May 1999
the lonely living LEGEND
By Sally Jenkins
Pete Sampras has grown weary of the "boring" label and tired of having his
record-setting accomplishments overlooked. But contrary to what
you may have heard, he's not even close to being burned out.
"The neighbors can't see me and I can't see them," he says. "I'm Howard Hughes."
Only Sampras would choose to live and not be seen in Los Angeles. It goes to prove what he has said all along, that he couldn't go Hollywood if he tried. Yeah, so he just bought Kenny G's old house up in Benedict Canyon, where nothing goes for under a couple mil, and it does have a tennis court, a pool, and a splendid view of the insufferable neighborhood below. But you won't find him on Rodeo Drive, hanging with the surgically enhanced types, or standing in line with the gaunt vampires who'll grovel to eat goat cheese and smoked duck ravioli at a table next to Gwyneth Paltrow.
Sampras bought his new house atop the canyon at the close of 1998 strictly as a getaway. It was a reward to himself for maintaining the year-end No.1 ranking for a record sixth straight year. It's a feat he believes has been underestimated, and one he doesn't feel will be equalled.
He promptly put his new four-bedroom, farmhouse-style vacation home to good use. He spent the Christmas holiday there, liking it so much that he abruptly and controversially decided not to play the Australian Open, despite the fact that he was only one major championship title away from an even grander milestone, Roy Emerson's all-time Grand Slam total of 12. Which was roughly equivalent to Mark McGwire giving up his turn at the plate with one homer to go to tie Roger Maris.
Sampras' reason was simple: He was tired. The 1998 season, during which he won Wimbledon to tie Rod Laver and Bjorn Borg at 11 Grand Slam titles, left him utterly drained.
It also left him acutely aware that, at 27, his days as the greatest player of his generation are now numbered, and that he has left some things undone in his career, like winning the French Open. But the main thing that Sampras has left undone is this: He hasn't properly appreciated his victories, nor been properly appreciated for them by audiences.
Posterity has granted Sampras neither popularity nor happiness. In fact, the last six years have been strangely flat emotionally and poignantly marked by personal loss. There was the untimely death of good friend Vitas Gerulaitis in 1994. The passing of coach Tim Gullikson from brain Cancer in '96. And the guilty plea of his childhood coach and mentor, Pete Fischer, on child molestation charges last year. All of which Sampras dealt with like The Great Internalizer he is: by clamping his jaw stoically shut -- and developing ulcers.
"I've bit my lip so many times I need stitches," he says.
No wonder he needed a break.
As Sampras sits at his new kitchen table, the blond wood floors produce an echo in the nearly empty house. His home base remains in Orlando, Fla., where he trains and keeps most of his belongings. But it's clear that his Los Angeles home is where he would rather be.
"This is where I'll hang up the racquet," he says.
Such a blunt statement serves as a reminder that Sampras, in his 11th year on the circuit, is no longer a boy champion. In truth, he's now entering the last phase of his career. The decision to splurge on a new home is in part an effort, he says, to refresh himself for a final assault on history.
"The older I'm getting, I feel that I want to start to enjoy a little bit of what I'm doing, enjoy what I've achieved," he says. "You think, is this worth it? You know, is this worth what I'm doing? And if you don't enjoy the victories, it's not. I've been at this level, this high level that people kind of expect. I mean, I'm supposed to win everything. It's flattering, in some weird way. But at times you want people to appreciate how difficult it is."
His home is still largely unfurnished, though Sampras has installed what he regards as the bare essentials: a big-screen TV, a leather sofa, a pool table, a phone with a screening device, and, perhaps most significant, his 11 Grand Slam trophies. The massive silver and golden cups and chalices are grouped neatly along a built-in bookcase next to his living-room fireplace. Sampras stands in front of them and examines each carefully. Graciously, he invites his visitor to lift a Wimbledon cup. "It's not as heavy as it looks," he says.
