of service and an eight-time Grand Slam champion.
Growing up in Iran in a family so poor it didn’t have an indoor bathroom, Mike Agassi fell in love with tennis watching American soldiers play the sport. It was the start of a life-long love affair with the sport. Mike Agassi taught himself to play and later taught his children.
“Believe me, I know what it’s like to be on the outside,” Mike Agassi wrote in his memoir “The Agassi Story.” “I’ve spent the better part of my life on the fringes. I was born in Persia later called Iran in 1930 to Armenian parents, a Christian in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.
“I remained an outsider in America, where I emigrated at age 21 with almost no money and even less English.
“My outsider status was cemented when, years later, my kids began playing competitive tennis. To the other parents, I was an appallingly middle-class Armenian casino worker from Las Vegas by way of Tehran, trying to involve my kids in the ultimate upper-class sport.”
Mike Agassi was famous for his hard-driving tutelage and also his temper. In his memoir, “Open,” Andre remembered his first Grand Slam championship, beating Goran Ivanisevic in five sets at Wimbledon in 1992. His father’s first words to the new champ were, “You had no business losing that fourth set.”
The elder Agassi became a fixture in the Las Vegas hotel-casino community, as an ambassador and maitre d’ at the Trop, the original MGM Grand (later Bally’s), Landmark and the current MGM Grand.
