Slammed as bland, Sampras is truly grand
June 30, 2002
All these years, it's been said that Pete Sampras is boring. Samprazzz, the London tabloids once dubbed him. But halfway through the Wimbledon fortnight, you have to ask yourself what's more boring, tennis with Pete Sampras, or tennis without him?
I don't know about you, but me, I was really gearing up for that featured match between Radek Stepanek versus Michel Kratochvil -- until I got sidetracked by my yearning to see Feliciano Lopez against Rainer Schuettler. Tennis without Sampras? I'm feeling a sudden wave of obsession with Tim Henman, the best story line left in the tournament.
Sampras, at 30, is finally in decline. You could see this plainly when he was knocked out of Wimbledon in the second round by journeyman George Bastl, and it's a sincere pity. If there's another great champion out there somewhere, he hasn't announced himself yet -- don't tell me that unpleasant little basher Lleyton Hewitt -- and in the meantime Sampras's absence from Wimbledon only further defines his stature, and just how empty of class the field is without the seven-time champion in it.
Tennis without Sampras looks like this: Nobody can win matches consistently. Only two of the top 10 men's seeds remained in Wimbledon after five days of play, Henman of Great Britain, and Hewitt. By Friday we were left with Andre Sa and Flavio Saretta. With the oft-injured Richard Krajicek and Mark Philippoussis. And with Xavier Malisse, whose previous career distinction was dating Jennifer Capriati.
Tennis without Sampras looks doubly vacant when combined with the absence of No. 3 seed Andre Agassi, who suffered a straight-set loss to 67th-ranked Paradorn Srichaphan in the second round. But Agassi, 32, has always been an upset candidate and a sometime factor. Somehow, we thought Sampras would always be there, he's been more than just great, he's been dependably great. And that's a quality we'll miss most. For more than a decade, we were able to count on him, to rely on him to turn in an elite performance: He has won 63 singles titles; at his peak he was invulnerable to upset by his inferiors. Only now, with his arm growing dead, and without a title for two years, has he been vulnerable to the lurkers and mediocrities.
In place of him, we have the Australian Hewitt, the current No. 1. Hewitt's game is that of a baseline belter, he's all jumped-up force and targeted placement, and so far in personality he's been as charmless as he is artless. Then we have Marat Safin, the young Russian whose U.S. Open victory a couple of years ago made it apparent that he is Sampras's heir as the most talented man in the world. But he's also dissolute. He was beaten in the second round by 5-foot-5 Belgian Oliver Rochus. Maybe one of them will prove himself a consistent champion, but thus far they've been one-dimensional wonders.
Sampras lulled audiences with the hypnotic rhythm of his game and the monotony with which he acquired records. But he always played complete and deeply realized tennis, and it was never boring to connoisseurs or to those who understood that beneath his surface detachment was a burning neurotic whose feeling for the game was such that he alternately threw up on the court, and wept on it. As his former coach Paul Annacone said, "Pete makes it look too easy. People watch him win, and think that doesn't look too hard. But he'd like people to understand just how difficult it is."
The real disservice the "boring" label did to Sampras was that it depreciated his supreme professionalism and courtesy -- no common commodities these days in tennis. He has quietly resented it, too. He would have been more rewarded for cheap behavior, overt iconoclasm or exhibitionism, than for his correctness. He has felt out of step, wished he could play in another day and time, when his qualities might have been more appreciated. "I really think I'd have been more comfortable if I'd been born in another era," he told me once, when we were sitting around the outer courts at Wimbledon. The irony, of course, is that Sampras is the true iconoclast, a man who steadfastly refuses to behave the way others want him to. He's a vinyl record in the DVD age.
And he has played tennis as if it was a question of ethics: having decided to do this thing, he was going to do it right. He's always reserved a special quiet disdain for opponents he felt didn't do the right thing. Once during a Davis Cup news conference, he rolled his eyes in exasperation at a U.S. teammate who had bailed out of a match with an injury excuse he didn't consider legit. It was customary to skip meaningless Davis Cup matches if a tie had already been decided - - top players always came down with a case of the tweaks and a doctor's note. Sampras wouldn't do it. He played the dead rubbers.
A few years ago, Sampras and his old friend Agassi were traveling together to Sicily for a Davis Cup tie. They had been given expedited papers to get them through customs, which Agassi figured meant they got to skip all the paperwork. But Sampras paused at a counter to meticulously fill out his entry card. Agassi waved him on, impatient. "Come on, we don't have to do that," he said. Sampras said, shortly, "Yeah, we do."
He never changed, in a decade of dominance. When he won the U.S. Open as a 19-year-old in 1990, he had the same thoroughly unaffected manner, and a quirky sense of humor. Told the president might call him, he smiled, and then made a shy grimace and said, "The phone's off the hook."
Asked to describe himself, he said, "I'm a normal 19-year-old with a very unusual job, doing very unusual things."
And that was exactly right.
"When I won Wimbledon the first time, I was boring," he said once. "When I won it the second time I was boring, and when I won it the third time I was still boring. And then I won it the fourth time. And all of a sudden some people said I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And you know what? I never changed a thing. Not one thing."
Sampras's legacy is 13 Grand Slam titles and seven Wimbledons, all-time records. But another legacy is that he showed his audience that Grand Slam titles aren't necessarily extraordinary things accomplished by extraordinary people. Rather, they are extraordinary things accomplished by ordinary and sometimes quite decent people.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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