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Boys to Men

September 9, 2002

FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. - You've known Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi for half their lives now. You've known them since they were boys, with narrow chests and dopey expressions. You've known them at their worst and at their best, their most boorish and gracious, you've seen their public joys, their clenched-fist victories and hoisted trophies, and you've seen their public embarrassments, their head-hanging chokes and disgraces. You've seen their girlfriends come and go, breakups and divorces. Now you know them as grownups, as fathers and husbands, and above all as adults, and that is what was so satisfying about their U.S. Open final.

It was a meeting of men. Not of rude boys with big strokes and sticky hair. The Lleyton Hewitts and Andy Roddicks will have their day, and in fact it's already here. But this particular day in tennis history belonged to Sampras, 31, and to the longtime rival he bested, the 32-year-old Agassi, 6-3, 6-4, 5-7, 6-4. Afterward, you shared an intimate moment with Sampras, when he jogged through the stands to embrace his wife, Bridgette Wilson, who is pregnant with their first child. And you may have felt a pang for Agassi and for his own wife, Steffi Graf, who held their infant son in the stands.

There was no mistaking the familiarity with which the crowds patted Sampras on the back and shook his hand as he made way through the stadium.

You've known him since he was 19, and seen him win 14 Grand Slam titles, the all-time record by two, but you've also seen him pitiable and dispirited as he went winless for the past two years, 26 long months, to be exact, in which he contemplated retirement.

This is what tennis needs more of: adults. Chiefly, it needs more players with whom the audience has developed a relationship, if not affection. Too often we hurry athletes toward retirement; for months now Sampras has been besieged with suggestions in the press and in the locker room that he should hang it up, that he was finished, because his game had lost some luster. The conventional wisdom in any sport, particularly tennis, the sport of child champions and teenaged burnouts, is that he or she should pack it in and preserve the storybook ending. But when we do this we rob the athlete, and we rob ourselves. Had Sampras listened, he would have cheated himself of the title that may be his most rewarding -- both for him and for us. "This might be my biggest achievement so far," he said. It meant, he said: "A lot. More than anything, probably."

Continuous emotional connections with athletes are what make games worth watching, otherwise we might as well be rooting for cardboard cutouts.

Perhaps we'll eventually know Hewitt, 21, and Roddick, 20, but so far they are relatively superficial characters, faint outlines of people. There was a time when we felt the same way about Agassi and Sampras. But now they have history. Actually, they have more than that. "They're on the other side of history," is how Agassi's best friend Perry Rogers put it. They have played their way into a fully mature rivalry; this was their 34th meeting, with Sampras leading 19-14, and it was their fifth grand slam final.

Over the years, they have been a study in opposites, in temperament, in tastes, and in strategy. Agassi is the ground-stroking exhibitionist and, at times, the hedonist who took shortcuts and long breaks between his seven grand slam titles. "My accomplishments do not meet my wealth," he used to joke about himself. This is no longer true; he has managed to become as decorated as he is rich and irreverent, and he also got the girl. Agassi passed the better part of the last two weeks in an obscure rented hideaway in Rye, N.Y., with his wife and their son, Jaden Gil, who is nearly a year old.

Agassi likes to tell this story on himself. A few months ago, he was babysitting while Graf ran a few errands. Agassi decided to trim the boy's lush blond hair. He got out his razor, but forgot to change the setting.

He ran the razor gently along the baby's head, and forged a wide bald stripe down the middle. When Steffi came home, the baby was as bald as his iconoclastic father.

Sampras was always the internalizer, reserved and methodical with the momentum-killing serve-and-volley game, abbreviating every point. His years as the top-ranked player in the world were a matter of grim focus and self-deprivation. But while the achievements were gratifying, other things were not. "I wanted a life," he recently told tennis journalist Joel Drucker.

Sampras now has both a career and a life. The last 26 months, he says, were a matter of mental fatigue, not physical, and the low point was his second-round loss at Wimbledon in June, after which he sat in his chair for long minutes disconsolate, and thought about stopping. "So much of what I was going through was mental," he said. "It wasn't forehands and backhands, it was my head space."

Sampras and Agassi both proved emphatically that age is irrelevant for them with their performances at the Open. Agassi defeated top-ranked Hewitt in four sets in the semifinals. Sampras played five dominant matches in seven days, and showed no sign of tiring. His serving arm was alive as it's ever been against Agassi. "We're still out here doing it, and it's hard to get around that fact," Agassi said.

Sampras served a love game to open the match. A dozen aces later, he had won the first set, 6-3. Only a clawing performance by Agassi, who was flat and not playing at his best -- he clearly peaked against Hewitt in the semifinals -- extended the match to four sets. In the end, Sampras's 33 aces and 84 winners were simply overwhelming, and as persuasive as any match he played in his youth.

And it should put a halt to that talk of retirement. After all, we're finally getting to know him. "It's a storybook ending and it might be nice to stop," Sampras said, "but . . ."

 

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