Tears that testify to the true Sampras
July 9, 2000
It's a fairly boring thing to do, falling on your knees on Centre court and leaking a tear or two. But that's Pete Sampras for you. He's an open book.
You read it according to your nature and, perhaps, your feeling about what exactly separates the great from the the merely talented.
If you have any sense of this at all, the odds are you turn the pages of the Sampras book as you might those of 'Mody Dick'. You're not reading about tennis, or deep sea fishing. The subject is fortitude, and how certain men get an idea in their heads and refuse to have it shaken loose.
Sampras knew, you could see it in every nuance of his face and his body, that this was the time to take his place in history, to win his 13th GS, and 7th Wimbledon, and set a mark that is unlikely ever to be surpassed. And becasue Sampras is who he is and what he is, there is no mystery about his reactions to any given situation.
When his beloved coach Tim gullikson was gying, Sampras wept on court in Melbourne. WHen he beat Pat Rafter last night , he wept again. Different tears, different situation, but the same source of emotion, the same level of regard and passion that sometimes just has to burst from the tight coiling of a man who simply plays tennis with every fibre of his being. Some of the fibre had been a little frayed these last two weeks, but not at his competitive core.
When Rafter, who had played so sublimely against Andre Agassi.......Sampras had returned to a zone of action, and competitive compuser, never equalled in the annals of the game.
Boring Sampras? Sure. Boring in the way of the sun in the morning when it comes up the usual way, eschewing some wild diverson from its axis. Boring in that way of consistency, which rejects whim and mood and just goes on producing levels of performance which make the opposition want to sue for peace. Sampras has been all of this all of his adult life, which at the age of 28 must sometimes strike him as being quite a long time, all those years since he exploded on the consciousness of the sporting world as a 19-year-old winner of the USopen. All of those years of being asked to liven up his act, add a little spice, a little colour, a little of the wildness of McEnore or Connors or Agassi, can wear a man down, but Sampras has not been for wearing down. He has been for playing, for operating on the highest ground of his sports, and if the world cried for a little titillatin, the world would have to be disappointed. The world could take the best of Sampras, only that.
Something, he added, which would no doubt deepen down the years but he didn't, after all, come into the game to dazzle everyone with his personality. He came to win, and keep on winning, and now he said: 'This is one of my best moments and I know that over time I'll appreciate it much more than I could do right now."