by Pete Sampras
When the comment reached me, it stung. I was always sensitive to what Jimmy said about me and my whole generation. As much as we—meaning the “stars”—say we don’t care about what people say, we do. And one way or another, we hear everything. Jimmy had been reasonably friendly toward me, but I always felt that he didn’t go out of his way to give anyone in my generation credit. We were stealing his thunder. He would just say things like, “I brought the ball to the five-yard line, it’s up to them to take it in. . . .” I understood, even then. Jimmy was never close to his peers; he saw everyone on the planet as his competitor, and he was on his way out of the game, clinging to the last rays of glory. I was fine with that; his clinging didn’t bother me.
Jimmy’s comment added fuel to the fire, and the incident took on a life of its own. The story was no longer just about what happened at the Open and what I said about it, it was about what Jimmy Connors had said, and then it became about how I felt about what Connors had said, and so forth. . . . That’s the media snowball effect.
It’s not easy being called out by a great player, but there are ways you can rationalize anything. So in my own mind, I had a problem—or I didn’t have a problem. My loss to Courier was symptomatic of something—or it was just a tough loss. I had exposed a deep fault line in my competitive makeup—or I was just a little out of sorts and had bad luck in the tiebreakers. . . . I wasn’t certain what was going on.
But the controversy touched on some realities that, one way or the other, would have to be faced, and how I responded would have a shaping influence on my career. At the time, though, I kind of hid from the significances. Many years later, Jimmy and I happened to be sitting a few rows apart at a Los Angeles Lakers game, and I decided to reach out to him. I got his attention, and we exchanged pleasantries. I asked for his telephone number and called him a few days later. We scheduled a round of golf, played it, and that was the end of our communication. It may be surprising, but Ivan Lendl, who many people thought was a cold fish, was a stronger rival as well as a better, warmer friend and role model than Jimmy.
One odd thing about the “ton of bricks” incident is that all I had really done was tell the truth about how I felt, but you all know that line Jack Nicholson famously said in A Few Good Men, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” I felt it was a little like that in New York in 1991. I gave the press a sincere, open statement about what I was going through, and I got hammered for it.
I know what the problem was: theoretically, I came across as sounding happy rather than bummed out about having lost my title. But I say “theoretically” because anyone in that interview room that day knew darned well that I wasn’t happy, even if I did feel relieved. I learned a lesson that day: some things are better left unsaid. I should have phoned in some trite, stock answer about how devastated I was, and how I was going to focus “110 percent” on my next tournament.
The “ton of bricks” episode ended a Grand Slam year in which I ran into a lot of bumpy air. I was struggling, and after the U.S. Open everyone knew it. My character became an issue. But I don’t think people understood that I was very much a work in progress. I’ve never been very interested in gossip, or analyzing other people intensely, especially those whom I don’t know. I’ve always been a live-and-let-live kind of guy. So seeing how people focused on my character, and picked apart the things I said and did, made me uncomfortable. I was feeling a bit of heat, but I wasn’t the only one. Andre Agassi, 0–3 in Grand Slam finals, was also dealing with “character” issues and getting beaten up pretty badly by the press.
Things were simmering under the surface on a few fronts as I took off for the post–U.S. Open indoor swing. And one of the most turbulent issues was my coaching situation. Joe and I both freaked out, in different ways, after I won my first U.S. title. I was so young that it was hard for us to have an easy, mature relationship. We both knew my game wasn’t as developed as it might have looked, and now we were looking at defending a reputation. How were we going to cope with the pressure?
Unfortunately, Joe had never played the pro tour, so there was a dimension of my life that was unfamiliar territory for him. That put Joe, who wanted to do the right thing, under a lot of strain. During the 1991 Open, while I was progressing toward the “ton of bricks” episode, Joe was often in the hotel bar, having a few glasses of wine. It’s a lonely life on the tour for a coach who hasn’t bonded fully with a player. He has to be there all the time—even when he doesn’t have a lot to do.
