by Pete Sampras
In the semis, I handled Jim Courier in four fast sets and found myself in my second U.S. Open final. This time, though, I wasn’t going up against a fellow prodigy and peer. I was facing a seasoned, extremely cool competitor who had battled his way to the final, Sweden’s Stefan Edberg.
Edberg and I had a few things in common. We were both reserved, shy, old-school sportsmen. Although Stefan grew up in Sweden, he went against the grain in that clay-court haven and switched to a one-handed backhand, much like I had, because he wanted to play attacking tennis. Edberg was a prodigy, too, but in a slightly different way. He’d won a junior (eighteen-and-under) Grand Slam. As a pro, he’d been through something similar to the struggle I was unconsciously dealing with in 1992—the battle to become a great competitor as well as a great talent. In Stefan’s case, the catchphrase that haunted him wasn’t “ton of bricks” but “fire in the belly.” Early in his career, Stefan was accused of lacking a gut-level, burning desire to win.
In a good example of bad timing, I was catching Edberg just as he was proving the critics wrong. The previous year, he had taken over my U.S. Open title with a flawless, artful, straight-sets deconstruction of Courier’s straightforward game. The breakthrough put to rest the “fire in the belly” issue, because nobody without that kind of motivation won the U.S. Open—it was simply too tough and grueling an event. This was doubly true for European players at the U.S. Open. Many of them just never got comfortable with the conditions, which usually included suffocating humidity and heat, sizzling-hot hard courts, and the chaotic, egalitarian New York vibe.
Any remaining doubters were convinced by the epic way Edberg went about defending his U.S. title at Flushing Meadows in 1992. In his last three matches before the final, he was down a break in the fifth and final set against high-quality opponents: Richard Krajicek, Ivan Lendl, and Michael Chang. The semi against Michael remains one of the all-time great matches, in terms of the struggle if not the quality of play. At five hours and twenty-six minutes, it set a new record as the longest match in recorded U.S. Open history.
Lanky and tall, Edberg was a great mover. He lived and died by his kick serve, which he liked to follow to the net, where he could use his superb volley to cut off all but the sharpest of returns. Stefan’s game plan was straightforward: get to the net. He wasn’t afraid to surprise you by employing the chip-and-charge tactic—returning the serve with a sharp slice or dink, and charging forward to take the net and challenge the server to make a great passing shot. Closing—that was his game in a nutshell.
The matchup was simple; we both wanted to attack. I thought I had an edge in power, especially on service, and on defense I gave away less than he did with his weaker wing, the forehand. I went into the match knowing I had to keep the service returns low; I practiced getting up and over the kick serve to rip back low, flat returns. With a guy like Stefan, I couldn’t afford to think too much about exactly where to put the return. If he was on his game, I would have enough trouble just getting the return low enough to make him lift and float his volley over the net, thereby giving me a look at a passing shot. Also, I wanted to attack Stefan’s forehand and serve well enough to stay out of those pressure situations that would invite him to chip and charge. I would wait for the inevitable, small opportunities that, if converted, could turn the match around.
When I woke up on the morning of the final, I felt great. I had accomplished a lot, getting to the U.S. Open final. I felt pretty content, and that probably explains why I didn’t feel nervous at all. I was happy to have gotten to the final. It was a blustery day, with the wind swirling around even more than usual in the bowl of Armstrong stadium. There was one mitigating factor when the match got under way: I was suffering from cramps and dehydration owing to a case of food poisoning. It was something I downplayed because I believe in the Aussie rule: If you’re fit enough to start the match, you’re fit enough not to make excuses about why you lost. And ultimately, my performance in the match had much less to do with any physical issue than mental, emotional ones that were coming to a head.