Neither is its owner. Up close, the face of all-time greatness looks like this: impressionable brown eyes beneath black pin curls. A mouth that, when it's not grinning or uttering a casual stream of boyish profanity, is unapologetically sensitive. The long, stubbled jaw of a male model, set slightly askew so as to make him appear at once hurt and faintly stubborn, and suggesting that inside lurks a guy who can be just a little bit of a son of a bitch. As his brother, Gus, once said, "Just because Pete is nice to you doesn't mean he really likes you." It's a charge Sampras doesn't bother to deny.
He points to six tall chunks of glass that are placed along the shelves among the Slams. They're the trophies Sampras received each of the last six years for being the world's No. 1 player. They're among his most cherished prizes and, to him, the most costly. Nobody but Sampras knows at what price they came. Not even those who have the sense to realize that it takes one hell of an effort to look as nonchalant as Sampras does on court, and that anyone who's been No.1 for more than half a decade is not only less than nice and easygoing, but more than a little driven and neurotic.
"The saddest thing is, Pete has made it look so easy that people don't understand how good he is," says his coach, Paul Annacone. "People don't get it. They watch him and say, 'That doesn't look very hard.' It doesn't seem to take a heck of a lot out of him to play great."
In fact, the last three months of 1998 were among the most trying of Sampras' career. He was obsessed with holding on to the No. 1 spot -- and not at all certain he could, chased as he was by the Aussie heartthrob Patrick Rafter and the little Chilean ponytail Marcelo Rios.
Sampras won only four events, his lowest total in eight years, and he was forced to play seven tournaments in the season's final eight weeks in a desperate effort to secure the top spot. Ordinarily a champion sleeper, he began to get restless. He lost his appetite, got snappish with people. When it was over, he had barely clung to the ranking.
Yet nobody seemed to understand the magnitude of what he'd done. Instead, it was said that he'd had a bad year because he only pocketed a single Slam, compared to the two majors he took home in 1993, '94, '95, and '97.
"The (No. 1) record was huge to me," he says. "I was consumed with it, because I knew the importance of it. I mean, I know what it takes. You have to give up quite a bit in your life. Just about everything. Every aspect."
"There are three things you need to be No. 1 and to stay No. 1: You need the game, you need the heart, you need the mind. Some guys have a little bit of everything, some guys have two out of the three. But in order to do it not for one year or two years but for six, you need all of them. You have to want to be No. 1. And I want it more than anyone."
"Those last few months, it was great that I did it. But it wasn't fun. I was miserable."
It's a sure sign of our moral decay that Sampras is considered boring. What is so boring about arrant all-time greatness? What's so boring about a player whose game is so deeply imagined and completely realized that it looks effortless? And what, pray tell, is so boring about a genuine iconoclast, a guy who's not afraid to buck his peers and his times and be a consistently decent and modest champion in an era of inflated reputations and surpassingly vulgar behavior?
Yet one essential truth about all-time greatness is that the getting there, the how and the why of it, is boring. Sampras' pursuit of the Lavers and Emersons has, in reality, been a soul-deadening enterprise, a matter of dumb focus, of lying on his back in hotel rooms for hours at a time not wasting an ounce of energy, of endlessly changing channels on hotel room TVs, of "eating pasta for every meal, whether you want to or not, forcing it down," he says.
So if there has been a joylessness in his single-minded quest, a lack of expression, is it any wonder? And if Sampras hasn't appreciated his own wins, is it any wonder that spectators haven't either?
There's an old saying: "It is hard to live long with a great name." Sampras knows this, and it's why he has muffled his own fame, cultivated a certain opaqueness, while Andre Agassi played the glib poster boy. Even in his choice of love interest, Sampras chose a decidedly uncelebrated and unactressy actress, the wholesome Kimberly Williams.
"Even though Kimberly's an actress, she has her own career and she's very grounded, which was a concern of mine," he says. "She's not so much into the glitz and glamor of being in Hollywood. I don't want to be any more famous than I already am."
