Saturday, January 25, 1997
Pistol Pete blows away rival in not-so-OK Corral
By JEFF WELLS
IT WAS supposed to be a war --- but it turned out more like a slap fight. Curly has hit Mo harder than Thomas Muster hit Pete Sampras. It looked like it might be something out of a spaghetti western.
Until yesterday, tennis had started to look pretty macho. A lot of sweating and grunting as the power went down. Pistol Pete hadn't seen a razor in days. Neither had Muster. He was starting to look as mean as one of those gunslingers who don't blink when flies are crawling around in their eyes.
Pete had hung in hard as both teenager Dominik Hrbaty and Spanish assassin Albert Costa had chopped at him for five sets. Muster had gone eyeball to eyeball with old enemy Jim Courier --- stubbled-up and pugnacious as ever --- and left him in a pool of blood. Then he had ripped big Goran Ivanisevic, the man with the cannon, to pieces. No wonder Sampras was talking about the trenches.
So what happens? Both men come out as close-shaven and baby-faced as Martina Hingis. And if this were a gunfight it was straight out of a Trinity movie, one of those spaghetti slapstick jobs. Thomas went for his gun but by the time he got to it Pete had backhanded him six times, poked fingers in his eyes and cut his belt until his pants fell down.
It was plain embarrassing. The computer had once declared Muster to be the No. 1 tennis player in the world. Now he looked like a stooge. This is no comment on the man's resolve. He ran for everything and grunted like a junkyard dog. But there was only one class tennis player out there in the cool breeze. The score was 6-1, 7-6, 6-3 in 1hr 53min.
Muster didn't even look in the same class as Costa, who had pinned Sampras to the baseline and beat him in the rallies. Sampras won 75 of 88 points (85 per cent) on first serve in that match and served 23 aces and was still taken to a shaky five.
Yesterday Pete was at it again, winning 51 of 63 first-serve points (81 per cent) and banging in 16 aces. Muster was groaning like a man with half a dozen arrows in him as he chased and swung. But once Pete had the first set it was a stroll. It is hard to see how Carlos Moya can cope with him in the final if it stays cool and his serve stays in the zone --- even if Muster, who declared Pete just too good, wonders how much the No. 1 has left. If Muster had pushed him to five that might have been a problem. But it turned out to be a perfect warm-up for Sampras's ninth grand slam final, at age 25, and he should then be in great shape to win his first French Open.
Sampras served in the opening game and got to the net three times. The statistics said Sampras won 52 of 77 net approaches but anytime anybody looks towards the net they seem to call it an "approach". He did, however, play the net game with aplomb --- better than any other player here. He is almost playing a lone hand in keeping the volley --- the great skill shot in the game --- alive. Muster was credited with winning nine of 15 net approaches but mostly he had to endure Sampras picking up freebies on the volley and even toying with him in the rallies.
Some war. Muster now uses a computer to chart his rivals. We hope it is more reliable than the one which once declared him the best tennis player on the planet. And no computer could have predicted the freak shot of the tournament when Sampras, forced out wide of the tramlines on his backhand side, hit a daisy-cutter around the net post.
In the fourth game, Sampras, leading 3-0, messed with Muster's mind by stranding him with a drop shot. Thomas lobbed him on the next point to show that he was no punching bag. But Pete was just drifting around the centre of the baseline, dictating, and he broke him for a second time.
The wind hurt Muster because, for all his gristle, he doesn't have super power. The ball stood up and Sampras hammered it. The sun also hurt him, he said --- like any gunfighter who has circled the wrong way. It was harder on a leftie, he said.
Muster, even for the hiding he took, has been a welcome presence. His doggedness was perhaps best personified when he almost returned a third-straight Sampras smash when laid out behind the baseline with legs up like a dead cockroach. He went up a break inthe second set with a string of sizzling passing shots, and Sampras said he should have won it. But leading 5-3, and serving, he had a double fault to go 15-40, got wrongfooted by a net cord at deuce, and was then broken back.
In the tie-breaker he served first and was beaten on the point in a 29-stroke rally, and that was the beginning of the end. Sampras won the tie-break 7-3. Muster had no more ammo.
So, with Pete timing his run home perfectly, the roof-off/roof-on/roof-off-again Australian Open gets a men's final, Sampras vs Moya, of dubious quality --- unless Moya is the real thing, not just a shooting star about to get shot.