I came out pretty strong and won the first set. But it was a terrible struggle from there. The “new” Stefan Edberg was on full display. He was full of emotion, pumping his fists, yelling, doing everything to show that he had fire in his belly. He won the second set. At the critical juncture of the match—a third-set tiebreaker—I threw in an ill-timed double fault to give Edberg a 6–4 lead and double set point. Stefan capitalized to go up two sets to one, and then I double-faulted away the first game of the fourth set. In a blink, it was 3–0 to Edberg. I went through the motions the rest of the way; I packed it in. Afterward, I told the press: “As the match wore on, I was running out of gas. I was very, very tired, maybe more mentally than physically. Mentally, I was telling myself that my body just couldn’t do it, and as a result, it didn’t.”
Once again, I was talking from the heart, but what I said was a curious combination of truth and cop-out. For instance, my physical problems were fatigue and dehydration, yet I admitted that I was more tired “mentally.” That’s not even logical, but nobody picked up on it. I admitted that my mind was telling me that my body couldn’t do it, when my mind should have been telling my sore body that I could. In short, I was explaining away my inability and unwillingness to dig deep. It wasn’t just that I had played “lousy,” I also played without heart, which is a greater sin.
In the aftermath, I was stunned and confused. Over the next few weeks, while I recovered from the long hard-court summer, a few painful truths would slowly crystallize in my mind.
Shortly after the U.S. Open, we played our Davis Cup semifinal against Sweden on indoor clay at the Target Center in Minneapolis. Because clay was not my best surface, I played only doubles—with McEnroe. We toughed out a real war with one of the best doubles squads of the era, Stefan Edberg and Anders Jarryd.
This was my first Davis Cup experience as a “doubles specialist,” and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the assignment. Doubles is an enjoyable sideshow at most tournaments, but it has a starring role in Davis Cup because of the format. As the third and only match on Saturday, doubles is the kingmaker in Cup play. Most Davis Cup teams that enjoyed long-term success were anchored by a great doubles team. When a tie is 1–1, which is often the case after the Friday opening singles matches, getting to that 2–1 lead can be huge. It also didn’t hurt my own enthusiasm level, or results, that my partner on some key occasions was McEnroe. Remember, it was McEnroe’s own longtime partner, Peter Fleming, who famously quipped, when asked to name the best doubles team of all time, “John McEnroe and anyone.”
We went on to meet the Swiss team in the 1992 final, on an indoor hard court in Forth Worth, Texas. Gorman, perhaps still mindful of Lyon, decided to play it safe. He named Courier and Andre, who were both playing very well, to the singles slots, and put me down for doubles, again partnered with Johnny Mac.
That was fine with me—Andre had proven himself a great Davis Cup singles player. He’s an emotional guy who really gets into all the hoopla. Jim was right there with Andre as a Davis Cup warrior. He gave his all, he was gritty and very cool under pressure. We had, arguably, the greatest Davis Cup team of all time—and a pretty stubborn bunch. In the opening ceremony, the promoter wanted us to wear these ten-gallon hats and it kind of freaked Jim out. He snapped, “I’m not wearing that stupid hat!” So there were no cowboy hats.
The Swiss had a very tough two-man team consisting of Jakob Hlasek and Marc Rosset. Both guys were very good on fast courts, which is unusual because most Europeans prefer the slower clay. So much for our home-court/fast-court advantage. Hlasek was in the midst of his career year in singles, and Rosset was a guy with a game as tricky as it was big. He could play serve and volley, even though his career moment of glory occurred on slow clay a few months earlier, when he won the singles gold medal at the Barcelona Olympic Games.
Andre won the opening rubber, but then Rosset showed his mettle with an upset of Jim. McE
nroe and I would be playing Hlasek and Rosset in what suddenly looked like a critical doubles match. And when we lost the first two sets, both in tiebreakers, it looked like tiny Switzerland might pull off one of the most shocking of Davis Cup upsets—and on U.S. soil, no less.
John was in one of his McEnroe moods. Throughout the match, he trash-talked Hlasek, a very quiet but cool guy who minded his own business and got along with everyone. John was suffering, and coming dangerously close to losing control. But then he was unlike anyone else in that he often played better after going nuts. Some of the line calls in the first two sets seemed dodgy, and in the third set John finally lost it over another apparent bad call. He started in on the umpire, and he just kept going on. He yelled at the official, and he yelled at our own captain, Gorman (for not making more of a fuss and “standing up for us”). He was just going ballistic in general, in any direction he wanted, long after the point in question was over.
