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Game, set and match likely as Sampras declines Wimbledon start

By Bill Dwyre in Los Angeles
May 17 2003

Pete Sampras, whose status as a tennis legend is best represented by his record 14 major titles, has probably played his last competitive match.

Through his coach, Paul Annacone, Sampras withdrew on Thursday from three tournaments that were holding entry spots for him.

One was Wimbledon.

“Yes, for me not to be at Wimbledon, I guess that’s big,” Sampras said from his home in Beverly Hills, California.

Seven of Sampras’s 14 grand slam titles came on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, where, in 2000, he beat Australian Patrick Rafter in the final. That gave Sampras his record-breaking 13th grand slam title, topping by one the standard established by Australian Roy Emerson in 1967.

Sampras beat Rafter after losing the first set and trailing in a second-set tie-breaker 4-1. When Rafter returned wide on match point in the fourth set, giving Sampras his seventh Wimbledon title in eight years, a period in which he had a 53-1 record, Sampras sank to his knees, emotions pouring out that were seldom seen from him.

He climbed high into the stands to embrace his somewhat reclusive parents, who were making a rare trip to watch him, and he spent much of the immediate aftermath battling to fight back tears.

He was still a month away from his 29th birthday then, but the high of his 13th major title was so hard to maintain that, over the next two years, he went on a 33-tournament victory drought that did not end until he stunned a tennis world that had begun to believe he couldn’t win a big one again by doing just that.

He beat Andre Agassi in a dramatic US Open final last September. That was his 14th major title, the 762nd tour victory of his 15-year career, against
only 222 losses, and took his earnings total to $43,280,489, by far the most ever.

He has not played since.

Late last year, he announced that he would begin a comeback at a February tournament in San Jose. But that event came and went, as did one withdrawal after another, followed by statements that he wasn’t quite ready to come back, stirring speculation the real comeback might be never.

But Wimbledon was always the carrot held out by those in the tennis community who felt he would not be able to resist returning there for one more try, especially because his 2002 experience there, a second-round loss to unheralded George Bastl of Switzerland on a side court, left both a bad taste and some unfinished business.

“I’m going to watch some of Wimbledon on TV,” Sampras said. “I’ll be curious. I won’t watch a ton, but it’ll be interesting to see how I feel.”

Sampras said he hadn’t totally closed the door to a return.

“More like maybe 95 per cent,” he said, adding that, by the end of the year, “it’ll all be more clear to me”.

Sampras also pulled out of the French Open, which begins on May 26, and the Queen’s Club event, a grass-court Wimbledon lead-in tournament in early June. Wimbledon starts on June 23.

Few expected him to play the French, his least favourite of the major tournaments because its slow clay surface does not suit his serve-and-volley game. The French is the only major he has not won. He advanced as far as the semi-finals only once and lost in either the first or second round seven of the 13 years he played there. Besides his seven Wimbledon titles, he won the US Open five times and the Australian Open twice.

Sampras’s decision was gradual. In March, the first real alarms went off in the tennis world that he might, indeed, never play again. He missed the Masters Series event in Indian Wells, an event that had been one of his first as a pro and one close to home.

At that time, he said he had been training hard and was ready physically to play, but the thought of playing matche
s that didn’t mean a lot, then going back to an empty hotel room made him change his mind.

“Maybe my juices will start flowing when the slams get closer,” he said then.

But as it became time to get ready for the one that really mattered, Wimbledon, Sampras found he really wasn’t ready.

“I know what it takes, the time and the training,” he said, “and I just feel it isn’t in me right now. If I went to a major, I would go there to win, not just to say goodbye.”

Source: Los Angeles Times

Filed under: Archives 2003 to 2011

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