Pete Sampras, Great Soul
September 9, 2002
I’m sorry, Pete. I was wrong. I thought you should have retired a year ago. After you won your 13th Grand Slam at Wimbledon in 2000, you wanted to give it another year. You wanted the glory one last time, wanted to see, in your own words, if you had one Slam more in you. But it was obvious to me after a full year of trying—and I think to nearly every other tennis fan on the planet—that you didn’t. And when I saw you fall in the first round of the French this year, I knew for sure you didn’t.
Pete, it looked all wrong. Your first serves, those Zeus-like thunderbolts, were now erratic slingshots. Your untouchable second serve, now fodder for the Gaudenzi’s of the world. Sure, you had lost a step, but who could begrudge you that after the million grueling sets you’ve put yourself through? No, it wasn’t the loss of raw speed around the court, but the off-balance and jerky way you moved through your shots that convinced me that the immortal grace you once played with had now deserted you.
When I saw you sitting slumped over, head in your hands, after your loss to the qualifier George Bastl at Wimbledon, my heart ached for you. “Don’t do this to your self, Pete,” I said to myself. “Don’t go out like this, man. You are too great and proud a champion to walk off the stage like this.”
But you stuck to your guns. You said you had another great moment in you. So I settled into watching your opening matches at this year’s U.S. Open with a sinking feeling in my gut that I was going to once again watch you flail after your impossible dream. Until, that is, I saw your serves in your first few games of your opening match. One thunderbolt after another! “Hmmm, I said to myself, this is definitely different.” Then when I saw you hit a few backhand winners in the 2nd and 3rd rounds, I said, now this is really different. You haven’t hit a backhand like that, well, since last year’s U.S. Open. You hung tough with Rusedski for five sets, and somehow pulled it out. Hass falls, Roddick falls. Not only did you have momentum, but the old fluidity had returned. Now you were dictating play, forcing your opponents to feed your forehand, and then unleashing shots that seem to rocket through the court. Even your flex-your-shoulders, cock-of-the walk strut was back!
But Pete, I’m sorry, even after you beat Schalken in the semis, I still couldn’t believe you could do it. After all, you had to face either Hewitt or Agassi in the final without a day’s rest. No day off, that’s what brought your two previous runs at the U.S. Open to a crushing loss in the final. Your body just couldn’t recover. And I knew Hewitt’s or Agassi’s would.
But by the time you walked onto the court Sunday against Andre, you had become Pete Sampras again, the Pete Sampras who had won 13 Grand Slam titles, the Pete Sampras whose cracking serves now once again sent even Agassi, the game’s greatest returner, into a state of near-fatalism. Up two sets to love, what a shock!
But Agassi wasn’t about to give up. Maybe Barbara Streisand didn’t quite get it right when she called Agassi a Zen-master, but there’s no doubt Andre has a big soul. All you have to do is look at the intensity of his gaze as he tries to discern the initial movement of the ball off the server’s racquet to know his being is animated by a burning spirit.
So, Pete, I wasn’t surprised Andre won the third set and, seemingly, was ready to steam-roll you off the court. The magic deserted you towards the end of that third set. The lack of a day off, which had brought your dreams crashing to earth the last two years, had finally caught up with you.
But this is where you surprised me more than at any other time in your amazing run at your 14th Grand Slam championship. You reached deep, pulled yourself together after the 7-5 loss in the third set, and began playing that fourth set with a steely conviction to try to push this one over the top. You reached deep, deep in that final set. Deep, back to your bitter loss to Stefan Edberg in the 1991 Open final. Back to single-handedly winning the 1995 Davis Cup final against Russia and collapsing after a grueling five set win against Andrei Chesnokov. Back to your famous episode against Alex Corretja in the 1996 Open quarter-finals, back to the exhausting last year of your six year run as the number one tennis player in the world, and back to your last grand slam title at Wimbledon, beating Pat Rafter before your family.
Ah, Pete, I’m sorry I doubted you. Like Andre, you have grown a great soul throughout all the years of victories and in the last two years of defeats. No one deserved to hold the champion’s cup above his head more than you on Sunday. Bask in the applause and kudos, they are all deserved. You say you might want to make another run at a Grand Slam title? Go for it, man, I’ll never doubt you again.