by Pete Sampras
If you want to be great, get your own issues out of the way and play with a clear mind—then it’s just a constant struggle for mastery of your opponent. The John McEnroes of this world are the exception rather than the rule. Like most players, I always took emotional outbursts by my opponents as opportunities. When a guy started losing it out there, I knew I’d gotten to his game or his mind.
I also was less interested in being appreciated or understood than in being a champion, and I didn’t mind being an exemplary one. I wanted to wring every ounce of potential out of the Gift, and the only way I could see doing that was through self-control. I also believed that if I just lived up to my potential, appreciation and even understanding would follow. That was my blueprint for success, and it created a backlash once it began to pay off. It didn’t help that guys like McEnroe and Jimmy Connors were running around bemoaning the lack of “personality” in tennis.
In fact, I had a bizarre locker-room encounter with McEnroe over that issue. John, who at the time had recently retired and was working as a television commentator, wrote this little column in the London Times. In one of his Wimbledon pieces he went after me; he more or less trashed me for being boring, and gave me some paternalistic advice about showing “more personality.” Basically, he was berating me for being what I am, instead of what he thought I should be. Besides, who said a tennis player was obliged to show personality (if that’s what you want to call it)? I wasn’t in tennis to win popularity contests, to show how interesting a person I was, or to be an entertainer. I was in the game to play tennis at the highest level within my reach, and to win titles. Tennis was my first love and also my professional business. And I never confused that with show business. If I wasn’t going to be remembered for my game, I wanted to be remembered for the way I carried myself. If I wasn’t going to be remembered for that—I didn’t want to be remembered.
I was pissed about this issue, and word got back to John. So he came into the Wimbledon locker room, put his arm on me, and brought his head real close. He was saying something like, “Pete, no offense meant, man . . . I just want you to do this, I want you to show a little more of this, do a little more of that . . .” And all the while I was thinking, This is weird. The guy has basically been saying that I should be more like him, that I was boring and not great for the sport, and now he’s not just my great buddy, he’s got even more advice. It’s like he thinks it’s no big deal. I could forgive John quite a bit; he’d said some pretty out-there things over the years, and we’d been Davis Cup partners who’d shared some great times. So this was extra-awkward, but I had to stand up for myself. We got into it a little bit and I told John exactly where to get off, but without losing it or getting all agitated. To this day I don’t know what John was thinking but I can’t really explain some of the other things he did, either—I’m not sure anyone can.
Over the years, I would get more emotional on the court. I showed that in different ways, including some of which I’m sure John McEnroe approved. But overall, I remained pretty self-controlled. My version of the tantrum or savage fist pump and primal scream was that trademark, leaping overhead smash. That was all the message I felt compelled to send.
There was no downside to my cool approach as there had been to my lackadaisical attitude. But the cost ultimately manifested itself as a health issue that cropped up about six months after my win over Goran.
Right before the 1994 Wimbledon, I got out of my Sergio Tacchini contract and signed a new clothing and shoe deal, with Nike. Wimbledon was my first official tournament for my new brand, and I was pretty fired up about being with the U.S.-based giant. The color of the money might have been the same in Italy as Oregon, but having your big endorsement deals with companies in your native land is always preferable; it’s just a much more natural connection that can be exploited more effectively for everyone’s benefit.
Nike had developed a nice, classic clothing line for me, along with a shoe that was part of the massive new “Air” campaign that would prove to be such an enormous hit. Unfortunately, the shoe didn’t agree with my foot, and by the time I left Wimbledon my right foot was hurting and swollen. I went to a doctor and had an MRI, and was subsequently diagnosed with posterior tibial tendonitis.
I was scheduled to play Washington, D.C., but had to withdraw. I also pulled out of Montreal and Cincinnati; my summer preparation for the U.S. Open was shot and Nike was scrambling around to find me a shoe I could wear for the American Grand Slam. I survived three matches at the Open, but my fourth-round opponent was the crafty, slightly built Peruvian Jaime Yzaga. A player with nice touch and nimble feet, Yzaga moved me around, made shots when he most needed them. He found a way to break me enough times on a hot, humid afternoon to drag me into a fifth set.
