by Pete Sampras
I would lose matches for a variety of reasons, including injury, low energy, poor execution—and the most acceptable of reasons, because I just got my butt kicked by a guy who did everything better on a given day. Sometimes a very big day. It happens, but trust me—that’s the least of your worries. I learned early in life how to lose matches, but in 1993 I finally learned how to win matches when I was tired, or discouraged and tempted to call it a day and move on. Once I learned how to tap into my pride and inner reserves of determination, I felt much more comfortable being the guy with the bull’s-eye on his back. I was getting over the typical insecurities of youth, and feeling focused and ready to lay claim to every Grand Slam title that came my way. It looked like clear sailing, too, but things rarely work out exactly as you expect.
After Wimbledon, I lost in four straight tournaments on my surface of choice, outdoor hard courts. But I went deep in three of those events (Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis). I made two semis and a quarterfinal, and I lost to a Grand Slam champion (or future Grand Slam champion) each of those times (Richard Krajicek, Stefan Edberg, and Patrick Rafter, respectively).
I felt fine going into the U.S. Open, and it was one of those years when the draw simply opens up like the vault of a bank, leaving the gold there for the taking. The toughest guy I faced during the Open was Michael Chang in the quarters, and by then I had too much game for my childhood rival. I simply overpowered him, playing out the most basic story line in men’s tennis.
I faced a surprise finalist at Flushing Meadows, the Frenchman Cédric Pioline. This was a guy with a tricky game; he was a good mover, and he had a stroking repertoire that he used to good effect to keep opponents guessing. But it was also his first Grand Slam final, and that’s a pretty daunting assignment for a guy well along in his career, unaccustomed to the thin air at the peak of the game.
One of the curveballs thrown at guys who get one or two chances at the golden ring of a Grand Slam title is the conditions that greet you on the big day. Nobody daydreams about playing a Grand Slam final under difficult conditions that make it tough to play your best or most attractive tennis. In the finals of your dreams, the sun is shining, the air is still, the crowd is poised and hanging on every forehand and backhand with ooohs and aaahs.
But it rarely works out that way. It was windy on the day of the Open final—it seems like it was always windy in Louis Armstrong Stadium—and that probably bothered Pioline. I went into the match thinking, How do I win this match with the least amount of drama and trouble? I played within myself, and he seemed nervous and not entirely comfortable on the big stage.
I won 6–4, 6–4, 6–3, and the match marked the beginning of the period when I dominated the game. Jim Courier briefly snatched back the world number one ranking in August of 1993, benefiting from the points-based computer ranking system just like I had back in April. But by September, I had the top spot back again, and this time I would hold it for more than a year and a half. I felt that I was the man in command and, with Tim encouraging me to show it, I made an effort to cultivate an aura of invincibility. I became more and more averse to demonstrating any kind of weakness.
For the rest of 1993, I was always in the hunt. I lost a few big matches: Goran Ivanisevic, my Wimbledon rival, tagged me on the fast carpet at the Paris Indoors in the quarters. I got my revenge a few weeks later in the ATP year-end championships, although I lost the final to Michael Stich. That surprised many pundits, but Stich was the player whose arsenal scared me the most. He had a great second serve, he could do anything, including serve and volley, and he moved easily and naturally. Those qualities, combined with the fact that he was playing before his countrymen in Germany, proved too much for me to handle.
In my last event of the year, the Grand Slam Cup, I lost a whale of a final to the emerging Czech player Petr Korda. The match went to 13–11 in the fifth (the tournament had no fifth-set tiebreaker), and Korda picked up the whopping $2 million check.
Down in Australia for the start of 1994, I played my first two matches and then came up against a newcomer from Russia, Yevgeny Kafelnikov. People had warned me about this tall, rangy kid with straw-blond hair, a jack-o’-lantern grin, and a high-quality two-handed backhand. His forehand was one of the all-time ugly shots in tennis; he hit it with a bent arm and it looked really ungainly, especially in comparison to his smooth, sweet backhand.
But that forehand was a better shot than it looked, and the guy had plenty of talent—enough to push me, hard. What’s worse, I never did very well with guys I hadn’t played before. What advantage I had in terms of my reputation was offset by the fact that it usually took me a match or two to figure a guy out, and get into a comfort zone against his unique game.
But I survived Kafelnikov, then beat Ivan Lendl and got my old friends Jim Courier and Todd Martin, back to back, in the semis and finals. I rolled through Todd in straight sets to win my third major in a row. I was on fire. Next I won the two big U.S. winter hard-court events, Indian Wells and Key Biscayne. I began to sense that people were a little in awe of me, a little fearful, and I liked that feeling.
From Miami, I went to the Far East to play the mini–hard court circuit that had grown up around Osaka and Tokyo. Tennis may be booming in Asia now, but at that time it was tough for promoters in that part of the world. In order to attract top players, they had to offer appearance fees in addition to whatever prize money was at stake that sometimes went into mid-to-high six figures if the player agreed to play at least two events.
