Articles Comments

Samprasfanz » Archives 2003 to 2011 » Sampras` agent proceeding with plans for next year

Sampras` agent proceeding with plans for next year

[October 30, 2002 Greg Garber ESPN.com]

The Westside Tennis Club at Houston announced Wednesday that Jill Smoller, Sampras’ agent at the William Morris Agency, said that Sampras is committed to play in the event, which will be held at the Houston club April 21-27, 2003. At the 2002 championships, Sampras defeated Andre Agassi in the semi-finals before losing to Andy Roddick in the finals.

Pete Sampras and his wife, actress Bridgette Wilson, may well become parents sooner than expected.

“The baby’s due at the end of November,” Jill Smoller, said Wednesday from her Los Angeles office. “But she visited the doctor yesterday and she’s farther along than expected. We could be looking at the middle of the month.”

So, while the world’s top-ranked eight players are banging away at the Masters Cup in Shanghai on Nov. 12-17 to determine whether Andre Agassi or Lleyton Hewitt is the sport’s No. 1 player, Sampras could be a first-time father back at home in Los Angeles.

After defeating Agassi in a back-to-the-future U.S. Open final — the first of his record 14 Grand Slam singles titles came over Agassi in Flushing a dozen years before — Sampras said he was thinking about retiring. In the two formal interviews he has granted since the Open, Sampras has kept that decision to himself. Connie Chung of CNN tired to pry the information from Sampras and his wife, but they didn’t budge. Tennis writer Steve Flink, who wrote an incisive piece for The Independent of London in early October, came away thinking Sampras hadn’t made up his mind yet.

What does Smoller think?

“At this moment, I believe he intends to play,” she said. “I talk to him something like 15 times a day and he hasn’t given me any indication that he’s not going ahead. I’m approaching it as business as usual in terms of next season. I don’t really have any choice.”

Smoller’s observation doesn’t necessarily mean Sampras won’t quit. The realities of today’s sports world — tournament commitments, potential endorsements and travel plans — demand that she assume Sampras will play in 2003 until she hears otherwise.

“He’s at home, enjoying the quiet with Bridgette,” Smoller said Wednesday. “He’s sort of got it in neutral right now.”

Sampras, 31, finds himself in a weird and oddly wonderful position. No other notable champion of the Open Era — not Laver, Borg, Connors, McEnroe or Lendl — walked away from the game after a Grand Slam victory. On one hand, the timing for retirement, given his win at the U.S. Open, his increasingly brittle body and the prospect of impending fatherhood, couldn’t be more ideal. On the other, Sampras’ victory suggests he still might have another Slam in him.

“It is a no-lose situation for me,” Sampras told Flink at a Philadelphia charity event. “I play next year, I won’t have the same pressures I had this year. If I decide to stop I will just enjoy the next chapter of my life.”

Before the Open, Sampras had endured the worst slump of his career, going 26 months without a tournament victory

Filed under: Archives 2003 to 2011

Leave a Reply

*