I was in poor condition and had very little left in the tank but, remembering the pact I’d made with myself, I fought like mad. The New York crowd was firmly behind me, and they really appreciated the lengths to which I went to try and stay in the match. But woozy and clearly on my last legs, I lost, 7–5 in the fifth. The struggle was of such high quality that it captivated many, and by the time it was over, chaos more or less reigned. Jaime and I had turned in the most riveting match of the tournament, providing many with an unforgettable moment.
As soon as the match ended, tournament officials hustled me into the referee’s office, which was alongside the short tunnel through which players entered Louis Armstrong Stadium. Attendants there stripped me and hooked up the IV bags. If you’ve never had an IV, it’s a really weird experience. The IV bag contains water loaded with various minerals that alleviate dehydration. Since they hook you up intravenously, the effect is instantaneous. Seconds after the fluids enter your bloodstream, you go from being a near zombie to bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. When the IV kicked in for me, the first thing I saw was the familiar face of Vitas Gerulaitis.
Seeing the kind of shape I was in, Vitas had rushed down from the commentary booth as soon as the last ball was hit. He volunteered to go over to the locker rooms to get my clothes and incidentals (back then, the locker rooms were a long walk from Louis Armstrong Stadium). When he returned, Vitas waited until I was sufficiently recovered to dress, and then he helped me out of the place, carrying my racket bag. The minute we stepped out of the office, the flashbulbs went off and I realized that a long line of reporters had formed along the wall in the bowels of the stadium, waiting for me.
I declined to do any interviews, claiming I just needed to rest. But Vitas exchanged a few words with some of the writers whom we both knew. Later, the New York Daily News’s ace sports columnist Mike Lupica had a great piece that really nailed the spirit of the moment. It was mostly a tribute to the bond between Vitas and me. Other writers described the match in riveting detail, and everyone seemed to agree that it was an epic.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the last I would see of my friend Vitas. He died in a tragic accident just weeks later, succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning while sleeping in the pool house on a friend’s estate in the glitzy Hamptons on New York’s Long Island. When I got the news, I immediately called Vitas’s mom. Like everyone else, I just called her “Mrs. G.” She was much loved by Vitas’s friends (and they were legion), and she was always happy to cook for Vitas and whichever of his friends happened to be around on any given day or weekend. When I got her on the line, she was still so distraught she could barely speak. It was terribly sad. I joined countless people in and out of tennis in mourning the loss of a great friend.
I couldn’t know it then, but there was more devastating news to come.
The new shoe episode in 1994 set me back a good deal at a time when I was really starting to roll. In addition to having my momentum broken, I lost out on prize money as well as a $1.6 million bonus I would have earned from the ATP Tour for finishing as the top player and meeting all my tournament commitments (meaning if I showed up at all the important events I had signed up to play; the tour was always trying to induc
e players to play as often as they could). But I was clearly unable to make my commitments because of the foot injury.
Endorsement deals are not especially complicated or risky (rackets can be an exception), but sometimes you have conflicts. Nike was confident that it made a great shoe, and believed that the problem had more to do with my foot than their product. It was tricky, as I was just entering into what I hoped might be a long-term relationship with Nike (I always preferred long, stable relationships, in every aspect of my life), and coming into the golden age of my career. The last thing I needed was to get into a tiff with Nike, which had already launched a major ad campaign (you may remember it as that “King of Swing” series of commercials). I accepted the shoe problem as an unfortunate start-up glitch, and before six months were out we came up with a good shoe that I wore for the rest of my career, the Air Oscillate.
I started my 1994 fall European tour in Stockholm. One night while I was at the practice courts, Tim fainted, landed on a glass coffee table, and cut his face all up. At the time, Tim was on a crazy diet and he was running a lot. He was a bit of a health nut, and he never met a fad diet that he didn’t try out. When they found me at the courts and told me my coach was at the hospital, I was stunned. But they said he had just fainted and cut himself up, so I played and won my match, and then went to see Tim. It looked like he’d gotten his ass kicked in a bar fight. The doctors suspected that the fainting spell or blackout had something to do with his heart.