Still, it bugs him every time he wins a major and doesn't make the Sports Illustrated cover. Frosts him each time Nike features someone else in its tennis ads.
"You get slapped in the face enough times, after a while you get numb to it," he once said.
But he recognizes, too, that he's done it to himself. "You know what I really think? That you can't have both. You can't have the popularity and the results. I've thought about it. And you can't have the rock-star image and also be No. 1 for a number of years."
A very different Sampras does exist, a guy who, when he isn't biting his lip until it bleeds, can give and take with the best of them, "Someone gives me crap, a hard time, I have no problem giving it back," he says. That other Sampras easily kept up, in banter and adventures, with that fast-talker and urbane man about town Gerulaitis. He's a fist-pumper and a foulmouth who once gave an obscene salute to a hostile Wimbledon side-court crowd that had rooted vociferously for his opponent, Andrew Foster, a Brit. A guy who isn't opposed to the occasional showy display, like a blown kiss to Williams on Centre Court two years ago. A guy who's impulsive enough to make spur-of-the-moment trips to Vegas to play blackjack, or extravagant enough to purchase share time on a private Citation jet. A guy who says, with traces of both bitterness and amusement, "If I told you how I really feel, you wouldn't even recognize me."
Would we have seen more of that Sampras if his early years as a public figure hadn't been so traumatic? It's a tantalizing thought. He was still a mortally shy 19-year-old when he won his first US Open in 1990. Sampras bore (and still bears) a resemblance to Holden Caulfield, the alienated young loner in what he jokes is "one of the few books I've read beginning to end," J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Like Caulfield, Sampras was solitary, refused to play along, and abhorred phonies. But the two parted ways in one crucial respect: Caulfield was an overt rebel; Sampras was a frustrated one.
"I was a good kid. I went to class, I did everything my parents told me to do," Sampras says. "He was such a rebel. He went off and did whatever he wanted to do. I guess I admired that. Some people live vicariously through others."
Sampras had no close friends in high school. He was such a tennis nerd that he never developed the simple ability to talk to others. Then he won the Open and was thrust onto the talk-show circuit, where he was a total stiff, a bust. Looking back on that younger version of himself, Sampras says; "That kid's really green. No one told him anything; no one taught him."
"I was a little shy kid coming out of nowhere, doing something extraordinary. It was a fairy tale. I didn't know what I was doing, and my game wasn't really ready. Afterward, I went on all the TV shows, and I thought, 'I don't really like this.' I just wanted to be left alone. I wasn't crazy about the whole scene. I was kind of thrown to the wolves."
From that point on, everything wrong with tennis became Sampras' fault. The sport's recession was his fault. Flat TV ratings were his fault. He didn't play to the crowd, he was an automaton, he didn't know how to promote the game. The charges came from all quarters, and still do. Lately, some of the most scathing have come from that sourly loquacious ex-champion John McEnroe, who has called him "selfish" and said that his refusal to play Davis Cup consistently is a "dagger in the heart of tradition."
A defensive Sampras decided that he didn't care if he was ever a crowd favorite. The only thing that mattered to him was the record book. "All I care about is the winning," he has said. "I let the racquet do the talking."
The racquet became his chief mode of public expression. That is, until the 1995 Australian, when all of his world-famous reserve came tumbling down and he began sobbing in the middle of his quarter-final match with Jim Courier after learning earlier in the day about Gullikson's terminal condition.
It's a peculiar fact that the most private man in tennis has at various times wept on the court and thrown up on it, as he did during his epic 1996 US Open quarter-final against Alex Corretja en route to his winning the title in Gullikson's memory.
"I know, I know," he says. "It's ironic as hell. I've shown a lot more than anyone else has shown on the tennis court. Crying, and throwing up. I really can't explain it. I'm not a psychologist."
