Andre Agassi — tennis player with roots in the Russian Empire
Andre Kirk Agassi was born in Las Vegas on 29 April 1970, the youngest of four children of Emmanuel "Mike" Agassi and Elizabeth "Betty" Agassi, née Dudley. His middle name was taken from the Armenian-American businessman Kirk Kerkorian. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his father's father.
Mike Agassi, born Emanoul Aghasi, was born in Salmas, in north-western Iran, on 25 December 1930 (IMDb gives 1931) and grew up in Tehran. According to the family's account, as given in his memoir, his father, David Agassi, was a carpenter from Kiev who had run a carpentry business in St Petersburg and left Russia for Persia in the 1920s, after the Civil War; in Tehran he married Noonia Majloomian, an Armenian from the Ottoman Empire. Most sources describe the family as Armenian; Mike Agassi himself described his father as an Assyrian from Kiev. David Agassi's birth year is not recorded. Mike boxed for Iran at the Olympic Games, emigrated to the United States in 1952, passing through Ellis Island on his way to Chicago, and later settled in Las Vegas, where he worked in the casinos.
He set out to make a champion of his youngest son, building a machine to fire tennis balls at his children. At thirteen Andre was sent to Nick Bollettieri's academy in Florida, and he turned professional at sixteen in 1986. He won his first major at Wimbledon in 1992, the US Open in 1994 as an unseeded player, and the Australian Open in January 1995, and that April he first reached No. 1 in the world. In 1996 he won the Olympic singles gold medal in Atlanta.
After sinking to No. 141 in the rankings in November 1997, he rebuilt his career and in 1999 won the French Open, becoming the fifth man to win all four major singles titles, followed by a second US Open that September. He won the Australian Open again in 2000, 2001 and 2003, for a total of eight majors, held the No. 1 ranking for 101 weeks and won sixty tour titles. He was part of the winning US Davis Cup teams of 1990, 1992 and 1995, and retired after the US Open in September 2006.
He was married to the actress Brooke Shields from 1997 to 1999, and in 2001 married Steffi Graf, the German champion. That year his foundation opened the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy, a charter school in Las Vegas. His autobiography, Open, written with J. R. Moehringer, appeared in 2009, and he entered the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2011.
"His paternal grandfather, David Agassi, a carpenter from Kiev, worked in St Petersburg and left Russia for Persia in the 1920s. His father, born in Salmas, Iran, emigrated to the United States in 1952, first to Chicago and later to Las Vegas."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kiev, Kiev Governorate (now Kyiv, Ukraine) — paternal grandfather; later St Petersburg
His paternal grandfather, David Agassi, was a carpenter from Kiev who ran a carpentry business in St Petersburg and left Russia for Persia in the 1920s, after the Civil War. There he married Noonia Majloomian, an Armenian from the Ottoman Empire; their son Emmanuel, Andre's father, was born in Salmas in 1930.
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Kiev, Kiev Governorate (now Kyiv, Ukraine) — paternal grandfather; later St Petersburg. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.