I went on to have a solid fall, winning Antwerp and the year-end ATP Finals, where my last two matches were wins over, respectively, Andre and Boris Becker. In my last event of the year, I was upset in the final of the Grand Slam Cup by Magnus Larsson, who walked off with the biggest—by far—payday of his career: $2 million. But the memorable thing about that tournament was Tim Gullikson having another fainting episode—the second in the span of just a few weeks. It occurred one morning while I was busy doing some promotional things with local Nike guys; Tim passed out back at the hotel and ended up in the hospital again. This time, his wife, Rosemary, flew over to Germany. Again, the doctors looked at his heart—they thought they found some congenital deficiency, but nobody was convinced of anything. Everyone just carried on, with growing concern.
The fainting incidents did nothing to dampen our enthusiasm at the end of the year. I had won two majors, plus the ATP Finals. The foot injury may have cost me a U.S. Open title, but despite missing all those summer events I still finished the year at number one for the second year in a row. I felt confident enough to take a brief rest for the holidays and go into the 1995 Australian Open without playing any official tournaments to tune up my game. Tim was all fired up, too. He loved the game of tennis and enjoyed the laid-back atmosphere in Melbourne. Many of his pals from his days on the tour would be there, coaching or working in various tennis-related businesses. And his twin brother, Tom, would be there, too.
I won my first two matches down under with a total loss of just eight games, and was due to play Lars Jonsson in the third round. Tim warmed me up and returned to the locker room, where he suddenly and inexplicably collapsed. By then Tim was already on medication for what was supposed to have been a congenital heart condition; doctors said that he had suffered ministrokes the previous times he collapsed, and traced the blackouts to a heart-valve malfunction. Tom rushed Tim to the hospital while I went out and played—and won—my match. I went to the hospital later, just to see what was going on, and I was told that Tim was going to be “okay.” The press was waiting for me after the visit, and I repeated the information.
My next match was against Sweden’s Magnus Larsson, the same guy who had tagged me in the Grand Slam Cup barely a month earlier. I started terribly, although I can’t say Tim’s collapse was a factor. At the time, there was still no real cause for alarm because nothing was determined.
Soon I was down two sets to none and in a third-set dogfight. In my entire Grand Slam career, I had only come back from a two-sets-to-none deficit to win once before, at the French Open, against Tomas Muster. But I fought my way back into it, winning the last three sets 7–5, 6–4, 6–4. When the smoke cleared, Larsson had fired one more ace (nineteen) than me. He told the press he simply couldn’t play any better than he had on that day.
After the Larsson match, I went to the hospital again. When I walked into Tim’s room the mood was very subdued. Tim and Tom both made an effort to remain calm, but they couldn’t really hold it together. They both tried to make small talk but soon broke down in tears and wept. Tim had gone through a barrage of tests at a private clinic, they told me, and had been advised to return home to Chicago for further tests.
Up to that point, the Gulliksons had been vague about Tim’s problem, and didn’t know themselves what might be wrong. They were also trying to shield me from distraction by downplaying things. They continued to take that tack, and I didn’t press them for answers they either couldn’t or didn’t feel right about providing. I figured they would tell me what they wanted me to know when the time came. My own job, I felt, was to stay strong and focused. I needed to go out and play well, because the last thing Tim needed was to start feeling guilty over how he was impacting my game—and Tim was just the kind of guy to do that.
The brothers told me they had already booked their flight and would be leaving the day I played my next match—a quarterfinal against Jim Courier. That match could in many ways have been a celebration of sorts, even though Jim and I had become rivals. Now and then we even sniped at each other in the press. It was nothing serious, just two very competitive guys suffering from testosterone overload, each wanting his share of the spoils and rewards. But we still went back a long way together, and Jim’s coach, Brad Stine, was friends with Tim and Tom. There was an American connection, a Bollettieri connection, all kinds of connections. But Tim’s condition hung like a dark cloud over everything. And he was definitely leaving before the match.