But those episodes didn't open Sampras up. If anything, they made him more closed off. He felt there was something deeply wrong with the fact that it took a tragedy for people to understand or like him better. He was embarrassed by his breakdown in Melbourne and angered by the suggestion that he had finally shown his human side. He had always prided himself on his emotional fortitude and his ability to preserve his privacy. The crying jag was too intimate.
"People take it for granted that I'm a robot out there," he said afterward. "I heard what some players were saying, that 'It's nice to see that Pete is human.' And I took that as an insult. I'm as human as anyone else."
The press has also had a hard time making him come to life. Until he captured his third straight Wimbledon crown, in 1995, Sampras endured biting criticism from the London tabloids, which dissed him in headlines like WIMBLE-YAWN and SAMPRAZZZZZ. But after the Three-Pete, he suddenly became the toast of England. And all he did was keep winning.
"You know, the first year I won, I was boring," he says. "The second year I won, I was still boring. And the third year I won, I was the greatest thing ever. And I hadn't changed a thing. Not a thing."
But lately he has begun to concede that perhaps winning isn't enough. There has been a subtle, incremental loosening up in Sampras' demeanor. At the year-end championships in Hannover, Germany, last November, even while in the throes of his No.1 quest, he was still contending with none-too-subtle suggestions that he wasn't a compelling champion. Not a single American journalist was covering the event at which he was poised to break the record.
"It was disappointing," Sampras says. "I felt I was doing something that, while not as historical as McGwire and (Sammy) Sosa, might not ever be done again. It's in that league. And I was thinking, is it me, is it the marketing, is it the media? I mean, I don't know. It's probably a little bit of everything. I've always been a very private person and don't really like to do a lot of things. But I think in the next year, I have to."
"Through my whole career, I kept on hearing that no one's watching the game and that it had low ratings. And I really didn't do much about it. But I think it's something I'll kind of ease my way into over the next couple years, getting out there more. I feel like I have to do more press or public appearances, do a talk show every now and again."
He pauses, allowing an expression of sarcasm to cross his face. "Because I changed a lot, didn't I, over the last couple years? Really opened myself up."
Few people in tennis have ever met the man who truly shaped Sampras. That would be his father, Sam Sampras. A retired engineer in Palos Verdes, Calif., he declines to be interviewed, and on the rare occasion when he does attend a tournament, he and his wife, Georgia, sit out of the view of cameras. His bouts with nerves are legendary; when his son plays, he is literally unable to look.
When Sampras was a boy, Sam would drive him to a tournament and drop him off. The child would walk onto the court and wave to his father. Sam would lift a hand in response, then turn around and walk away, too sick with fear to watch.
"Here I was, this little 11-year-old playing against older kids, and I felt all alone," Sampras says. "That's what I felt, lonely. I mean, we're getting sort of heavy here. But maybe that's where I got my independence and the way I am on the court. I was just out there by myself, because my dad was always going for a walk."
It was at the same age, when Sampras was playing a 14-and-under tournament in Shreveport, La., that Sam Sampras gave his son a lesson in the vagaries of celebrity. After Sampras upset David Wheaton, one of the hottest juniors at the time, he was surrounded by admirers from the large crowd. He gave his first interview, to a reporter from the Shreveport Times. He had won a big match, and suddenly he wasn't alone anymore.
The next day, Sampras lost to Mal Washington, one and one. When it was over, he sat at courtside, crushed. As he was packing his bag, his father came over.
"Pete, look over there. Look at that," he said. The same reporter was interviewing Washington. "That's what happens."
The same theme was drilled home throughout his childhood: Winning doesn't make you a better person. The popularity it brings is passing and false.
Sam Sampras made clear to Pete what it cost to pay for his tennis development. And not just financially, but also in terms of the time commitment and the stress and the struggle of raising a prodigy while at the same time not slighting his three siblings of time and attention. "There were times my father questioned if it was worth it," Sampras says.
