June 2000
Pete Sampras in pursuit of perfection
By Joel Drucker
Phots by Mark Robert Halper
This month, Pete Sampras has two opportunities to become the most dominant men's tennis player in the history of the game. He will attempt to win a record-setting 13th Grand Slam singles title at either the French Open, which ends June 11, or Wimbledon, which gets underway two weeks later. In this exclusive interview with WorldTraveler, Sampras discusses his sterling career: 20 years of sweat, sacrifice and salvation.
Pete Sampras is the Rodney Dangerfield of tennis.
Even though he's won a record-tying 12 Grand Slam singles titles, many tennis insiders question his desire, his fitness, his resume. While his dominance rivals Michael Jordan's -- he finished the year as the world's number one ranked player six straight times between 1993 and '98 -- those unfamiliar with tennis find it difficult to appreciate his icy precision.
On most days, Sampras takes a challenging approach to reconciling fame and success. Virtually any time he's asked a question, his lips curl up in the same cheeky manner as Jack NichoIson's Joker in Batman. Though those Sampras feels comfortable with will experience his jocular smart -- aleck side, he usually bites his tongue, issuing safe bromides like, "I'm just a normal guy who plays tennis well."
At first glance, Sampras might be right. Sure, he owns a house high in the canyons of Beverly Hills and drives a Mercedes, but between the collegial informality of his home and the exceedingly dusty hood of the car, Sampras seems little more than a boyish Tom Cruise character with a few million. He loves going to Lakers games, kicking back in his living room, watching sports on his big-Screen TV and listening to Pearl Jam.
Adjacent to Sampras' lounging room are the makings of a rec room,
featuring a pool table, several framed magazine covers and numerous trophies. The room has barely come together, which is what you'd expect from a bachelor who travels more than 30 weeks a year. The trophy case is cluttered, its wares obscured by dusty glass.
Then, out of the blue, as a guest regards a poster of Sampras serving, Sampras asserts himself. "You see that?" he asks. "That's an athlete serving."
The plot thickens. Would a quarterback need to state the case for himself as a jock? Then again, no one ever called football a sissy sport.
Sampras is victimized by misperceptions of tennis, which may well be the Rodney Dangerfield of sports. "People see all the pretty settings and the beautiful people and the money and they think this is a nice little game," says Hall of Famer Pancho Segura, a former coach of Jimmy Connors. "Well, I got news for you buddy -- it's not. It's like boxing, a war with rackets."
The problem for Sampras is that for so long he won the war with nary a scratch. While Connors and Andre Agassi waged crusades, Sampras' excellence has been regal, so all-encompassing that his triumphs are received with all the emotion of a Microsoft annual earnings announcement.
Queried about his seemingly tranquil, epic reign, Sampras' eyes light up. A nerve has been struck. The normal guy becomes a verbal panther, darting as swiftly as he does for his forehand. "You think it was easy being number one those six straight years?" he asks. "You've got to work your booty off, and if you don't, you get knocked off. Being number one has to be a passion. You have to want to be The Man. I got comfortable being on the top. Guys keep coming after you, every week. They want you."
But now, for the first time since the early '90s, Sampras, who'll turn 29 in August, is a man in exile. One of the more challenging campaigns of his career commences this month. The French Open, the one Grand Slam event Sampras has never won, began May 29. The slow red clay of Paris nullifies Sampras' shot-making skills, turning matches more into battles of attrition than the displays of aggression Sampras prefers. "Patience is not his strong suit," says Sampras' coach, Paul Annacone.
Compounding Sampras' clay court quandary is that the defending French champ is Agassi, who undercut some of Sampras' historic quest last year by becoming only the fifth man to win all four Grand Slam titles over the course of a career. Despite beating Agassi four out of five times in '99, numerous injuries forced Sampras to yield the number one ranking to him. This January, Agassi drew first blood by beating Sampras at the season's first Grand Slam, the Australian Open.
