by Pete Sampras
I never knew what was going to happen next, in terms of my development. I knew I was destined to be a tennis player, but at fifteen, sixteen years of age, I was just trying to figure out my game. Pete Fischer was busy teaching me how to play a serve-and-volley game, and even though I wasn’t on a fast-track junior career, Glenn Bassett, the coach at UCLA, was already coming around, trying to pre-recruit me for the Bruins. That was flattering, but the bottom line was that I wasn’t winning national titles; I was pretty good in my USTA section—admittedly, one of the toughest sections—but that was about it. All the while, I was concentrating on getting better, not winning. I implicitly trusted Pete Fischer and what he was doing with my game.
My father was, in many ways, the most potent, if unobtrusive, force in my evolution. His words and opinions carried great power in my life. I remember playing David Wheaton when I was twelve and he was just a little older. I beat David, who later had a good pro career, in the second round of the clay-court nationals when he was the number two seed. It was a really big win for me, and afterward a local reporter sought me out for an interview. That was great; I felt like the king of the world.
The next day, on the very same court, I lost something like 6–1, 6–0, to Mal Washington. I mean, he really schooled me. So after that match, the same reporter went over to Mal and got an interview from him. My dad pulled me aside and said, “You see that guy who talked to you yesterday? Now he’s talking to Mal, because it’s all about how good you are every day, not one day.”
That’s how Dad was; he just cut to the chase. And that’s how I turned out to be, later in life. Call it being a realist, call it being hard-nosed. It’s all the same. I felt bad about losing to Washington that day, and my dad had to add a little fuel to the fire to make sure I didn’t forget the lesson. I had played lousy. What I did yesterday no longer mattered. It’s always about today and tomorrow.
My journey to tennis stardom was a pretty straight path that I traveled quickly, thanks to my great developmental environment. But there were uphills and downhills, and my toughest challenge was changing my mind-set from grinder to attacker. I had to learn to start thinking differently, and more.
A grinder can lay back, waiting for a mistake, or tempt you to end points too quickly. An attacker has to think a little more: Flat serve or kicker? Charge the net, or set up a groundstroke winner? Is my opponent reading my serving pattern or shot selection? As a serve-and-volleyer, you attack; as a grinder you counterattack. The basic difference between attacking and defending is that the former requires a plan of attack and the latter calls for reaction and good defense. In both cases, execution is paramount.
Early on, I had to play attacking tennis with a so-so serve; the shot would not jell for me until around the latter half of 1989. Have you ever seen a bowler in cricket throw the ball with that stiff, roundhouse motion? It’s an exaggeration, but my serve was a little like that. I got the ball to the right place, with decent power and spin, but the loose, whiplash swing, the explosive snap—those were yet to develop.
But the upside as I grew into my attacking game was that my emerging talents and personality were well suited to the style. As I became an attacker, my athleticism began to emerge; as a result, my entire game and attitude changed. But I made one big mistake. As I began to rely more and more on my natural athleticism, I worked less diligently. Some of that had to do with the normal rite of passage to manhood. As I approached sixteen, seventeen years of age, I became more introverted. I started to experience feelings of insecurity. I had a lot going on internally, and in some ways my tennis suffered. My maturation was a drawn-out process, and I more or less marked time, tenniswise. But I did reasonably well—well enough to begin testing the waters at pro events. I had a breakout in 1988 at sixteen, at the U.S. Pro Indoor tournament in Philadelphia.
It was a fitting place to pop onto the scene. The Pro Indoor was an established event with a great tradition, run by a couple of old-school tennis types who were part of the game’s establishment, Ed and Marilyn Fernberger. The Fernbergers ran a classy event; the U.S. Pro Indoor was a fixture on Philadelphia’s winter athletic calendar, and it had always been at the forefront of the tennis boom. The event was played in February in the cavernous Spectrum arena (capacity seventeen thousand), then the home of the NHL Flyers and NBA 76ers.