When it came to being a star, the son always got the following piece of advice from his father: "Pete, just tell the press you were lucky."
Somehow, Sam Sampras managed to shield Pete without being an overbearing tennis parent. And after his son found a mentor in Fischer, Mr. Sampras stepped willingly into the background.
"My dad, he gave me the chance," Sampras says. "And I'll always be thankful for that. You know, it takes a hell of a person to be able to do that. To give up your son, so to speak, to let someone take over the tennis. My dad was paying for all my lessons. But he took the back seat."
The only Grand Slam final that Sam and Georgia Sampras watched their son play live was the 1992 U.S. Open, when he lost a painful four-setter to Stefan Edberg. "That needs to be corrected," says Sampras, who hopes they will one day attend a final that he wins.
But each time Sampras reaches the Wimbledon final, he places the same phone call. He dials the number in Palos Verdes and asks his parents to fly to London to watch him. "Why don't you come over?" he asks.
Every time, he gets the same reply. Sam Sampras is too nervous, or too superstitious, or too reticent, to make the trip. He thinks he would be in the way. "Ah, Pete, you're doing fine," he says.
Yet more and more of late, Sampras, who talks to his parents three or four times a week when he's on the road, feels the need to have them at courtside.
"These past few years, I feel like I missed a lot with them," he says.
Pete and his father grew especially close over the terrible two-year period when Sampras lost Gerulaitis and Gullikson. After Gullikson's funeral, Sampras had a long conversation with his father. Pete felt he had been dealt the worst possible hand. After his largely solitary adolescence, he had finally met companions -- and been robbed of them.
Sam Sampras empathized. He had lost his mother and two sisters to breast cancer. He told his son, "You don't think you'll get through it, but you will." He reminded Sampras that he was lucky, that he had a career and a fortune that others envied. "This is life," he said, "and you just have to find a way to deal with it."
Then he reiterated what he had told his 11-year-old son all those years ago. "This is what happens," he said.
Sampras genuinely believes that he would have been more comfortable in an earlier era, and perhaps in a different country: Australia. The endless afternoons he spent in his boyhood watching films of Laver, Emerson, and Ken Rosewall inspired more than his long, smooth strokes. He came away with a feeling of kinship for that courteous, wordless generation. They were men of laconic handshakes at the net, men who never discussed their injuries, men to whom silence was sporting. To Australians, a tennis stroke on elegant bent knee was a statement in and of itself, and so it is to Sampras.
"You know what I can't stand?" Sampras says. "Guys who pop off."
He played tennis with Laver once. And it was an experience so gorgeous and pure that the memory of it is fixed in Sampras' mind in an almost painterly fashion. It was a storybook June afternoon at Wimbledon in 1994, a few days before the start of the tournament, and the place was empty save for a few puttering members. The rose-laden vines were curled around the fences of the All-England Club with something resembling affection, and the grass courts seemed especially lush. It was hard not to stroll the grounds for the simple sake of appreciating their beauty.
Sampras was doing precisely that, wandering the outer courts after a practice session, when he rounded a corner and came upon Laver and Fred Stolle having a hit, with Rosewall looking on.
The day was brilliant, but no more so than their tennis whites. Sampras stood and gazed, his mouth ajar, watching Laver, the small, neat man with strokes as clean as a freshly painted picket fence.
Stolle noticed Sampras watching Laver with hungry eyes. "Grab a racquet, Pete," Stolle said.
Sampras glanced uncertainly down at his clothing: a gray T-shirt, baggy checkered shorts, a pair of boat shoes, and no socks. "Come on," Stolle urged.
"This is too good," said Sampras. "We've got to hit a few." He pulled a racquet from his bag and strode onto the court. "I'm breaking every rule of the club."
Then it was Rosewall's turn. "Am I allowed?" he asked. "It would be a great privilege." He joined them.