Two weeks after the French Open ends comes Wimbledon, the sport's preeminent tournament. Sampras has won this event six times over the last seven years. John McEnroe won three Wimbledons, Connors two, Agassi one.
Yet even where he most shines, Sampras is under-appreciated. Because Wimbledon is played on grass, an extremely fast surface, rallies are ruthlessly short, demanding such a high pitch of athleticism that Sampras' skills are often undetectable to the millions of untrained eyes that limit their tennis-viewing to Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. "I watch tapes of me playing and it all looks so easy," says Sampras."If only people knew how much work it took me to to get to that point."
The work has been nonstop for two decades. From the time he started playing at eight, Sampras has never imagined a life anywhere but on a tennis court. Growing up as the son of an engineer in Palos Verdes, California, a Los Angeles suburbiand one, notably for Sampras, emotionally immune from Hollywood), Sampras apprenticed at one of the most tennis-rich venues in the world: the Jack Kramer Club, named for a former world champ and the breeding ground for such high-powered juniors as U.S. Open winners Tracy Austin and Lindsay Davenport.
At nine, Sampras was befriended by Peter Fischer, a tennis-loving pediatrician who told him he was going to make people forget Rod Laver (the player often considered the best ever). Sampras' parents, so unintrusive that they've never attended Wimbledon, believed Fischer, letting him supervise their boy's tennis education from several specialized instructors.
Sampras was one of many Southern California teens told they could win Wimbledon. All led similar childhoods. "Growing up, I didn't have much of a social life," says Sampras. "No proms, no football, no dances. It wasn't normal." Though consistently ranking high in his age groups, Sampras never won a national junior title.
Even then, he was envisioning himself in epic terms. At 15, Sampras had a two-handed backhand and a speedy retrieving game that could have earned him a college scholarship. "But the vision was always Laver, on being a pro," Sampras says. Under Fischer's tutelage, he ditched the two-hander in favor of a one-hander, precisely the versatile, net-rushing tool needed to win at Wimbledon.
To imagine a 15-year-old delaying short term gain for long-term potential -- jettisoning the SAT in order to ponder tenure -- reveals that Sampras is not as normal as he declares. "He'd always looked so cool from a distance, but when I sat on the court against him during a Davis Cup match, I saw that this guy was unbelievably intense," says three-time Wimbledon winner John Newcombe. According to Annacone, "What I've liked about Pete is that he's so comfortable with his ambition. He knows what exactly what he wants, but he's not going to get too laborious and give himself a reason or excuse not to pursue."
Along with such contemporaries as Agassi, Michael Chang and Jim Courier, Sampras went from high school into the pros. By his late teens, Sampras' game was evolving. Hall of Famers began touting him. His service motion became one of the most fluid in history, mixing speed, spin and placement like a baseball pitcher. The power of his ground strokes and volleys were backed up by an asset that remains under-appreciated: gazelle-like movement. "He's as complete a player as we've ever had," says ESPN analyst Cliff Drysdale.
But even when he validated Fischer's prophecy by becoming the youngest U.S. Open champ in history at 19 in 1990, Sampras admits that, "It was great and it was rough. It came too soon, and kind of got me off track for a while."
A loss in the finals of the '92 U.S. Open -- the one Slam his parents have attended -- proved a major jolt. "At crunch time, I didn't really dig deep enough, kind of gave it away," says Sampras. "For months, I'd think about it in my sleep, and I realized, these Slams are precious, they're what it's all about." Since then, Sampras' record in Slam finals is 11-1.
"It was kind of strange to grow up as a pro, in a world where everyone was watching me," he says. "But you just figure it out." He relocated to Florida soon after winning the '90 Open to avail himself of better training conditions. He broke up with Fischer. So equipped and powerful was Sampras that his arrival as number one in '93 was seemingly inevitable. In '94 - '95, Agassi asserted himself as a potential rival, only to fade out dramatically after Sampras thumped him in that year's U.S. Open final. "Andre and I bring out the best in each other," says Sampras, who admits he played the best tennis of his life in beating Agassi in the finals of Wimbledon last year. But Sampras also pointedly adds that, "I respect him coming back. I don't respect the fall off."
