A Duel Fit for New York
September 9, 2002
The last rays of sun vanished from the upper deck of the east stands at 7:09 p.m. Pay no attention to the calendar: this is when autumn actually begins in New York, on the last evening of the United States Open, when the sun goes down.
Only two people were still left standing from this very long and now very old summer. Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi have been going at each other for a long time, since they were children, but now night was falling for both of them.
This was the 34th time the two of them had met, tying them with Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, another of the great tennis rivalries. They both acknowledged this meeting could be their last in a Grand Slam tournament, and they both wanted it to be an epic match, but it could only become great under a darkening sky, in this city that has nurtured them on their visits since their teens.
Now in New York, with night coming on, the two old rivals pulled the best out of each other, one last time. Sampras, 31, tried to blow his serve past Agassi, 32, who tried to whistle his return past Sampras, both of them hoping for some easy sets, but knowing better.
Easy matches did not create Tilden-Johnston or Rosewall-Laver or King-Court Smith. They all had to struggle with each other to gain respect for each other.
Agassi and Sampras do not sit around and share their carbo stash the way Martina Navratilova did with Chris Evert when they waited for their final round sandwiched between two men's semifinals. But in their own distant guy way, Agassi and Sampras have come to know they needed each other for these final days of their career.
"He's made me a better player," Sampras would say afterward. "He's brought moments to my career that are like Borg and McEnroe. Those guys needed each other. I've needed Andre over the course of my career. He's pushed me. You know, he's forced me to add things to my game.
"He's the only guy that was able to do that," Sampras would add. "He's the best I've played."
On what could be the last time for these American men, straight sets would not have sufficed, although that is what Sampras was hoping for as he ripped off monstrous first serves and audacious second serves to take a two-set lead. But Agassi was not going to let Sampras off easy, and neither was Sampras's aging body.
Part of the crowd adored Sampras and nobody wished him harm, but as the sunlight disappeared from the lip of the stadium, the crowd implored Agassi to win a set. Nothing personal, just a bit of amortizing of their considerable investment in the tickets produced the cheers for Agassi.
This is when New Yorkers turn up their Knick volume and their Ranger loyalty for the player who is losing. The players all understand that. The fans in Ashe Stadium had tried to do that for Venus Williams on Saturday night, when her sister Serena was smoking her in two sets, but it is basically impossible to separate the two sisters, and the crowd was stymied. This is not how great rivalries are born. There may never be a great Williams rivalry to match Becker-Edberg or Seles-Graf. Or Sampras-Agassi.
The crowd cheered as Agassi won the third set, as Sampras began to lose his serve. Pete lumbered off to the bathroom, and it was easy to conjure up images of the aches and pains that have caught up with him late in these long matches.
"I was definitely feeling a little bit of fatigue," Sampras would say later.
Sampras has always hunched over, looking like a man with a stomachache — and sometimes he actually was — so there was a reasonable scenario of him deteriorating as the evening wore on.
However, it is also true that Sampras has never lost at night at the United States Open, in 20 official night sessions. Now it was evening. The Jets' football game had gone into overtime on CBS, delaying the start of the tennis match by nearly 45 minutes, but now Sampras was able to battle his slump and his years and his worthy opponent in the cool of the evening, Pete's time.
Now, under the glare of lights, the crowd was begging for a fifth set, hoping for the manic late-night feel out in Flushing Meadows when, historically, people like McEnroe and Connors and Ilie Nastase have turned into werewolves in shorts.
"I wanted it to go longer," Agassi would say later. "I mean, that's the only chance I had, to get it to a fifth. I think there's a lot of momentum coming from two sets back if you can get to the fifth."
Sampras wanted to avoid that. His serves regained their early pop and
he broke Agassi in the ninth game, and then he padded in for a winning volley,
as he has done so often, to give himself a 6-3, 6-4, 5-7,
6-4 victory for his 14th Grand Slam championship, the most in history, doubling
Agassi's total.
Sampras also took a 20-14 lead in this series that may now be over. Their bodies and their wills cannot know at this moment if they have anything left. But if this was the last one, it was appropriate. It was New York, it was night, and autumn was coming on.