I never did anything just for the money. Part of it was that I was lucky—I didn’t need to. But part of it was also that bad things can happen if you just chase the dough in exhibitions or tournaments that you wouldn’t bother playing if it weren’t for those appearance fees. Those bad things include burnout, injury, mental fatigue—all of which can affect your performance later in tournaments that really count, and as the year grinds on. At times I pulled out of events where I was getting an appearance fee because I didn’t feel I could give my best effort (usually for physical reasons).
In my case, playing in Asia was appealing because I was in no hurry to get to Europe to play on the red clay. From the get-go, clay was a crapshoot for me, and my results showed little correlation between the time I spent playing clay events and my results in the red-dirt tournaments that most counted. In Europe that spring of 1994, I put up the best clay-court result of my career, winning the Italian Open on the golden clay courts of the Foro Italico in Rome. At the time, the Italian featured the fastest clay courts you could find, which helps explain how I came to play the Wimbledon icon Boris Becker in the final. But along the way I also took out solid clay-court players like Alex Corretja and Andrei Chesnokov, losing just one set in the entire tournament.
That win satisfied the popular former pro and television commentator Vitas Gerulaitis. We’d been friends ever since Vitas, seeing how I struggled on clay, sought me out to encourage and advise me. He had credibility because even though he played serve-and-volley tennis, he’d won the Italian Open twice. He told me that if he could do it, I could, too. I really respected what Vitas had achieved with his daring chip-and-charge game, and he was just a great guy to be around because of his energy, big personality, and obvious zest for life.
Vitas, Tim, and I spent a fair amount of time together in Tampa, where I lived for training purposes for most of my career. Vitas would come by frequently; he was a golf nut after he quit tennis and he liked to play with Tim. Our friendship surprised many people, because we were so different. Vitas, in his heyday, was the ultimate glam tennis player—a habitué of Studio 54 who had the charisma, big hair, and habits of a rock star. He was a favorite of Andy Warhol’s, and a regular in the New York gossip pages. But Vitas had been ranked as high as number three, and he’d won the Australian Open and reached two other Grand Slam finals. The 1977 Wimbledon semifinals, in which he played his great pal Bjorn Borg, is still considered one of the greatest matches in Open-era history.
I was in great shape moving on to Paris and Roland Garros. Although clay wasn’t my favorite surface, at times I felt very comfortable on it and I assumed that sooner or later, my window of opportunity in Paris would open. One of the guys I beat at the French Open was a newcomer, Marcelo Rios. He was very young at the time, but already “discovered.” In fact, we shared an agent in Jeff Schwartz. But Jim Courier, working very hard to push me and continue challenging for the top ranking, took me out at Roland Garros in a four-set quarterfinal. He was still in his golden age in Paris; he had been to the final the preceding three years, winning twice.
During the grass-court season, Todd Martin won two tiebreakers to beat me in the final at Queen’s Club, and I moved on to Wimbledon to defend my hard-earned title. I lost just one set, to Todd, as I served and volleyed my way to the final opposite Goran Ivanisevic.
I had my hands full with Goran, as I would on grass during my entire career. A great deal of Goran’s juice at Wimbledon came from being a left-hander. That natural edge made his first serve even better and more effective than mine; I really believe it was. When Goran’s serve was on, it was pretty much unreturnable on grass. He was the only guy I played regularly who made me feel like I was at his mercy. I never felt that way against that other Wimbledon icon, Boris Becker.
But my second serve was better than Goran’s, and the key to beating him for me always was getting hold of and punishing his second serve. Goran put tremendous pressure on my service games, because he usually held so easily. I felt that if I played one shaky service game against him and was broken, the set was gone. Very few people were able to make me feel that way, once I’d figured out the grass game. That was very tough, mentally. Goran’s serve also gave him a huge advantage as a returner—he could afford to take huge, wild cuts with his return. If he happened to tag two of those in a row, I was down love–30—and from there anything could happen.
The final was incredibly fast tennis, played on a hot day, with balls flying all over the place at warp speed. It was a gunfight, both of us dodging bullets we could barely see, hoping to connect with a semilucky return here, or tease out an error there. That kind of tennis calls for a firm hand and intense focus. I proved slightly more steady in the crapshoot tiebreakers, and after I won two of them, Goran folded up. I won, 7–6, 7–6, 6–0.
The match marked the high point in the growing debate about grass-court tennis. A growing chorus of critics charged that Wimbledon tennis had degenerated into a serving contest between two giants who almost couldn’t lose serve, but couldn’t break each other, either. Goran and I personified the trend, never mind that neither of us was the biggest guy around. Our big serves and our desire to end points quickly added up to a perfect storm of Wimbledon controversy.
Tennis at Wimbledon, some pundits said, was in danger of becoming irrelevant, because ongoing technologies had produced more powerful rackets that buried the needle on the power meter deep in the red. Even the tabloids got into it, running pictures of prominent politicians and others in the Royal Box sleeping soundly. Ostensibly, that had something to do with the way the game was being played.
Ironically, though, I never did take advantage of the evolving racket technologies. My earliest racket as a junior player was the wooden Wilson Jack Kramer Pro Staff. I also played with a Kneissel, briefly, and a Donnay that was essentially the same as the racket I would come to use for my entire career—a Wilson Pro Staff 85 Graphite with an 85-square-inch head (the smallest available). It was a racket that probably lost whatever “cutting edge” appeal it had long before I posted my best results with it.
