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For Heroic Sampras, a Most Noble Victory

July 9, 2000

WIMBLEDON , England -- At approximately 8:37 here last night, with darkness rapidly falling, Wimbledon officials were close to calling the championshipmatch. Pete Sampras and Patrick Rafter had played grueling tennis for nearlythree hours, going at each other like ram and bull.

The match had been stopped twice due to rain, and all told they had been involved in this match for several hours. But now, in the fourth game of the fourth set, Sampras -- leading by two sets to one -- decided it was time to go home. He reared back and sent a 131-mile-an-hour serve past Pat Rafter for an ace that gave him a 30-0 lead. He went on to win Game 4, broke Rafter's serve in Game 5, won Game 6, broke Rafter in Game 7 and served to win the match in Game 8.

In a span of 24 hours, we witnessed tennis history played out at two different speeds, two contrasting styles, two different souls.

On Saturday, 20-year-old Venus Williams performed pirouettes after winning Wimbledon for the first time on an afternoon shellacked by promise of more days to come. Last night, Sampras, 28, grabbed history after he won a record 13th Grand Slam championship and his seventh Wimbledon title

When the match ended there was no leaping. Sampras bowed and squatted, tears in his eyes. Then he walked around. He looked for his parents, Sam and Georgia, who chose to sit high in the stands to avoid television cameras, a contrast to Richard Williams, who said he stayed in the limelight largely to keep pressure off his daughters.

My parents are not tennis parents," Sampras said. "You see a lot of cases where parents get too involved. They've always kept their distance. They've always given me my space." Last night Sampras displayed all the qualities of the hero: the loss in the first set, vulnerability near defeat, then a comeback and a final triumph.

He hadn't played well for the tournament and was almost convinced that he would lose the match. "Today I found my game when I had to," Sampras said.

When he was asked if this was the best day of his tennis life, he said: "With everything that's happened, I'd say this is one of the best moments. It's hard to really tell you how I feel in 10 minutes. But as the months go by and the years go by, I'll look back at these two weeks as the most difficult and the most satisfying."

The cheering interest of this match was defined before the players played their first game. Sampras and Rafter emerged from the players' tunnel together. When they took their seats, Rafter pulled off his warm-up bottoms to a smattering of cheers from female admirers.

Rafter is the 27-year-old Australian with a beard and a ponytail and funky good looks. Sampras is clean-cut, but has no public persona to speak of and is not the celebrity-style athlete of a dot-com age.

But to understand and appreciate what Sampras has accomplished, you have to love tennis, understand tennis. He is Hank Aaron, not Babe Ruth. Joe Louis, not Muhammad Ali. Jack Nicklaus, not Tiger Woods.

Last night Sampras played a grinding, grueling game of tennis that neatly frames his career.

No flash. Terribly efficient.

Sampras lost the first set in a tie breaker and was down by 4-1 in the second-set tie breaker before coming back to win it.

"Serving at 4-1, I really felt like it was slipping away," he said. "Somehow I got through that tie breaker. From a matter of feeling like I was going to lose the match, I felt like I was going to win the match within two minutes. That's grass tennis."

He looked into a reservoir of victorious moments and searched for a frame of reference that could carry him through.

"I felt it was slipping away," Sampras said. "When you're sitting on the changeover you think of past matches that you've lost the first set -- to Becker, 7-6, at one stage -- came back and won the next three. There's time. You reflect on your past experiences, being able to get through it."

At least on this day, Rafter's frames of reference couldn't pull him through. Sampras jumped on his opponent in the third and fourth sets. "I was making him work, making him work," Sampras said. "Even though I was losing some of his games, I felt like it was a matter of time before eventually I was going to break him. I lost my nerve in the first set, he lost his nerve serving 4-1 in the second tie breaker."

Last night, Sampras fulfilled the heroic mission . "I never, ever planned on ever breaking this record," he said of Roy Emerson's 12 Grand Slam victories. "You don't plan on breaking records like this. It's kind of transcended into something that I put myself in a position to do it. "It's amazing," he said. "It really is amazing, this tournament just panned out for me. I didn't really feel like I was going to win here."

At the beginning of the match, Rafter had received the most cheers when he pulled off his warm-ups.

Now, hours later, the moment of truth had come and gone. The stadium was engulfed by darkness tinted with slivers of natural light and camera flashes. The roar of the crowd was aimed at Sampras, who raised his arms in triumph.

At the end of the day, he was an illuminating figure.

 

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