But while I was struggling, I was deeply entrenched in the top ten. I was callow in many ways, but I could tell Joe was getting nothing out of his job. I’ve always had pretty good radar for what I need, coachingwise, so I decided to tell Joe that, for everyone’s benefit, I needed to make a change. I wanted to do it when we were back in secure surroundings at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy.
It was pretty weird—there I was, at nineteen, about to “fire” a guy more than twice my age. I just told Joe that I appreciated all he had done but that I felt our relationship had run its course. Basically, that was it. And he got it. Not just that, I actually think he felt relieved. For the rest of my career, I always did the unpleasant job of firing someone instead of leaving it to an agent, my dad, or some other third party. I owed the people who worked hard for me a face-to-face explanation, I believed. Thankfully, I didn’t fire a lot of people.
Ivan Blumberg, my agent at the time, then suggested that I get together with Tim Gullikson. But the Gullikson who first came to see me at my home near the Bollettieri academy in late 1991 was Tim’s twin brother, Tom. The Gulliksons were interesting guys—they had a well-deserved reputation as blue-collar tennis pros. They were teaching pros from Wisconsin—not exactly a tennis hotbed—who decided to take a crack at the tour. The unusual part is that they actually made it to the top level.
These two quintessential “regular guys” also formed one of the best doubles teams of their time and used their earnings from doubles to finance their singles ambitions. Tim was the more successful singles player—over the years, he’d notched up impressive wins over a lot of top players, including John McEnroe at Wimbledon.
When Tom came to see me in the fall of ’91, we talked and hit some balls. At the end of his visit, he told me that he had a commitment to coach Jennifer Capriati for something like thirty weeks a year, but that his twin, Tim, would be interested in working with me full time. I don’t know if this was a preplanned bait-and-switch move or not, but I agreed to meet with Tim.
We met in Florida, hit some balls, and talked. Tim, it turned out, was more easygoing than Tom, which suited me. He was also gregarious—a natural communicator, which would be a good quality in the coach of a reticent, reserved kid like me. While never a great player himself, Tim was a student of greatness and loved being around it. By nature, Tim was an attacker with a superb volley, so he had an affinity for my style. And he was still a young man—just about forty when we met—so he had energy, passion, and commitment. I decided to hire him, effective January 1992.
The unsettled coaching situation contributed to my inconsistency during the fall of ’91. I took a loss to Brad Gilbert in Sydney, but won Lyon. I had back-to-back losses to Boris Becker and Guy Forget in Stockholm and at the Paris Indoors. I put a little balm on my wounds at the year-end ATP Finals, where I beat Agassi in the round-robin and Lendl and Courier, back-to-back, to win the fifth most important tournament of the year.
My last event of the year was my Davis Cup debut, against France, back in Lyon. Those who love Davis Cup, like John McEnroe or Andy Roddick, make it a top priority and consider it the ultimate honor. Playing with the name of your country on the back of your shirt and on the scoreboard is a unique experience. On that I’ll agree. It creates a special kind of pressure that you just don’t feel when you’re playing for yourself, even at places like Wimbledon or Flushing Meadows.
Davis Cup is a team effort, which is also different and interesting, and the nationalistic na
ture of the competition ensures that you play under some conditions you just don’t have to face on the tour. Everything gets magnified or skewed in Davis Cup, and you can throw the records, the rankings, and the form chart out the window. That makes Davis Cup a tough assignment for a rookie.
The Davis Cup format is a single-elimination tournament featuring sixteen nations that have qualified for the elite World Group, and each match (in Davis Cup it’s called a “tie”) consists of five matches—four singles and a doubles—that are played over three days (Friday through Sunday). The teams usually devote the entire week leading into the weekend tie to on-site practice, so Davis Cup can eat up as much as four weeks of a player or team’s time.
