Emanoul Aghasi

Of Armenian descent, Emanoul Aghasi encountered numerous sports in his youth through the presence of the American and British military during World War II and eventually settled on boxing as his pursuit of choice. He won several Iranian national championships in the 1940s and early 1950s, which led him to be selected to represent his country as a bantamweight at the 1948 London Olympics. There, he was eliminated in round one by Álvaro Vicente of Spain. Four years later, he had a similar result in Helsinki as a featherweight, losing in the first round to South Africa’s Len Leisching, an upcoming bronze medalist.

Aghasi retired from active competition after the Games and moved to Chicago to join his brother, renaming himself “Mike”. After graduating from Roosevelt University, he was offered a job in a hotel in Las Vegas, where he would spend the rest of his life. He worked particularly hard to train his youngest son, Andre, in tennis, which paid off in spades, as Andre became one of the most successful tennis players in history and an Olympic gold medalist. Mike published his autobiography in 2004.