📍Las Vegas, NV, USA
1970 – 1983“Andre Agassi was born in Las Vegas in April 1970, the youngest of four children of Mike Agassi, a former Olympic boxer for Iran who worked at the Tropicana casino and hotel, and Betty. His father was obsessed with making one of his children a tennis champion. Before Andre could walk, Mike hung tennis balls over his crib and gave him a paddle to hit balloons, and when Andre was small, he and his friends built a tennis court in the backyard of the family's home in the desert suburbs of Las Vegas. On that court, his father set up a ball machine he had modified to fire balls at enormous speed, which Andre called the Dragon. As he wrote in his memoir, Open, he hit thousands of balls a day against it, and his father's relentless demands made him come to hate tennis even as he became brilliant at it. He was hitting with famous players who came through Las Vegas, including Jimmy Connors, before he was ten. His older siblings had also been pushed into tennis, and Andre was the one who carried his father's hopes. At thirteen he was sent to Nick Bollettieri's tennis academy in Florida, which he described as like a prison camp, and he left school in the ninth grade. He turned professional at sixteen in 1986, and became one of the most charismatic players in tennis, winning eight Grand Slam titles and completing the career Grand Slam, as well as Olympic gold. He has since founded a charter school for disadvantaged children in Las Vegas, the city where he grew up.”
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