This week I'm discussing "The Agassi Story," the 2004 autobiography of Mike Agassi, Andre's father, with TENNIS.com editor Kamakshi Tandon.

Hi Steve,

Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore,
And that's what parents were created for.

We've talked a lot in the posts and comments about what goes into creating a top tennis player, and in some ways it's the kids and not the parents who are the hardest to figure out. Rebelling is always an option, as the little poem above reminds, so those who stick with it must have something within that drives them – love of the game, sporting ambition, sheer doggedness, parental approval, (or in uglier cases, avoiding parental violence).

What drives the parents, particularly those who pick out tennis for their children rather than just noticing they have an aptitude for hitting the ball? It takes a certain amount of single-minded daring to invest that much in such a precarious venture. Mike Agassi's story about pocketing his passport from a government office, brazening his way out of Iran, and having just $4 in his pocket by the time he's on a bus to Chicago – doesn't that have echoes of Yuri Sharapov's now-famous journey to Florida in it?

And often, the parents are trying to help their kids escape from something rather than to something (ref. Life of Pi). Seeing how conscious Mike Agassi was about the uncertainty and short span of his boxing career, it's easy to understand why he was so determined to build a surefire method of producing tennis players. In fact, he says that if he had to do it again, he'd opt to teach his kids golf because you can play it for even longer.

When he was 16, Andre discovered something about me that I'd kept from him, kept from all my kids: I twice competed in the Olympics as a boxer. So when, during the course of an interview, a reporter asked Andre about my Olympic career, he was flummoxed. "Why didn't you tell us?" he demanded afterwards.

The fact was, I'd kept my athletic past a secret from my kids because I didn't want to put any ideas into their heads. I never wanted them to box, to put their faces in front of a punch.

And of course, for Mike Agassi, immigrant hardships were an escape from an even harsher past:

My father, David Agassi, was a quiet man, strongly built, very religious and I adored him. He was born during the 1880s to Armenian parents in Kiev. (Our original family name was Agassian, which, thanks to the "ian" at the end, clearly identified us as Armenian. As a skin-saving measure during a time when the Turks frequently used Armenians for target practice, an industrious ancestor changed the family name to Agassi.) He married, fathered two sons, and built a thiriving caprentry business -- he was among the first to use the tongue-in-groove technique for laying floors – but lost it all after the 1918-1920 was between the White Russians and the Communists... although his life had been spared by the Bolsheviks, he felt certain it was simply a matter of time before he, like so many of the men with whom he had served, faced the firing squad. So, leaving behind his wife and two sons, who refused to move, and his prosperous business, my father scrambled for the Russo-Persian border – first on a bicycle and later by mule and bus – making a beeline for Tehran.

My mother Nooria, who was born in Turkish Armenia, had also made the joruney to Tehran, though she never attributed it to the Armenian genocide as such. By her telling, she visited Tehran with her family, met my father and decided to stay. Althought he was much older than she was, by 20 years or so, they married and soon started a family of their own.

... Because of his reputation as a fine carpenter, my father had been hired by Reza Shah to lay flooring and to build a winding oak staircase in the Green Palace... Like most countries involved in the [WWII] war effort, food and necessities in Iran were scarce, and people like us -- that is, people in the lower class -- struggled mightily thanks to severe inflation. For my family, though, that wasn't the half of it. Reza Shah had been ousted by the Allies before he got around to paying my father for his work at the Green Palace. Years of work – those beautiful floors, that graceful staircase -- all for nothing. It just about killed him.

Few things can make hundreds of crosscourt drills poignant, but this might be one of them.

Perhaps this is crucial to the last and very interesting point in your post, Steve – that when it comes to sporting excellence, we prize the ends and not the means. Families that live in richer countries and are relatively comfortable take a different attitude to their kids' tennis talent – if you're good at it and you enjoy it, we're behind you all the way. But they would never think of putting all their chips on a child's sporting career – not because they don't have as much to gain, but because they have more to lose.

You can't criticize the choice, only be sad that a choice is even required. I often reference a piece on this topic by Chris Clarey in the International Herald Tribune:

...I watched my daughter wait in the stands before the first relay race of her life: watched her laughing with her classmates, slapping hands and swinging from railings; rubbing up comfortably against the camaraderie and sense of anticipation and shared purpose that are supposed to accompany such occasions. No bad vibrations here... No doping here. No suspicion of doping either. No consultants or rights negotiators or bean counters. Just a rambunctious bunch of 6- and 7-year old kids hustling around a slightly undertended sports complex with their slightly overwrought parents trying to do the right thing.

...They will come back for more races and relays. There will come a time when not everybody will win medals. Those who do might be tempted to push on and chase the sort given to the best in the world. In a different time and from a different vantage point, I might have wished that for them. But in June 2001 and from where I'm typing at the moment, I would have to advise against it. There are other lofty goals in life that you can be surer are worth the effort.