The Fernbergers had been dedicated tennis aficionados since forever; they wooed and consistently got the support of the best players, including Aussie icons Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall. The Fernbergers flew in former champions as their guests. On any given night, the hospitality suite at the official tournament was open until three or four A.M., and players, officials, and even press mingled freely and sat around talking tennis with tournament guests like Don Budge, Vic Seixas, and John Newcombe. The Ferbergers routinely flew in a planeload of British reporters to give the event added prestige.
I went to Philly to play in the qualifying draw in February of 1988. The main draw at an event has a few places reserved for the survivors of the qualifying tournament, which can be a pretty grim experience. It’s often played at a local club or in a big gym, and it generally attracts few or no spectators. The players are journeymen, declining veterans, and still-developing talents fighting it out, hoping to make the big show.
I battled my way through the qualifying, and was most impressed when I went to the Spectrum to practice as a main-draw player. The painted cinder-block hallways under the stadium were lined with posters of Bruce Springsteen, Rod Laver, Elton John, and others. The tournament picked up my expenses—hotel, meals, transportation—and that seemed like a really big deal. But my euphoria was shortlived: in the main draw, I lost to Sammy Giammalva in the first round. However, I’d gotten a taste of the big time.
A few weeks later, Gus and I went to Indian Wells together, and we stayed in this really crappy motel. It was a run-down joint where you parked your car right in front of your door and you could hear people walking by at all hours. I ended up making it through the qualifying tournament there as well. Therefore, as a main-draw player, I got a free room at the posh Hyatt Grand Champions hotel. Gus and I were like two guys who had just won the jackpot in Las Vegas. We walked into that room and our jaws dropped at the sight of the welcome-gift fruit basket. The towels were thick and fluffy. We flopped onto the bed and watched cable and on-demand movies, and they had pistachio nuts—free pistachio nuts, just laying there! I was never so happy in my life.
At Indian Wells, I beat Eliot Teltscher and Ramesh Krishnan, who were top-twenty players. Things were really starting to click, and people were taking notice. Tournaments began offering me wild cards, which are slots in the main draw set aside for use at the discretion of the tournament director, who might give it to a former star, a player coming back from injury, or a local hotshot junior. He could even give it to a bum off the street. Grand Slam tournaments hold open 8 places for wild-card entrants out of the 128 places in the draw. Smaller events dole out fewer wild cards. If you get a wild card, you don’t have to face the stress and pressure of qualifying; you’re guaranteed first-round-loser prize money, which easily covered whatever portion of your trip you’ve paid out of pocket.
In my era, wild cards became a tool used by tournament directors to establish relationships with budding stars. When you took a wild card—and they were like gold, especially for aspiring pros—you got all the perks of the main-draw players, like free luxury hotel stays and meals, a courtesy car and driver, and a lavish goody bag. Sometimes the tournament director wined and dined you and your parents, working hard to make an impression so that you might develop loyalty to the event and keep coming back.
By the time I beat Teltscher—a big name at the time—at Indian Wells, the agents were coming around to check me out. Pete Fischer had come down to the desert to bask in the glory, too. By then, I knew that Glenn Bassett, the UCLA men’s tennis coach, was going to be disappointed—there was no way I was going to UCLA, or any other college. The die had been cast, and now it
was just a matter of exactly when I would turn pro. We decided to make the leap right then, after I beat Krishnan, even though it meant setting up a whole new lifestyle for me. Who would travel with me? What contracts would I sign? Where would I play next—and then after that? We had no idea. It was like, Okay, now I’m a pro, what happens next?
My dad and Pete Fischer began dealing with all of the action, and the action was moving fast. In those early days of my pro career, I would often tell myself, Hey, it’s all a learning experience. . . . It was a hedge against feeling pressure, because I had been thrown off the deep end. One minute, it seemed, I was just a decent amateur, slowly making progress, and the next I was a blooded pro, with a couple of gaudy scalps hanging from my belt and expectations hanging over my head. I was pretty good, but not that good. I didn’t pop onto the pro tour with a seamless game. I still had lots of holes, and I would kind of fill those in as I went along, reciting my mantra: It’s all a learning experience.