At the last minute, someone decided that we all ought to get together for a “farewell dinner” for Tim, the night before I played Jim. It was a good suggestion and a nice gesture. The dinner took place at an Italian restaurant in downtown Melbourne. We made small talk about all kinds of things and tried to keep it lively and fun. The only subjects we wanted to avoid were Tim’s condition and my upcoming match with Jim. But everyone was feeling very nervous for Tim, and the entire occasion was somewhat forced. It took some effort to keep up the jock banter. Tennis players thrive on the familiar, and this was foreign territory for us, emotionally; the added tension of knowing Jim and I were playing the next day didn’t help.
Down deep, I had a terrible feeling that things were falling apart, but I was very lucky about one thing, from a purely selfish perspective. Paul Annacone, a pro who has always kind of looked out for me, was in Australia playing in his last Grand Slam event before he retired—in fact, he was playing only doubles. I asked Paul if he had any interest in staying on to help me out at the tournament until we knew what the story was with Tim, and he agreed to do it.
Very early in my career, our mutual agent, Gavin Forbes, made sure I got to know Paul. We got together now and then to talk about tennis over a meal, or at a tournament. In fact, during Wimbledon, Gus and I would go over to Paul’s place at the St. James’s Hotel to hang out and eat up all the ice cream Paul kept in his freezer. We stayed in touch as I matured and became a top player. The tour is a pretty cold place where everybody tends to take care of his own business. But Paul always took an interest in how I was doing, and he kept an eye on me; I felt it and appreciated it.
As luck would have it, a few weeks earlier, Paul and I had even been on the same plane to Australia. We talked a bit then, and he told me that after the Australian Open, he would try to get into coaching at the college level. But when Tim had to go home, he set those plans aside. It was a case of amazing timing, even though the circumstances were tragic. I have no idea what I would have done if either Paul had lost and gone home early, or decided not t
o make that last trip to Australia in the first place.
Paul is a soft-spoken guy who was even younger than Tim, and very easy to be around. He accompanied me to the site daily, although Tim remained my official coach. Paul would talk with Tim on the phone, and then act as a go-between, conveying Tim’s ideas and implementing his wishes. Paul was willing to do this for as long as his help was required. We hoped that Tim would get his health issues sorted out and be back by my side in time for the next Grand Slam, in Paris—if not sooner. But the signs were ominous. In the locker room, I overheard some of the veteran coaches talking about brain tumors and cancer.
Tim left the next morning, and I slept in because I would be playing Jim at night, in the prime-time match. I didn’t think much about the future. There would be other, better times for that. I had a job to do, and I was doing it in the way I felt would have made Tim most proud.
The retractable roof of Rod Laver Arena was open for our match; the conditions were close to ideal. Right from the start, Jim played well. He liked the court and playing conditions in Australia much more than I did, and on that night his forehands cracked like rifle shots in the still, warm air. There wasn’t much to choose between us, but I dug myself into an enormous hole when I lost the second of two tiebreakers and trailed by two sets to none. That’s as bad as it gets in best-of-five Grand Slam matches, especially against a player of Jim’s caliber. The dialogue in my head went something like this: Now I’m done. I can call it a day, have a shower, write it off to bad luck in the breakers. Or I can stay out there and, if I’m lucky, fight for another two and a half hours—just to get back into it.
Something inside just drove me to keep fighting. I earned an early break in the third, and clung to the advantage to win the set. Then, in the fourth, it looked like I might be done when Jim broke me in the fifth game and held for a 4–2 lead. He was just two games from the match, but he was starting to cramp up (although I didn’t notice at the time). With a game point to go up 5–3, Jim hit a double fault—one of just two from him in the entire match. Then he made two groundstroke errors and suddenly instead of 5–3 it was 4–all and I was alive again. I held serve, and broke Jim in the next game to take the fourth set.