Finally, I just lost it myself. I turned on John and snapped, “John, it’s over. Done with. Let’s not harp on what happened three games ago, it’s time to move on, man.” For some reason, my own little outburst had two welcome results. It calmed John down (emotionally, if not verbally) and it fired me up. We won the third set and adjourned for what was then still the required ten-minute break before the start of the fourth set. John and I came off the break with wild eyes and fire in our bellies. It was one of those rare occasions when I got into the emotion of it all. I was pumping my fist and yelling. McEnroe must have said, “Come on, let’s kick ass” a thousand times. We clawed and fist-pumped and yelled our way to a not very pretty but extremely relieving win, 6–2 in the fifth.
Although I became very emotional in that match, in general John and I were like a Jekyll and Hyde pairing; I tended to be cool and forward-looking, he was hot-tempered and all wrapped up in the moment, always ready for an altercation. He thrived on that, and I understood it. We were good for each other. He pumped me up with his emotional outbursts, even if I didn’t show it, and I calmed him down with my self-control, even if he was, externally, still the same contentious, fiery player.
The next day, after Jim beat Hlasek to clinch the tie, I became a Davis Cup champ. It mattered not at all that I had played only doubles in the final; I had done my share all year and felt as proud and entitled as if I had played every singles match for the United States in our drive to win the Cup.
But throughout the fall, I kept harkening back to the loss at the Open to Edberg. It was eating away at my guts. I occasionally thought about what Dad had said a lifetime earlier in Shreveport. I had been a U.S. Open finalist, sure, but who cared? The guy whom the press—and everybody else—was interested in was Edberg.
The real giveaway, I came to realize, was that I hadn’t been nervous before the match. There are two kinds of nervous in tennis: bad nervous, which can make you freeze up, play an inhibited game, or choke, and good nervous, which is a sign that the match you are about to play really means a lot to you—a sign that you can’t wait to get out there to mix it up with your opponent, even if you’re not guaranteed the win. It’s the kind of nervous that makes some great football players throw up before a big game.
I also thought about how the final hadn’t been a well-played match. Sure, the wind might have had something to do with it. My food poisoning may have been a factor. Stefan’s own fatigue, after his death march to the final, was in the mix, too. But this is what I kept thinking: If he didn’t play that well, and I didn’t play that well, why did he win? And the answer dawned on me, slowly, over a matter of weeks. For the first time, I understood and could articulate the truth: I lost because I had packed it in. And it was part of a pattern.
Coming face-to-face with that reality enabled me to admit that on two critical occasions in 1992—the Wimbledon semi with Goran and the Open final with Edberg—I had more or less quit while I still had some reserves to call on. The Edberg match was the straw that broke the camel’s back. If I didn’t care, who would? I had wasted two big moments, and there was no guarantee that I would experience those moments again.
My future was no longer a matter of how good I could get in order to put myself in a position to win big events. I was there; I was plenty good. I wasn’t developing anymore in any significant technical or physical way, I was developed (except in my grass-court game). The real question was, Did I want to win majors? The Edberg match forced me to confront that. I slowly came to a realization about myself that wasn’t very pretty. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Dad. It would have been easy enough to do; all I would’ve had to say was, “Listen, I have a confession to make: I packed it in on some big occasions.” But I internalized it, and got no forgiveness from the harshest judge of them all—myself.
My inner dialogue went on for about two months: Why make this thing more complicated than it needs to be? If you see the other guy struggling, why follow suit? True, I’d been feeling a little overwhelmed by my swift climb to the top of the game, but I was also a little too content with what I was achieving. Why, I finally asked myself, are you being such a pussy?
