TRAVEL & LEISURE/Golf
September/October 1999
Pete Sampras
By Evan Rothman
Photographs by Sam Jones

He has won twelve majors. He gets no respect.
What's wrong with this picture?
Situated in the A-list Los Angeles outpost of Ventura County, Lake Sherwood was so named after serving as a location in the original film version of Robin Hood. And from the veranda of its massive Georgian-style clubhouse, nearby Sherwood Country Club looks like a set designer's vision of the ideal moneyed playground. Santa Monica Mountains as backdrop. Sprawling oak trees and gurgling streams dominating the foreground. They even got the bird noises right.

As if on cue, Wayne Gretzky suddenly drives a golf cart into frame. "I hear Pete's going to be out here today," he calls to an assistant pro. "Tell him I want to get a beer later."

"Pete" is of course Pete Sampras, and the imagined scene of them -- two of the most preternaturally mild and self-effacing superstars in sports shooting the breeze over brewskies -- is a funny twist on the typical let's-do-lunch Hollywood moment.

Both Sampras and Gretzky have always been more talented than they are famous, often overshadowed by lesser actors but greater hams. But put Sampras under the the spotlight at Wimbledon or on his sport's biggest stage, New York's Flushing Meadows, where this fall he is poised to break Roy Emerson's record for majors victories, and he delivers a star turn.

Sampras shows up for our round right on time, alone. He sports wraparound sunglasses, but the amble is as recognizable as the Duke's. The regular-guy hair and wistful good looks recall Tom Hanks. we exchange introductions and pleasantries, and the shades come off. At the practice tee, not wanting to gawk, I just listen to his first swing. A whoosh, crisp as a winter wind through a deserted alley, is followed by a crack of absolute authority. Next time I gawk.

He displays the idiosyncrasies of the self-taught: The rounded posture and close-set feet suggest the starting position of his legendary service motion; the hands aren't so much conjoined as prescribed. Once the swing begins, however, the mechanics become music. The club flows back and through uninhibited, a fluid, wholly organic movement. Like his serve, his swing is an effortless buildup, then a seamless course reversal, followed by a furious but controlled unwinding that appears disproportionate to the winding. For the blessed few, some actions do not produce an equal and opposite reaction. It is clear that he is a natural.

Sampras offers that he has hardly touched a club in months, not since he played in the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic. The tournament gave him the red-carpet treatment. His pairings included Arnold Palmer, Fred Couples and David Duval. Sampras responded in kind, coming within inches of an ace on his one nationally televised shot.

Sampras has time today for only nine holes, but word is, he likes to have a few dollars at stake, so I am armed with a bulging wallet and the hollow confidence of a man whose editor has offered to subsidize arty reasonable losses. As we pull our clubs for the first hole, a short par four, he asks my handicap. We both play to a twelve, but rather than issue the expected challenge, he offers some local knowledge: "You want to take an iron here." Sampras steps up and rips a four-iron, but pushes it out of bounds right. "Nope," he says, surfer mellow. I manage a nervous, thin three-iron in the fairway. "Good ball!'' Sampras chirps, with winning if unmerited enthusiasm. He pulls out a second ball and blows a perfect draw some thirty yards past.

History has shown Sampras, winner of twelve Grand Slam titles and the world's number-one tennis player for a record six straight years and counting, to be die-on-his-sword competitive, even by the standard of champions. Though the public unravelings are said to embarrass him, his most vivid and memorable encounters, all victories, have been, in shorthand: Vomit Match (1996 U.S. Open quarterfinal, d. Alex Corretja), Crying Jag (1995 Australian Open quarterfinal, d. Jim Courier) and Violent Cramps (1995 Davis Cup final, single-handedly d. Russia).

He is different at golf, which may be why he loves the game so much. Stan Smith introduced golf to a sixteen-year-old Sampras, then his charge on the U.S. Junior Davis Cup team. "I was a hacker," Sampras recalls en route to our second shots. "I gripped the club like a baseball bat, I didn't know anything about etiquette, I didn't know what par was."

This is surprising somehow. Sampras has always seemed like a golfer in tennis togs: the deliberateness of someone who takes the long view, notably the languid walk more suited to course than court; the cocky glint of the eyes shining through the veneer of bland pleasantness; the stoic, melancholy aura.

