Tennis magazine
November 1996
Playing to the Crowd
By Brian Cleary, Assistant Editor

"That ain't good sportsmanship. He just missed the ball and you clapped."
-- a fan at the Open, instructing a friend on tennis etiquette

"Petey! You the boy! You the man!"
-- large man shouting out to Pete Sampras during the fifth-set tie-break
against Alex Corretja
The average New Yorker who attends the U.S. Open moves around a lot and talks and yells during points as if he were at a Knicks or Yankees game. "It's hard to tell if they are even watching sometimes," said Lindsay Davenport. They were definitely watching Goran Ivanisevic during his win over Stefan Edberg. "I had maybe 18,000 fans against me. It's not easy playing the New York crowd," Ivanisevic told a German TV reporter after the match. "I didn't know they would be yelling, 'Miss it.'"

But what New York fans lack in tennis decorum, they make up for in sports savvy. They know how to spot talent and toughness as well as when a player is choking, dogging it or just in over his head. This year, they saw all that and reacted accordingly.

Pete Sampras won his first U.S. Open as a 19-year old back in 1990, but it was only this year, at age 25, that he became a champion New Yorkers could call their own, one viewed with the reverence in New York previously reserved for the tournament's most beloved figures: Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe.

You knew Sampras had broken a barrier when he turned and threw up at the end of his side of the court in the fifth-set tie-break against Corretja and then just walked away, as if that was the way tennis is played these days. That tie-break alone brought Sampras five separate standing ovations. "I hate to lose, and I do whatever I can to win, and if it is ugly, it is ugly," Sampras said the next day.

After the match, Sampras was holed up in a tiny room underneath the Stadium court for an hour and a half trying to regain his strength, with a media frenzy just two security guards and a door away. When the door opened and Sampras was led out of the room to meet a waiting car, he was still holding a piece of gauze over his forearm because of the two IV's he had been given to restore his body's energy. The bright lights of TV cameras, seven in all, were pointed right in his face as he emerged.

A younger Sampras might have been overwhelmed by this, might have seen it all as a nuisance. But this year, Sampras met the bright lights with a big smile, one befitting a star of the magnitude of Mac or Jimbo.