This week I’ll be discussing "The Agassi Story," the 2004 autobiography of Mike Agassi, Andre’s father, with TENNIS.com editor Kamakshi Tandon.
Hi Kamakshi,
By the time I finished this book, I found myself thinking, “Wow, Mike Agassi really doesn’t know much about his youngest son, does he?” There’s very little in terms of personal detail about Andre after he left Las Vegas for Bollettieri’s at about age 13. I always knew father and son had a “strained relationship,” as the saying goes, but they barely seem to have been in the same room for much of Andre’s adult career. Mike seems to have gotten most of his information about what Andre was thinking from press conferences and magazine interviews.
In other words, if you want inside dope on Andre, Steffi, Brooke, Barbra, etc., this is not the place to go. Mike is not without his opinions, of course (he walked out of Andre’s wedding to Brooke, if that tells you anything about his opinion of her), and he does offer up a nugget or two. According to Mike, Andre lost to Sebastien Grosjean at the French a few years ago not because, as everyone thought, Bill Clinton was in the front row, but because he tanked so he could be with a dying friend back home. He also claims Andre and Barbra Streisand were just friends, and he never forgave Bollettieri for changing Andre from a serve-and-volleyer to a baseliner. I never knew Andre served and volleyed as a kid, but I tend to think Bollettieri made the right move—Andre doesn’t strike me as having the serve, the height, or the range to have been successful as a net-rusher. As a pro, he certainly didn't have the right instincts up there.
The best parts of the book are the earliest. Mike describes a youth of relative poverty in Tehran, two trips to the Olympics as a boxer for Iran, early immigrant experiences in the U.S., and finally admits to “ruining” the life of his first-born, Rita, by bullying her into tennis. It got to the point with her that the minute she saw him watching, she would start to tank by hitting balls over the fence. But if she didn’t know he was around, she was great. Mike maintains in the book that she “would have been better than Navratilova” if she hadn’t rebelled. What exactly he did to her, and to Andre, he never really says. But it’s clear he was beyond stubborn. For years he and Rita would see each other at tennis events and walk right by each other without talking. Reading that gave me a shiver.
At the same time, Mike is clean-living, a family man, and a little naïve in general—this is a guy who has lived in Vegas for decades and gambled one time. He begins the book with this line: “Believe me, I know what it’s like to be on the outside.” And he was, particularly in the rarefied world of tennis. My favorite early section is his description of his first encounter with tennis.
For me, it was love at first sight. Until then, my game had been soccer, which I played barefoot. And like most boys I knew, I’d engaged in my share of street fights. But something about tennis piqued my interest like nothing ever had, something I can’t quite define. I loved the thwack of the ball, the arc of a well-played stroke. I loved the sheen of the wooden racquet, the twang of the steel-wire strings. I loved the variability of the game, the way you rarely saw the exact same shot twice. I sifted through the game in my mind, analyzing why the ball behaved the way it did, dissecting the techniques players used to make it behave differently.
Mike Agassi wasn’t brought to the game by his parents; he came to it out of desire and an attraction to its basic elements. It reminded me of the story that Guillermo Vilas told once about his introduction to tennis as a kid. He was at a fancy club to see some of the Australian greats (I think) play, and he was just taken by everything about the sport. Vilas had never seen anything like it: the white clothes and ball, the strange scoring, the look of the racquets, the sound of the shots. These are all the old gentlemanly aspects of the game, which tennis has tried to leave behind at various points. It seems that tennis has a reputation as the ultimate insider’s sport, but that’s exactly what’s attracted so many outsiders. It has, or had, an archaic style all its own. And the modern game has been defined and mastered by outsiders: Ashe, King, Gonzalez, Connors, Navratilova, and most recently Andre Agassi.
Mike Agassi loved the sport as it was, but he also claims he could see its future—power, hitting on the rise, taking the ball early. And that’s what he taught his kids.
It makes for an interesting argument in favor of maintaining the classical elements of the sport. In some ways, those are the things that are most attractive to a certain type of outsider.
As a tennis purist, I’m guessing you’ll agree, Kamakshi.
Steve