It is therefore appropriate that Sampras mentions conduct in the same breath as results. He is the rare athlete who seems as genuinely proud of his manners as of his success. For Sampras's on-course demeanor and swing, Freddie Couples is his golfing role model, a function Sampras speaks of with unabashed reverence.

Standing over his half-wedge approach, he chuckles. ''Man, I hate these in-between shots." He then takes a beautifully judged swing and drops a two-hopper six inches from the cup. A wide grin creases his famously poker face. On the green, he picks up his gimme, then knocks away my ball after a putt slides three feet past. "Good par," he says. The hole
turns out to be his day in microcosm: wildness mixed with brilliance, each met with a smile; a kind word proffered whenever possible; no knee knockers.

That Sampras has detractors must strike the golf fan as inconceivable. He has won the big events -- he has won them with class and he has won them with daring. And yet this champion, for whom being a ''good role model for kids means more than anything people write'' about him, is for some -- including former twin terrors John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors -- not a victim of the declining interest in men's professional tennis but a leading cause of it.

To paraphrase Martin Amis, in the world of men's tennis, the word "personality" has become synonymous with the word "asshole." By that definition, Pete Sampras has rarely exhibited much personality. He's a Fred Perry man in Nike's clothing, who rather than kick up a racket wants only to wield one better than anyone, ever. Though he says he generally feels appreciated by tennis fans and the media, he wonders how golf would have received equivalent feats.

"It's a question I ask myself a lot," Sampras says. "Is it me or is it the sport? If I was playing golf and won twelve majors and acted the way I act, and with the sense of history I have, I think I'd be a Jack Nicklaus or an Arnold Palmer. It just tells you that tennis, unfortunately, is struggling and people want to find something to talk about or write about, and the easiest thing to do is say I'm boring. That was a big thing early on in my career, and it's kind of died down a little, but that will always baffle me."

I ask Sampras if he read the Sports Illustrated profile on another ''boring" superstar, David Duval, which linked the golfer's stoicism and single-mindedness to the child-hood trauma of losing his older brother to leukemia. He had not, but he had heard about it.

"I know a little something about being overanalyzed," he says with a wry grin.

To wit, ESPN this year profiled Sampras as part of its "SportsCentury" list of the fifty greatest athletes of the past one hundred years. As the show proved, some people are thrust into neuroses and others have neuroses thrust upon them. With the possible exception of Rip Van Winkle, perhaps no one's sleeping habits have been dissected more thoroughly than Sampras's (e.g., enjoys lots of it, prefers total darkness, doesn't liked to be touched during). It seems unlikely that the other forty-nine athletes of the century will have this indignity visited upon them during an ostensible homage to their achievements. Add to that being blamed for a lack of both competition and the aforementioned dramatic range, and you had a tribute that was more like a roast.

"It was so disappointing," says Sampras. ''I figured, okay, maybe these guys will get it right and tell you why I'm in the top fifty. But they had a bunch of writers talking about the whole 'boring' thing."

As Sampras notes, not only was the approach constricted, but it failed on its own terms, stuck with an outdated picture of the man himself. If his life has not been the public soap opera of an Andre Agassi, neither has it been without drama. "I'm not seventeen anymore," he says quietly, then pauses. ''I've been through a lot."

Sadly, he has: the premature deaths of his close friends Vitas Gerulaitis and Tim Gullickson; the conviction of his former tennis mentor Pete Fischer on child-abuse charges. But his experiences have given him the perspective to put criticism in a larger context.

"There's always going to be somebody who isn't going to like you, who will try to knock you down. And I felt that, but you can't let it worry you. After losing Vitas and Tim -- that's the worst thing in the world. You can't compare losing people to a tough article. Tim always said not to change, that I was fine the way I was. I'm not the one with the problem."

At the fifth hole, a 534-yard par five, Sampras scorches a drive close to three hundred yards on a string. "Not bad -- if you like perfect," he crows. A topped fairway wood, a few good-natured expletives and a lovely mid-iron later, he is on in regulation. Left with a delicate pitch
over an imposing front bunker, I ask my playing partner for advice.