In the summer of 1988, I finished my junior year in high school and then traveled the tour. I have no strong memories of where I played, but I remember hooking up with Jim Courier to play doubles, and we enjoyed some success. I first met Jim when we were both on the Junior Davis Cup squad, as sixteen-year-olds, and we picked the same agency to represent us, the International Management Group (IMG). Gavin Forbes, whose own dad, Gordon, had been a player (he also wrote the classic book about amateur-era tennis bums, A Handful of Summers), was a young guy and he represented both of us.
Gavin saw that Jim and I could benefit from a friendship I was too shy to pursue on my own. So he arranged for me to go and train with Jim in Florida. Compared to me, Jim was worldly and experienced. He had fought his way through the pack at the prestigious Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy—even as Andre Agassi stole a lot of his early thunder—and, most important, he was talented, ambitious, and blessed with a huge appetite for work.
Jim and I hit it off right away, and he showed me how hard you needed to work to keep your game and fitness at an acceptable level. We would hit balls for three or four hours a day, go to the track to work on our legs and speed, go to the weight room to develop our strength. That was all new to me, and Jim and I became close. We lived together at the NBTA, and through him I met the teaching pro and coach Joe Brandi. I began working with Joe informally, because Pete Fischer still had his day job as a doctor.
Over the next two transitional years, I would get help from various people. By that time, I was high on the radar of our national tennis association, the United States Tennis Association (USTA). Part of their mandate is to develop junior talent, so they hooked me up with a series of coaches on a one-off basis. I went out to see the clay-court expert Jose Higueras in Palm Springs. (Jose would become Jim Courier’s coach and guide him to his great French Open wins.) I also spent time in Jacksonville, Florida, with a guy whose game was more similar to mine, Brian Gottfried. He was an old-school-type serve-and-volley player who worked with me on various aspects of the attacking game. We would drill for ninety minutes in the morning, and play matches in the afternoon.
We would do this full day of workouts, and then at 4 P.M. he would drop me back at the condo where I was staying. I did that for a three-week stretch. This was different from the Kramer Club—that had been pretty easy stuff. It was also more lonely.
I broke into the top one hundred pretty quickly in 1989. The first really big win of my pro career was a second-round upset of Mats Wilander at the U.S. Open, where he was the defending champ. Mats was the proverbial “regular guy” and a consummate team player; as I write this, he’s still the captain of the Swedish Davis Cup team. But beneath that friendly, laid-back, humble Swedish persona was one of the toughest, most focused, and gritty of Open-era competitors. He proved that in 1988, when he became the first player since Jimmy Connors (in 1974) to win three of the four majors in one year (only Wimbledon eluded him). Mats won with his brains and heart as much as with his steady, adaptable, baseline game.
When Mats and I met in the second round, it was my first appearance on the Louis Armstrong Stadium court at the original USTA National Tennis Center. It was a night match, which made me nervous. I knew we would have a standing-room-only crowd of about eighteen thousand, and that New York fans had a reputation for rowdiness. I was a little apprehensive and still green—emotionally, mentally, and even technically. My forehand—my best shot—was a little shaky, and in the big picture I had no backhand worth the name. But the one thing I suddenly did have was a serve. In 1989, I suddenly started serving up aces. Don’t ask how, because I can’t give you a good answer.
Pete Fischer and Gavin Forbes were both there for my match with Wilander. Serving well, I won it in a barn burner, 6–4 in the fifth. It was a huge win, and a harbinger of sorts because, as crafty and tough as he was, Mats couldn’t do enough to offset my advantage in power. Some circumstances also took a little away from the upset. At the time, Mats’s father was struggling with a terminal illness, and Mats himself was feeling the aftereffects of his great 1988 season. He was a bit fried, mentally, and soon after the U.S. Open he began a dramatic downward slide in the rankings.
As my small team rode back into Manhattan on the Grand Central Parkway after the match, Gavin said, “You know, you’re going to be all over the papers tomorrow.” I thought, Well, this is cool, what’s going to happen now?