At that moment, a gentleman executive of the Club arrived. He surveyed the scene and the men on the court -- Laver, Rosewall, and Stolle in their impeccable whites, and Sampras in his grunge wear.
Dress code or not, Sampras couldn't let this opportunity slip away. "Come on," he said to the official. "Three of the greatest players who ever lived."
The foursome waited to see if the man would make Sampras stop. "Right," he said after a moment, turning his back on the rule-breaker with a carry-on gesture. "I think I'll return to the office."
For half an hour, Sampras rallied almost silently with the three Australian greats. At one point, he hit a running forehand winner. "That'll do," Laver said softly, appreciatively.
When Rosewall struck a twisting backhand slice that stymied Sampras, Stolle coached the youngster: "Get the elbow up, that's it." Sampras then hit a deep, rolling backhand.
"This young man learns fast," Stolle said admiringly.
Later, Sampras approached the net. Rosewall passed him with a sharp, compact backhand. "Jesus," Sampras said.
On a subsequent Sampras venture to the net, Rosewall sliced a gentle backhand pass down the alley. "There's my lunch," Sampras said.
Afterward, they all took chairs at courtside. Sampras began grilling the trio about the old days. "What did you eat before matches?" he asked Laver.
"Before Wimbledon finals, I ate an Aussie breakfast: steak and eggs," Laver said. Sampras raised his eyebrows in mild shock.
The questions continued. How many tournaments did they play a year? What tension were their racquets strung at? Laver told Sampras a story about how he once refused to sign an autograph before a match. The rebuffed fan was so incensed hat he tore the Laver label off his tennis shoes. The point was clear: Sampras can't please everybody, so he might as well be true to himself.
Eventually, his curiosity sated, Sampras shook hands and they parted company. He sat on a nearby bench in the sunshine and reflected on his encounter. "It made my hands feel good just to hit the ball with them," he said. "I felt like we were all kind of showing off a little bit. You know, I was showing off what I could do, and they were showing me what they could do."
It was, to date, Sampras' only extended encounter with Laver. Over the ensuing years, they would merely shake hands or talk briefly on the phone. When Laver suffered a stroke last summer, Sampras called to wish him well. Laver has often said that he makes a point of watching Sampras whenever he can. But there are also long periods of silence between them. It's not an easy conversation. Each is too shy, too self-effacing, to readily engage the other.
For instance, they've never discussed Sampras' desire to break the Slam record. "We probably never will," he says. ''It's weird. It's like we both know, but our personalities are so similar that we would never talk about it. We would never do that. I mean, he's probably the only guy that when I see him around, I say, 'This is the man.' He's probably uncomfortable with the fact that he's my idol. I've talked about him, and he's talked about me, and it's like we almost know more about each other through the papers than from actually sitting down and talking."
Laver is among a select group that Sampras calls the "Untouchables." They comprise a special category of athlete, Hall of Famers who are enveloped in an aura of decency. Others deserving of that exalted status are Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Terry West, the Lakers' basketball great and current vice president of basketball operations, who has become Sampras' golfing buddy. Conspicuously absent from his list are the two premier American tennis players of the previous generation, McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, both of whom have criticized Sampras for not being more fiery and fan-friendly.
"Throughout the past few years, I hear former players, you know, pop off," he says. "But I've never heard Laver or Rosewall ever talk crap about today's players. And that's what I aspire to be like. To me, that's Untouchable. Guys who know they're great without having to say they're great."
On the rare occasion when Laver does speak out about Sampras, he doesn't "pop off." Instead, he pays him a typically succinct compliment. "Pete has the ability to summon his best tennis when he most needs it," Laver says. "And that's what great ones do."
Sampras has it in him to be an unregenerate lounger. While playing hooky from the Australian, he didn't so much as look at a racquet. He spent most of his time on the golf course, tackling Pebble Beach, Cypress Point, and Spyglass Hill in one weekend. Even as Yevgeny Kafelnikov was winning Down Under and thanking Sampras for his generosity in not showing up, Sampras was teeing up at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in La Quinta, Calif., a pro-celebrity event.