"Hands forward, ball back and make sure you accelerate; that's the most important thing," he coaches. I manage to follow only the first two steps, eliciting a sympathetic groan.

On the sixth hole, without any prompting, Sampras points out the desired line for the blind opening shot. It's a display of thoughtfulness rarely associated with the modern athlete. This is a guy with a problem?

Sampras has never made an effort to be or to seem complicated. The imperatives of greatness, as he sees them, keep his life simple. Music, movies and Lakers games fill his downtime. He unabashedly loves Caddyshack. His favorite golf story is the one about how his vigorous swing accidentally snapped the head off the beloved persimmon driver of Jerry West, the Los Angeles Lakers's executive vice president of basketball operations and a regular golfing buddy.

Only one subject rankles: his personal life. Asked if the much-publicized break-up of Andre Agassi and Brooke Shields made him reflect on his relationship with actress Kimberly Williams, he replies with a tense no.

Making things as simple as possible may be a requisite for the single-mindedness he has long displayed and that has served him so well professionally. "When I'm playing tennis, I'm playing. I can't focus on anything else. There's no sight-seeing, there's no shopping. There's the hotel, the courts and the airport. It's not as glamorous as people think you're there to work." When I ask about any connections between golf and tennis, he says, simply, "I don't see any similarities at all. Golf's more of a mental thing for me, an escape. you can't find a more different sport."

One could argue of course that there are many similarities between the sports: their individual nature; their mental and emotional demands; their biomechanics. They have evolved in tandem, both in terms of sociology (long-overdue moves toward inclusiveness) and the play at its highest professional levels. Both are in what might be called a postmodern period: The level of athleticism has risen so that it has either destroyed or merely camouflaged the subtleties of the games, depending on your point of view.

There is certainly more "oomph'' nowadays; whether that equates to less "ahhh" is debatable. Sampras, with his 125-mile-per-hour serves and tomahawk overheads, plays a game with which preceding generations are not familiar, just as Tiger Woods and David Duval do in relation to Jack Nicklaus, and he to Bobby Jones before him. Why golf fans have been more accepting than tennis fans of this evolution may have something to do with the grace their heroes have shown in accepting the inevitable ascendancy of the new breed.

But such musings are perhaps best left to writers and satellite-tour players. Sampras's mock-angry responses to way-ward shots make clear that part of his enjoyment of golf is that here he can make mistakes of little consequence. It is pleasurable to watch someone who has displayed such transcendent ability be humbled into mere inconsistency. It is even more pleasurable to watch him enjoy being average.

On the elevated eighth tee, which affords a stunning view -- most frighteningly of its 232-yard par three -- he chuckles, surveying the scene. "You know what? I have no idea where this ball is going." Is this also a part of golf's appeal, that unlike tennis there is potential yet to be mined? He stares ahead, considering. "I probably will care more about getting better at golf when I stop playing tennis," he says. ''But it takes time to get better, and I don't have that much time right now."

He doesn't and yet he does. At twenty-seven, Sampras has more tennis behind him than in front, a fact that has not gone unnoticed. "Seeing Jordan, Gretzky and Elway retire, it's got me thinking about the next few years, what I'll do when I'm done playing. To be honest, I just don't know what I'm going to do. I started playing tennis when I was seven years old, and at sixteen I turned pro. So I never thought of doing anything else."

"Most kids at my age are figuring out what they want to do and getting jobs and dealing with relationships," Sampras says as we ride up the ninth fairway. "I've pretty much been consumed with tennis my whole life."

He pulls out a sand wedge, enters the bunker where his ball resides and digs in. The shot is a long and difficult one, to a back pin placement on a sliver of green, but he doesn't hesitate. A long, graceful swing sends the ball on a perfect arc to within tap-in range.

"This was fun," he says, shaking my hand. He then rides off toward the club-house, presumably for beers and BS with Gretzky. As he heads into the setting afternoon sun, casting a shadow that grows longer the farther away he gets, the image suggests a champion whose greatness will be better appreciated by posterity than by his contemporaries -- a fate he's accepted but does not deserve. In that, surely, he is a golfer at heart.