What happened was that I won another round and then lost to Jay Berger, winning just eight games in three sets. But I’d made a statement: Mats was a top-five player and the defending champion in New York. I was an American upstart, a total underdog, and the media and fans both at the match and afterward were really into my story.
These rapid changes tied to my sudden success threatened the status quo I had established. There was no way Pete Fischer was going to give up his career in medicine to travel with me. But Pete loved publicity, and he enjoyed taking credit for shaping my game. As I started to become the player he had predicted right before his eyes, it made him a little crazy and greedy. Also, while he was back home in California, I was in Florida training with various coaches whose credentials were far more impressive than Fischer’s. He was probably afraid he was going to be cut out of the action, so he tried to retain control even if he couldn’t—make that wouldn’t—be my regular coach. And he wanted to be compensated for his trouble.
Even before my big upset of Wilander, Pete had started making some huge demands—astronomical demands. Pete wanted something like 25 percent of my Grand Slam earnings, 50 percent of something else. He basically wanted a cut of everything. One night Fischer showed up at our home in California and wrote down his demands on a paper plate: If I achieved a Grand Slam, winning all four majors in the same calendar year, he wanted a bundle of rewards—including a Ferrari Testarossa. That was written on the plate. In fact, I remember that in one story Pete did with Tennis magazine there was a picture of him sitting in an umpire’s chair, wearing a hat with the logo of . . . Ferrari.
The night Pete waved that plate around was surreal; I remember it in detail to this day. He and my dad had a huge fight. It got very uncomfortable, because Fischer was like family and nobody was trying to screw him out of anything. We knew what he’d done for us, we were grateful, but the long-distance coaching arrangement he proposed was untenable, and his demands seemed outrageous. As he was losing it, emotionally, he seemed bent on blowing up the whole relationship. On another level, it was just funny. I remember thinking: I’m just a seventeen-year-old kid, I can barely keep two balls in the court, and Pete is talking about me winning a Grand Slam (something only two men in the entire history of the game have accomplished) and getting a Testarossa out of the deal?
The craziest thing is that it wasn’t like Fischer needed the money. He was a wealthy doctor with a great practice, and he lived on a five-acre estate. Our relationship effectively ended the night of the paper plate. My dad quietly decided to cut him off, and he had an even more powerful reason for that than the demands Fis
cher was making. Dad was worried that I relied too much on Pete, and that my development was being arrested. I needed to get out in the world and learn to deal with it, firsthand.
As the rift with Fischer grew wider, I was resolved to hire a coach. I settled on Joe Brandi. It was a good fit; I was living at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, and Joe was coaching there. He was tight with Jim and his coach, Sergio Cruz, so the four of us spent a lot of time together on the road. By then, I had a solid idea of how he operated. Joe was an older guy, in his fifties or thereabouts, when he started traveling with me. It was a sweet arrangement: Jim and I practiced and played doubles together (we won the Italian Open in 1989). After workouts or matches, the four of us went out to dinner. I can’t exactly say Joe and I really bonded, because he was so much older. Maybe it was better that way, too, because I needed to come into my own as a man, and Jim was there as a buddy and brother-like figure to ease the transition.
My results opened doors for me. Ivan Lendl called late in 1989 and invited me to stay with him and his family at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut (he always pronounced it “Connect-E-coot”). He was the top player in the world at the time, and he lived in this huge mansion. After I stowed my stuff in a guest room, he introduced me to his wife, Samantha, showed me his dogs (Lendl bred German shepherds), and gave me a tour of his grounds and facilities. When I next spoke with my dad, I eagerly told him all I had seen, and he just said that if I worked as hard as Lendl had, I could create that kind of a life for myself, too.
Ivan had that iron man reputation and image, and he definitely could be intimidating, with that clipped Czech accent and hard-assed attitude. But he welcomed me into his home and made me feel comfortable. He was courteous, and curious about me. One thing that struck me right away was that he had our entire week planned out in advance, in terms of when we got up, when we practiced, when we trained, ate, or slept. He was up at six every morning himself; he was very regimented and focused. You could call it robotic, I guess; many people did. But he had it pulled together. He knew exactly what he wanted and how he was going to pursue it.
