Open: An Autobiography

If she’s not pecking at my father, the old lady is squawking about the old country, sighing about the folks she left behind. My mother says Grandma is homesick. The first time I hear this word I ask myself, How can you be sick about not being home? Home is where the dragon lives. Home is the place where, when you go there, you have to play tennis.

If Grandma wants to go back home, I’m all for it. I’m only eight, but I’ll drive her to the airport myself, because she causes more tension in a house that doesn’t need one bit more.

She makes my father miserable, she bosses me and my siblings around, and she engages in a strange competition with my mother. My mother tells me that when I was a baby, she walked into the kitchen and found Grandma breastfeeding me. Things have been awkward between the two women ever since.

Of course, there is one good thing about Grandma living with us. She tells stories about my father, about his childhood, and this sometimes gets my father reminiscing, causes him to open up. If not for Grandma we wouldn’t know much about my father’s past, which was sad and lonely and helps explain his odd behavior and boiling rage. Sort of.

Oh, Grandma says with a sigh, we were poor. You can’t imagine how poor. And hungry, she says, rubbing her belly. We had no food - also, no running water, no electricity. And not a stick of furniture.

Where did you sleep?

We slept on the dirt floor! All of us in one tiny room! In an old apartment house built around a filthy courtyard. In one corner of the courtyard was a hole - that was the toilet for all the tenants.

My father chimes in.

Things got better after the war, he says. Overnight, the streets were filled with British and American soldiers. I liked them.

Why did you like the soldiers?

They gave me candy and shoes.

They also gave him English. The first word my father learned from the GIs was victory.

That’s all they talked about, he says. Wictory.

Whoa, were they big, he adds. And strong. I followed them everywhere, watching them, studying them, and one day I followed them to the place where they spent all their free time - a park in the woods with two clay tennis courts.

There were no fences around the courts, so the ball would go bouncing away every few seconds. My father would run after the ball and bring it back to the soldiers, like a puppy dog, until finally they made him their unofficial ball boy. Then they made him the official court custodian.

My father says: Every day I swept and watered and combed the courts with a heavy roller.

I painted the lines white. What a job that was! I had to use chalk water.

How much did they pay you?

Pay? Nothing! They gave me a tennis racket. It was a piece of junk. An old wooden thing strung with steel wire. But I loved it. I spent hours with that racket, hitting a tennis ball against a brick wall, alone.

Why alone?

No one else in Iran played tennis.

The only sport that could offer my father a steady supply of opponents was boxing. His toughness was tested first in one street fight after another, and then as a teenager he strode into a gym and set to work learning formal boxing techniques. A natural, the trainers called him. Quick with his hands, light on his feet - and he had a grudge against the world. His rage, so hard for us to deal with, was an asset in the squared circle. He won a spot on the Iranian Olympic team, boxing in the bantamweight division, and went to the 1948 Games in London.

Four years later he went to the Games in Helsinki. He didn’t do well at either.

The judges, he grumbles. They were crooked. The whole thing was fixed, rigged. The world was very biased against Iran.

My father, Mike, as a scrappy eighteen-year-old

bantamweight in Tehran

But my son, he adds - maybe they will make tennis an Olympic sport once again, and my son will win a gold medal, and that will make up for it.

A little extra pressure to go with my everyday pressure.

After seeing a bit of the world, after being an Olympian, my father couldn’t return to that same single room with the dirt floor, so he snuck out of Iran. He doctored his passport and booked a flight under an assumed name to New York City, where he spent sixteen days on Ellis Island, then took a bus to Chicago, where he Americanized his name. Emmanuel became Mike Agassi. By day he worked as an elevator operator at one of the city’s grand hotels. By night he boxed.

His coach in Chicago was Tony Zale, the fearless middleweight champ, often called the Man of Steel. Famous for his part in one of the sport’s bloodiest rivalries, a three-bout saga with Rocky Graziano, Zale lauded my father, told him he had tons of raw talent, but pleaded with him to hit harder. Hit harder, Zale would scream at my father as he peppered the speed bag. Hit harder. Every punch you throw, throw it from the floor up.