But Sampras' withdrawal wasn't a case of temporary burnout, or post-adolescent rebellion, or simply a giving in to laziness. By pulling out, Sampras acknowledged what the rest of us aren't fully conscious of yet: that he's fast approaching tennis senior citizenship.
Sampras, who turns 28 in August, is a conservationist when it comes to his game. He took the 10-week break (his longest from competitive tennis since high school) because he wants to do something virtually no one in the modern era has done -- contend for Grand Slams into his 30s.
Borg, McEnroe, and Mats Wilander were all 25 when they won their last Slams. Edberg was 26. Boris Becker was 28. Ivan Lendl was 29. Even the ageless Connors was only 31 when he captured his final one, the 1983 U.S. Open. Sampras aspires to be older than any of them when he hoists his last major championship trophy.
Another reason Sampras skipped the 24-hour flight to Melbourne was because at this point, he doesn't need another Australian Open title. The one he really wants is the one he still lacks: the French Open. That's why he took the vacation, and that's why when his hiatus was over, he installed gym equipment in one of his many empty rooms, summoned his coach, Annacone, and began working out with fervor.
"He's working harder now than I've seen him do in the last five years," Arnacone says. "Pete's enigmatic. People don't understand what he's doing or why. But he's got a crystal-clear vision of what he wants these next few years. It's very simple. He wants to win the French. And he wants to break the Grand Slam record."
The former won't be easily accomplished. Clay has never suited Sampras' game, or his suspect fitness level. He's reached the semifinals at Roland Garros only once in nine tries, and was so spent after surviving three five-setters that he went down meekly to Kafelnikov.
But assuming Sampras stays healthy, the Grand Slam mark will almost certainly be his. Even if he's past his prime, Sampras, the game's preeminent grass player, seems destined to add to his total of five Wimbledon crowns in six years. The record, he says, "is what will keep me going."
Rafter has provided Sampras with additional motivation of late, capturing two straight U.S. Opens and, in so doing, delaying Sampras' assault on history.
When Rafter beat him in Cincinnati last August, the normally dispassionate Sampras got snippy. Asked about the difference between himself and Rafter, he retorted, "10 Grand Slams." But after losing to the Aussie again in the U.S. Open semi-finals, Sampras casually amended the statement. "Now it's nine," he said. He doesn't want Rafter drawing any closer.
"Frankly, when I see him holding the Open trophy, it pisses me off," Sampras says. "I feel like that should be me."
Here are some of the things Sampras would like to happen before he retires. He would like to play more golf. He would like to spend real time with his parents. And he would like to be acknowledged, finally, for what he is: the best tennis player you'll ever see.
"I won't say I'm great," he says. "But I know what I feel, deep down, even if I haven't said it. I'll never sit here and tell you that I'm the best ever. That's no't my personality. But I'll say this. There are times when, if I walk off the court after playing great, or if I have a great practice session, at those times, I do feel like I've mastered the game."
It may be that the casual observer can never fully appreciate Sampras. Perhaps the only ones who really know how good he is are the other Untouchables. Sampras makes it look too easy. His arm is like a knotted rope when he serves. His ground strokes unfurl with an unerring naturalness. His footwork is so economical, his quickness so predatory, that points, matches, and even whole tournaments go by in a hypnotic rhythm. The fact that his game is hard work tends to get lost in his perpetually slumping, blase body language, and his curved, uncommunicative shoulders. He abbreviates his own greatness.
But if you can't fully appreciate him, you can at least get to know him a little better. "I mean, I'm not going to turn into the talk-show king," he says. After a moment, though, he relents. "But I want to show people that I care. I care just as much as they do."
With that, Sampras says goodbye, turns back toward his hideaway, and closes the door.