The four Davis Cup weeks take place over the course of the year; the big final is played in late November or early December. The home-field advantage (every tie is either a home or an away match) is determined by previous history on a simple basis: the teams take turns hosting ties. So if the last time France played the United States the tie was played in France, the United States is automatically the host for the next meeting—even if it doesn’t happen for four or eight to twelve years. Hosting is a huge advantage. You get to fill the stadium with your home crowd (and Davis Cup fans are the rowdiest and most vocal in tennis), but even more important, you get to choose where you play (indoors or out, at a small club or in a huge arena) and on what surface.
Davis Cup didn’t mean much to me when I was growing up. I don’t remember watching it on television (and it isn’t like Davis Cup was all over the tube back in the pre-cable days). So I had no pre-existing reverence for the event. This made it tough to commit to Davis Cup because, like most top players, I put the ability to perform at my peak in Grand Slams at the top of my priorities. And Davis Cup asked for a lot, timewise.
In 1991, France put together a magical run under captain Yannick Noah, a very popular former player and French Open champion. Guy Forget and Henri Leconte, two flashy lefties, carried the French squad to its first final in the Open era. And the French also had the home-court advantage over their final-round rivals—the United States. They chose to play the tie on fast carpet in an indoor stadium in Lyon.
When France announced the surface, U.S. captain Tom Gorman had a stroke of genius—at least theoretically. Although I had lost my U.S. Open title in the “ton of bricks” match, I was the best fast-court player in the nation. I was the ideal guy to have on the squad alongside Andre Agassi. But Gorman seemed to completely forget that I was a rookie on the tour, and he discounted the unique pressure for which Davis Cup is renowned. For some reason, playing for your country on a team can really get to you. Some players are inspired and react heroically; others get cold feet and feel intimidated by nationalistic pressure. Throwing a green player into the cauldron in an away final before a wildly partisan crowd was an enormous gamble.
When I arrived in Lyon, I found the anxiety and stress surprisingly high. I guess that’s partly because all these USTA officials were around, like they always are at Davis Cup, looking over the team’s shoulder. It also had something to do with the fact that this Davis Cup final was a huge, huge deal in France—it seemed like the entire French national press corps had descended on the venue (the Gerland Sports Palace) for the final, hoping to record how France won its first Davis Cup since the days of yore when the famed “Four Musketeers”—Jean Borotra, Jacques Brugnon, Henri Cochet, and René Lacoste—reigned over international tennis.
We had a team Thanksgiving dinner at the hotel in Lyon the day before the start of the tie. It was prepared by a famous chef, but even that event was slightly strained, because we were together with a bunch of tennis officials, and we all had to wear a coat and tie. I’ve got nothing against appropriate dress, but it seemed that everything was ceremonial, forced, difficult . . . when what we really needed as a team was to relax. All these things bore down on me extra hard, because I had been nominated as the number one singles player for the United States. It was like an NFL rookie quarterback getting his first start in the Super Bowl.
Gorman was also uptight; that became evident to me. We were always having these team meetings, and to me that didn’t make sense. They just magnified everything and added to the stress. All my life, I preferred to operate with a low profile—I’d rather be understated than dramatic, cool and aloof rather than confrontational and all gung ho. I just don’t believe in making things bigger than they need to be, even some things that may seem awfully big, like winning the Davis Cup. At the end of the day, it’s easier to take the attitude that they’re just tennis matches; you go out, do your best, let the chips fall where they may.
I was happy to talk tennis with Gore, our veteran captain and a former Davis Cup star himself. I was glad to hear what Andre Agassi thought. But these meetings—everyone was just sitting around talking about the next day’s practice or the upcoming pairings. Ken Flach, one of the doubles players (partnered with Robbie Seguso), looked at me in one of these meetings and asked, “You going to serve and volley on both serves, Pete?” I just looked at him, thinking, I’m one of the top players in the world, and you’re a doubles specialist who can’t even make it in singles. Where do you get off, asking how I’m going to play?
