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End of the road for the king

[June 22, 2003 Sunday Times, Andrew Longmore]

Pete Sampras exclusively reveals he has played his last match at Wimbledon and may not even defend his US Open title.

The racket lies in the games room, next to the pool table. Close by stand the trophies, the videos neatly stacked next to the television, the images of a career that is done. Being Pete Sampras, as cautious off the court as he was explosive on it, he will not fully commit to a life without tennis, but in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times last week, the seven-time champion admitted for the first time that he would not be coming back to his beloved Wimbledon.

“We’ve got the two biggest events in tennis coming up, Wimbledon and the US Open, and if there was anything in me, that would be enough of a challenge,” he said. “But it’s not there, it’s time for other guys to hold up the trophies. I’m 95% sure I’m stopping.”

Sampras can even date the moment the odds slipped beyond his reach. Two months ago, he returned to the practice court at the bottom of his garden in Beverly Hills. It was spring and the inner clock was counting down the days to his favourite time of year. He called his coach, Paul Annacone, and said he wanted to hit some balls again, the first since he won his fifth US Open so dramatically and emotionally
late last summer.

“I knew I had to get my body back in tennis shape if I wanted to play at Wimbledon,” he recalls. “I’d been putting off the decision and putting off the decision in the hope that something would come back. I thought I would get back to practising hard because of what the tournament meant to me. For a couple of days we had some good practice down there. But then on the third day, after about half an hour I called over to Paul and said, `Let’s sit down for a second’. He knew what was coming. “I said, `This is real, I can’t do it’. I just knew my heart wasn’t in it. It wasn’t my body that felt bad, it was just getting up and going to practice. I enjoyed hitting the balls, the backhands and the forehands, it was the bagful of other stuff that I knew I had to do, all the drills and the fitness.

” I just wasn’t where I needed to be. Last year, losing like that (to George Bastl) on Court Two wasn’t the way I wanted to go out. I couldn’t think of anything worse, but even that wasn’t enough to make me go back.

“Then it really hit me that I wasn’t going to play Wimbledon. I had to own up to the facts, to the reality of where I was, and that was a huge deal because of what Wimbledon has meant to me. Growing up as a kid, that was where I dreamt of playing and where I dreamt of winning.

“It’s no longer a tennis tournament, it has become part of my life and the whole process of not playing there after so long was very hard.”

For two weeks, Sampras knew he wasn’t going to play

Filed under: Archives 2003 to 2011

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