It took me some years to come up with the answer, and here it is in its most simple form: Everybody has a place in this world, and spends a good part of his mature life carving out his niche—the zone where he is comfortable. Some guys, they get to number one and they think, I don’t really like it up here, it’s too lonely. Too stressful. Too demanding. So they settle back a little. They find a comfort zone at number three, or five, or whatever. I could have done that; a part of me was doing that early in my career. The truth is that when you’re anywhere but at number one, you can hide. You can get to the second week of majors regularly, win one now and then, earn a lot of respect and money, and lead a great, stress-free life.
I honestly can’t tell you why my conversation with commitment took this tack, but it did: I decided that I had this great talent and I wasn’t taking care of it. I had the Gift, and I was turning away from it, at least on some of the very occasions when it was maybe the only thing that could pull me through. It wasn’t going to be good enough for me to just be in the mix; it would nag and wear at me. I realized that the game was not about getting somewhere, but staying somewhere. Some of us, we get there and we don’t want to let it go. We don’t want to see some other guy take it. And that’s ultimately what makes you a warrior—a fully formed, mature competitor.
You can’t really teach someone determination, although you can nurture it. It’s something that is either in you or not, and you have to figure it out as an individual. And if you decide you need to be number one, you have to realize you can’t hide. You have to get fitted for the bull’s-eye on your back and get used to living with it.
I was ready. That 1992 Edberg match was my Rubicon, my version of that famous Muhammad Ali moment when he threw his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River one night. At the end of 1992, I was determined to have a huge 1993.
I went into 1993 determined never to give up in a match again. Whatever happened, I would never lose another battle—especially a Grand Slam final or similar big opportunity—because I didn’t have the heart to fight to the finish and walk off the court spent. I’d had my conversation with commitment; now it was just a matter of backing up my promise on the court.
As the year developed, I felt I was right in the mix of top players, and enjoying the game more than ever. I lost to Edberg in the semis at the Australian Open, where he always played well and I did not. I won Philadelphia, Miami, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, and claimed the number one ranking on the computer for the first time in my career. It was a controversial ascent because I became number one by winning everything but slams. Still, I was hardly to blame for the way the ATP computer allocated points, and I was clearly the most consistent player in the early part of the year.
It rankled me that I had yet to win my second major, while Jim Courier by then had a whopping four (two at Roland Garros, two from the Australian Open). He’d taken command in our generation (Micha
el, Andre, and I had just one major apiece), and I was determined to regain my place at the top of our pecking order. It was more important to me than the computer rankings.
I turned in a good clay-court season, putting up wins over Alex Corretja, Andrei Cherkasov, Guillermo Perez-Roldan, and some other clay-court experts. At Roland Garros, I lost in the quarters to the eventual champ, Sergi Bruguera. Then it was on to the grass: I went on to Queen’s Club and lost in the first round to one of those accomplished South African grass-court players, Grant Stafford. But that wasn’t so bad, because I never did well at Queen’s in the years when I was in the hunt at the French Open. This had less to do with having to make the transition from clay to grass than the letdown I always felt after missing a chance to win a Grand Slam. I needed time to recuperate, emotionally and mentally, from a major campaign—especially one that was unsuccessful.
I was one of the clear favorites going into Wimbledon in 1993, and not just among the pundits and London bookmakers. This time I was comfortable with the expectations, and I wanted to win. One of my major goals when I hired Tim was figuring out the grass-court game, and we worked on that, in various ways, from the onset of our relationship. We felt that the early loss at Queen’s Club could be helpful, because it meant we had almost two full weeks of valuable extra time to iron out what we both hoped were the final kinks in my redesigned Wimbledon game.
When my brother, Gus, and I first arrived at Wimbledon in 1989, we’d gone straight to Centre Court and just sat there, taking it all in. Centre Court—it had such a huge impact on me as a child that years later, as a young pro, I was almost shocked to see that the place really, truly did exist. And it was much smaller than Gus and I had imagined. We just sat there for ten minutes, drinking in the sight of the empty, quiet stadium and gazing at that cool, inviting, emerald green grass. This was the place where, as we’d watched, John McEnroe had won; this was the place where Laver had played all those matches—on our living-room wall.