Cold-blooded as Sampras may seem, he's participated in several of tennis' most emotional moments. When his coach, Tim Gullikson, began showing signs of what would prove to be a fatal illness at the '95 Australian Open, Sampras started crying during a match that he came from two sets to love down to win. At the '96 U.S. Open, Sampras vomited during a final-set tiebreaker, fought off a match point and whipped a second serve ace to pull out a victory. In the '95 Davis Cup finals (tennis' premier team event), Sampras collapsed on the court after winning his first match, only to come back and score victories in doubles and singles the next two days.
"There's deeply intense soul inside Sampras that he doesn't want to come out because it will distract him for winning big titles," says Vic Braden, who was the Kramer Club's first tennis pro and has watched Sampras play his whole life. "But there are moments when all the churning inside him can't help but surface."
Though his appetite for winning remains large (he plans to play well into his 30s), Sampras has at last given himself permission to savor his accomplishments. "I used to take the tennis life for granted, but these days I'm starting to enjoy it more," Sampras says. Currently dating actress Bridgette Wilson (House on Haunted Hill), Sampras admits to finding unprecedented pleasure merely by occupying his Beverly Hills home. Standing on his tennis court, he pushes a button. Out comes Pearl Jam from a nearby speaker.
"Practicing to this music is pretty great," he says. But there's one spot Sampras rarely occupies, a room whose stiff couch, wood-armed chairs and absence of phone, clock, radio or TV contrast sharply with the fraternal aura of his media and rec rooms. Think of where you'd host elders on Sunday afternoons and you'll get the idea.
Before fleeing for popcorn and the remote, you notice that this formal venue houses Sampras' six gold Wimbledon cups, along with trophies from the ATP Tour honoring him for finishing the year as the world's number one player. Goodbye, happy-go-lucky flophouse. Hello, tennis Smithsonian. "Past, present, future, it's all working away in that head of his," says Braden.
"Tennis is a tough sport," says Sampras. "It's the only sport that's one-on-one with no coaching. Even a boxer has a corner man. In an environment like that, you see the true colors of an athlete. It's a very lonely feeling, playing tennis. That gets lost a bit. It's a unique and special sport. You've got no teammates to carry you through. It's up to you. In tennis, It's always a one-man show."
As low-key as Sampras wants to come off, the choices he has made and the battles he has waged tell another tale. Tennis is more combative than you think. So is Pete Sampras.
Joel Drucker writes frequently about sports and popular culture for the likes of
Cigar Aficionado, Biography, Tennis and HBO Sports.
Serving Aces On and Off The Court
While Pete Sampras' serve demoralizes his opponents, his delivery brings hope to many in need. Three years ago, Sampras launched "Aces for Charity." For each ace he hits during tournament play, Sampras donates $100 to charity.
When you have the best serve in the game, that translates into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since 1997, Sampras has contributed more than $750,000 to The Kid's Stuff Foundation, The Vitas Gerulaitis Youth Foundation, Revlon/UCLA Breast Center, The Avon Breast Health Access Fund and the Tim &Tom Gullikson Foundation. He's also a regular participant at the U.S. Open's Arthur Ashe Kids' Day eventibenefitting AIDS research). In 1990, still in his teens, Sampras donated $250,000 to the Cerebral Palsy Foundation.
The Gullikson Foundation is particularly near to Sampras' heart. Tim Gullikson was Sampras' coach for three years. He died of brain cancer in 1996. Sampras has consistently donated time and money to the Gullikson Foundation, serving on its board, playing in charity events and, most recently, conducting the Pete Sampras Classic, a celebrity golf tournament that donated $90,000 to the Gullikson Foundation.
"We're lucky to have the life we have in tennis," says Sampras. "It's good to help others who aren't so fortunate." --J.D.