Mike Agassi
| Emmanuel Agassi | |
|---|---|
| Born |
ایمانوئل آغاسيان Emmanuel B. Aghassian December 25, 1930 Salmas, Iran |
| Residence | Las Vegas, U.S |
| Nationality | Iranian American |
| Occupation | Boxer, tennis coach |
| Spouse(s) | Elizabeth Dudley (1959 - present) |
| Children | Rita Agassi Philip Agassi Tamara Agassi Andre Agassi |
Emanoul Aghassian (ایمانوئل آغاسيان), Anglicized as Emmanuel "Mike" Agassi (born 25 December 1930 in Salmas, Iran), is a former boxer and the father and former coach of Andre Agassi.
Born to Assyrian and Armenian parents (however in his own words, his father was an Assyrian from Kiev and mother was a Turkish Armenian ), he was raised in a Christian household in Tehran. One of his ancestors changed his surname from Agassian to Agassi to avoid "persecution". Agassi was first exposed to tennis by American and British servicemen. He represented Iran as a boxer in the 1948 and 1952 Summer Olympics, losing in the first round both times.
He followed his brother Samuel to Chicago in 1952, and changed his name to "Mike Agassi". Less than a month after graduating from Roosevelt University, he met Elizabeth Dudley through a mutual friend. They married at a Methodist church in Chicago's North Side on August 19, 1959. When a friend offered Agassi a job at the Tropicana Hotel, the couple moved to Las Vegas, Nevada with their 2 year old daughter Rita and 8-day old son Phillip in October 1962; daughter Tamara (Tami) was born in 1969, and Andre in 1970.
Agassi has described Rita, Phillip, and Tami as "guinea pigs" in the development of the methods he used to mold Andre into a world-class player. In 1984, Rita, having rebelled against her father's 5,000-balls-a-day-regimen, married Pancho Gonzales. In his autobiography Open, Andre recalled Mike and Steffi Graf's father Peter nearly coming to blows arguing over whether Andre or Steffi had the superior backhand technique when Mike showed Peter the machine he built to fire tennis balls at Andre and his siblings.
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