This week I'm discussing "The Agassi Story," the 2004 autobiography of Mike Agassi, Andre's father, with TENNIS.com editor Kamakshi Tandon.
Kamakshi,
College basketball breeds maniacal drill-sergeant coaches with bad haircuts. The NFL produces prickly, efficient, CEO types (that dope who coaches the New York Giants notwithstanding). Tennis? That’s the home of the stage father, of course. Usually he’s marching his little girl around the court—think Roland Jaeger, Stefano Capriati, Yuri Sharapova, Richard Williams, among others. While Mike Agassi is best known as the father of a successful male player, that’s how he got his start as well, by wrecking the early life of his daughter Rita. So how does Mike measure up against his competition? Would either of us have wanted him as a father?
On the whole, I have a slightly more positive view of Mike than the other loose-cannon tennis dads, though that may be because I’ve only read his side of the story. He does himself a huge favor by coming across as at least semi-honest about how he treated his kids, particularly Rita. But it’s also with her that he did real damage. Not only did she end up tanking tennis matches, she rebelled by rushing into a relationship with the decades-older Pancho Gonzalez. Mike learned his lesson and cooled it a bit with his other kids, though he had all of them out on court ASAP, hitting, as he claims, thousands of tennis balls every week. Neither Phil nor Tami, both of whom played college tennis, seem to have come away with serious scars. Still, Andre’s love-hate relationship with tennis must be a product of the way he was pushed into the game. He always seemed thrilled by winning matches, but burdened by having to live up to the outrageous expectations of his father. Mike Agassi, after all, visited Centre Court as a young, unmarried man and walked away thinking: “Someday someone from my family is going to win a championship here.” Who does that?
Maybe the best way to assess Mike is to go over his various pros and cons. This is guy with more than his fair share of both.
Pro: As Ernie commented on my last post, Mike was as an outsider to the country-club game, and that allowed him to be very clear-eyed about how the sport would evolve. Taking his cues from boxing, he saw the future importance of being able to hit on the rise and with power from all over the court. When Andre got to the pros at 16, he was already the hardest hitter there.
Con: Mike says in a number of places that in Iran, family is everything, which isn’t true in America. Yet he let his own family shatter. He said Rita was “dead to me” at one point, and it took a determined initiative by Steffi Graf—another “family is everything” type—to get Mike and Andre talking again after years of silence.
Con: He walked out of Andre’s wedding to Brooke Shields without explanation.
Pro: Andre eventually admitted Mike had been right about Brooke and that the relationship was a mistake (Mike never explains exactly why he thought this in the first place).
Pro: There was a debate going on over at Pete Bodo’s blog recently about how early is too early with a tennis prodigy. If you go by the Andre model, timing and technique, like language skills, are best formed as soon as possible. Mike fed Andre more balls than he did to his other kids, and he said one of the reasons that Andre didn’t bother to practice when he was a young pro was that his strokes had been completely grooved years before. This is the main reason that Andre could compete at the top of the sport even as his body gave out at 35 and 36—nobody has ever matched his timing.
At some level, U.S. fans want to have it two ways: We complain that our kids are too soft to compete with the best from around the world, but we’re repelled by the Mike Agassi-like methods that do produce champions. Mike’s best move with Andre may have been handing him over to Bollettieri, a savvier drill sergeant, before Andre lost it and quit the game for good.
Con: “Earlier the better” is not the model that produced the two best U.S. players of recent decades, Pete Sampras and John McEnroe. Each took longer to grow into their games. Andre’s conflicted attitude toward tennis, which can be traced back to Mike’s early onslaught, cost him many productive years in the middle of his career, years where Sampras remained at the top of the sport.
Pro: What was Mike’s motivation, a normal American parent might wonder? Yes, there was his immigrant status, which made him driven to succeed in his adopted country. But less than some other tennis parents, he didn’t seem to be after the money. And while he had to work his whole life, he wasn’t a grind or an overachiever. From what I can tell, his motivation came from his love of tennis, which was all-consuming. He was a talented enough boxer to make the Olympics, but he always loved tennis more than boxing—more than anything.
There are worse sins than that, right Kamakshi?
Steve