It sounds arrogant, but I was just feeling prickly and uptight. At the same time, though, I never went into a match with a cut-and-dried game plan. I knew my own strengths and the kind of game I felt most comfortable playing, and I tried to be aware of what my opponents did well or badly, and how to get to their games. But I always liked to “feel” my way into a match, fine-tune what I would do based on my level of play and the feedback I was getting from across the net.
The quality of my serve on any given day often dictated how aggressively I played. My feeling for how I moved on a given surface (or on a given day), combined with the quality of my opponent’s return game, determined how often I followed my serve to the net. I operated by instinct, figuring things out as I went along. Flach’s question put me on the spot, seeking a commitment I wasn’t prepared to make. It was innocent enough, I guess; my reaction spoke volumes about how defensive and tense I was feeling.
On top of everything else, the French singles players were veterans capable of playing lights-out tennis. There were no question marks about the team; if anyone could handle the pressure of playing at home, it was these guys. The adulation of the home crowd would inspire them. If the fast carpet suited my game, it suited theirs just as well.
A Davis Cup squad has two singles players, a number one and a number two, and a doubles team. The three-day tie begins on Friday, with two singles (pitting the number one from one nation against the number two from the other). Saturday is doubles-only day. And on Sunday, the “reverse” singles pits the number one and number two guys from each nation against each other. A draw determines who plays the first match (or “rubber”) of a tie, and from there on a formula takes care of the rest.
I was our number one singles player, but the draw determined that France’s number one (Forget) would open the proceedings against our number two, Andre. I watched from the bench, cheering Andre on as he took care of business to put us up 1–0. I was impressed and slightly intimidated by the crowd. The place held just over seven thousand, but it was sold out, so the overall effect was of a huge, deafening crowd. My moment of reckoning was rapidly approaching; I was up next, the U.S. number one against France’s number two, Leconte.
What happened was, I froze. It was that bad. It was deer-in-the-headlights-grade paralysis. Notice that I didn’t say I “choked.” As I wrote before, there is a big difference. Freezing is worse. It prevents you from getting to that critical point where you can choke (or not).
The score just seemed to fly by, like so many of Leconte’s winners. When I was serving, I’d stand up at the line and wait, while the crowd was going nuts. I just stood there, absorbing all the karmic energy, waiting for them to quiet down. That was a big mistake—I should have asserted greater control over the situation by walking a
way from the service notch to wait until they calmed down. That would have represented control, and playing at my pace. It was something I learned in Lyon that would come in handy in many later matches.
I lost to Leconte in straight sets and left the court shell-shocked. On Saturday, the French won the doubles to take a 2–1 lead. On the decisive final day, I faced Forget in the first singles match to keep the U.S. hopes alive. I hadn’t had enough time to process what happened on Friday, or to identify the lessons from my awful first-day experience. I gave Forget only token resistance as he clinched the Cup for France in four sets.
I felt terrible afterward. I’d been overwhelmed. For all the talk about Davis Cup being a team thing, I’d felt very lonely out there—as alone as I would ever feel on a tennis court. Sure, the other guys were right there on the bench, encouraging me. And you have your captain sitting on court with you so you can talk and get advice on changeovers. But people make too much of that. It’s not like you can hand your racket off to a teammate and say, “Hey, I’m struggling with this, how about picking up the slack?”
It was a tense and miserable week. Gus, who was my roommate on the trip, tells me that the night we lost, we went to sleep pretty early. I woke some hours later, clearly in the throes of some nightmare, and screamed—at the top of my lungs—Go USA! Then I went back to sleep. I think it was a reaction to the crowd noise during the tie. I had never been exposed to anything like that, and maybe I just needed to fight back or assert myself, even if it was just in a dream and too late to matter.
The explanation for this disaster seems simple. I was the wrong man for the job. And to this day, whenever anyone brings up that tie in Lyon, I just shrug, grin, and tell them “Wrong man for the job.” I don’t want to blame Gorman, or anyone else, but the one thing that was painfully clear by the end of the final against France was that Pete Sampras, a raw youth, was completely unprepared for the demands of Davis Cup play. He was the wrong man for the job.