Every one of my frames was customized for me by Nate Ferguson, who worked for the guy who pretty much invented the high-end customization trade, Warren Bosworth. All of my rackets were weighted with lead tape and balanced. I also had grip work done. I played with a big grip—somewhere between 4 5/8 and 4¾, and I liked a fairly big butt cap; I always wrapped my grips with Tourna Grip. I admit I could get pretty neurotic about racket tuning. I would go to these events early in my career, and the stringing machines were different and the stringers were different guys, so I would have to get four, five rackets done before they got it right—if they got it right. I was always worried that poor or inconsistent stringing might cost me matches, so as I began to win big, I decided to spend a little money. I hired Nate.
Nate basically traveled with me as my racket guy; he also did all of my stringing. I was very particular about my tension, and used the thinnest strings available, 17-gauge gut. On clay, I strung 32 to 33 kilos (70.4 to 72.6 pounds); on grass, 32 kilos; on some fast hard courts, I went to 34 kilos (74.8 pounds). Because of the thin string and high tension, the gut sometimes snapped at crazy times—like in the middle of the night, when the pop would wake me up. One year, I went through more than seven hundred sets of gut (gut sells for about $35.00 a set, retail). I wanted my rackets strung for every match, which means that if I won a major, I went through at least fifty-six sets of gut over the two-week period. At the French Open, if I had my rackets strung after a match and it happened to rain on the off day, I had the frames torn apart and restrung before I played again.
Over the years, I was offered money—sometimes a lot of money—to switch rackets. I went as far as trying a few demos. But they never felt the same, and I’m the first to admit that a lot of this probably was in my head. By the same token, you hear a lot of war stories about tennis players and golfers who changed rackets or clubs and ended up miserable. Wilson was all too aware of my feelings, and had me captive to that Pro Staff 85. I was so fastidious about this issue that for a few years I played with the racket even though Wilson and I had not come to terms on a contract and I was basically getting paid nothing.
Looking back on it now, I think changing to a larger-headed racket in the latter years of my career would have helped me. My racket was great for grass—it was very precise, with that small head and narrow string at high tension. But on clay, you can benefit from having a greater margin of error. The sweet spot on my racket was just three or four inches. With a larger head and different strings, I might have generated a lot more power and spin from back in the court. I would have played more like guys play today.
It’s hard to know just what would have happened, but in any case I’m certain that my small-headed racket was an ideal tool on grass. I admit that the critics had a point when they claimed that we were in danger of turning tennis into a schoolyard rock fight. In terms of artistry, my final with Goran was a bust—although I still believe that it was less because of the styles we played than the specific way Goran and I matched up. Against a lot of my other grass-court opponents, it was a different story.
Here’s another thing to consider: I’m not sure that long points automatically increase interest in the game—not by a long shot. People have complained for ages about the boredom of watching endless, sometimes seemingly aimless, rallies on clay. I think the mix of court speeds and styles of play are great assets to tennis, and one hidden cost of that tradition is that you occasionally get matchups that produce one-dimensional tennis on a given surface.
Note that nobody complained about the game being too “fast” or “boring” when Andre Agassi was playing, say, a Pat Rafter. And nobody rhapsodized about the glories of red clay when two grinders were having five-hour rallying contests. Goran and I were not the ideal matchup at Wimbledon, although we often played each other. In the wake of our 1994 match, Wimbledon went to softer, slower balls, and they began to develop a new grass mixture that ultimately slowed down the courts and made grass-court play more rally-friendly.
The “Wimbledon is boring” th
eme spun off another story line: “Sampras is boring—and a menace to the game with his domination.” I stood accused of playing brilliant tennis that won minds, but not hearts. After one of my matches, a tabloid ran the simple headline SAMPRAZZZZZZZZ. . . . I had been raised to believe that winning matches is what counted, and that you didn’t make a fuss or draw attention to yourself as you went about that job. Now being good was boring, and a threat to tennis.
It wasn’t easy to read that stuff, and it was the last thing I wanted to talk about in my press conferences. Whatever I said was bound to come off as defensive, self-justifying, or both. Some people took it upon themselves to interpret my extraordinary self-control as evidence of a lack of emotion. This struck me as pretty arrogant. I had emotions, all right, trust me on that; I just knew how to master them, and that was true on and off the court. That’s no mean feat in a sport known for producing hotheads and emotional powder kegs.
Players like John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, and Boris Becker won legions of fans because they so freely vented their emotions. I understood that they needed to do that to play—or feel like they were playing—their best tennis. And, of course, it always made good copy, and added an extra layer of interest to the personalities of those guys. I never begrudged or envied that. But I also felt that the media could have done more to appreciate that I was the yin to their yang.
In tennis, you always have two opponents out there—the other guy and yourself. You can’t worry too much about the other guy, other than dealing with the shots he sends your way. The most important guy you have to beat is yourself—the part of you that’s prone to doubt, fear, hesitation, and the impulse to give up. If you’re too busy struggling with yourself, like some players, you can hardly be expected to beat your opponent.
