Andre Agassi was never afraid of a little pressure.
When he was 9 years old, his father pit him against NFL legend Jim Brown in a $10,000 tennis match at a Las Vegas country club. Brown initially thought the challenge was a joke, though it’s safe to say the pro shop got a lot less funny when Andre’s father, Emmanuel B. Aghassian, a retired Iranian boxer, put up the family home as collateral. That is, he literally bet the house that his pre-tween boy could take two out of three sets from the best athlete of all time.
Andre won in straight sets—6-3, 6-3, 6-2—the third of which paid double.
Eleven years later, Agassi, now an unmitigated international sensation, sauntered onto center court at Roland Garros to compete in the first Grand Slam final of his career. This time, though, the pressure was of a different, and far more gruesome, sort: Agassi’s iconic, tri-tone lion’s mane mullet was in fact a wig.
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