Posted on: March 07th, 2003
Sampras not ready to get back in the game [Mar 7, 2003]
- petepageI don't know whether Pete Sampras' stunning championship at last fall's U.S. Open was, in fact, his valedictory as a force in American tennis. But I know it should be.
Sampras' performance at the Open was what a successful life in sports is supposed to be: It was favored; it was impassioned; it was inspired; it carried the day. Think Michael Jordan against the Utah Jazz and you're right there. If you were to charcoal an exit sketch for Sampras, in fact, New York would be the canvas, and his winning the men's singles title would be the image.
But that's it, of course: We're all just guessing at the Sampras image right now. Months after that triumphant turn, the 31-year-old has become the sport's leading cipher.
Will he or won't he? Only Kremlinologists and tea-leaf readers know for sure.
Friday's announcement that Sampras has withdrawn from next week's Pacific Life Open in Indian Wells, Calif., was taken as another in a growing collection of indications that his career as an active tennis player is either over or about to be placed in a cryonic container. It's the third tournament Sampras has pulled out of in a month, following withdrawals in San Jose and Scottsdale.
Officially, the word is that while Sampras continues to work out with coach Paul Annacone, he is not yet ready to return. Unofficially, we're free to run wild.
And we're getting help with the running. When Sampras returned last month to the mega-agency IMG for marketing and management, he lauded the firm for its resources to help him "as I begin to transition to a non-tennis playing career." Company president Bob Kain, for his part, said IMG was "glad to be part of the team that will direct the next stages in this legend's life."
Sounds a lot like moving on, now that we mention it. And if so, then allow me to suggest that Sampras' greatest possible exit line is the one he already has written.
Forget the farewell tour. The farewell tour almost always devolves into a string of uninteresting performances against uninspired "rivals," adorned by gifts of classic cars and rocking chairs. If I want to see some old dudes waving from the stage, I'll catch a Kansas concert on the next fairgrounds tour.
No, Pete Sampras already has it all worked out. The Open was the thing. There's no point in playing another competitive match, another honest-to-goodness tour-tournament match, unless Sampras becomes somehow convinced that he can write a better ending.
It seems obvious, even from afar, that Sampras is a man who has been given the gift of perspective here at the far side of his playing career. He's a guy with a lovely wife and a young kid, still just 31 years old, with decades to become anything that he wishes his life to become. Sampras doesn't have to spend the rest of his days being introduced as the man who used to be Pete Sampras.
He already has the Sampras Tennis Academy set to open in September in Carson, Calif., and he is set as an investor in The Tennis Channel, coming sooner or later to a remote control near you. A life beyond the game itself beckons, too, and with IMG aboard, the question of Sampras as a business entity is pretty much answered. He'll have his hands in stuff.
So this, instead, is a question strictly about the tennis. It's about wanting to see Sampras play just a bit more on the one hand and knowing instinctively on the other that New York was the perfect walk-off piece.
It's a sports-centric concept, by the way, the career capper. You never hear of anybody in business who closes the deal of his life and then retires the next week. We reserve this hideous ritual for the world of sports, a place in which people age in dog years, sometimes treat their bodies as ongoing lab experiments, and seem to understand without being told that they're holding the tail of a shooting star even when they're at the apex of things.
It is a world that Sampras dominated for years on end -- for the duration of the 1990s, essentially. A record 14 Grand Slam singles titles. More than 60 individual tournaments won. Weeks, months and years on end of unparalleled status on the men's tour.
Now Sampras lifts his eyes and sees another horizon, maybe a few other horizons. It happens even to the great ones -- especially to the great ones, perhaps. If Indian Wells, as close to a major on the men's tour as any non-Grand Slam can be, isn't enough to quicken the pulse of the mighty Pete, perhaps there isn't a challenge on the tour that would.
If so, the ending already is written. No need to revisit the idea. Pete Sampras has already made his closing statement. All he need do now is honor it.
Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com
Source: ESPN
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