Set apart by his athletic ability and mental toughness,
Pete Sampras was clearly the player of the '90s.

The year was 1994, and Pete Sampras was having dinner at a restaurant in Palm Springs, Calif. A few weeks earlier he had won the Australian Open for his forth Grand Slam title, and counting Wimbledon and US Open victories the year before, his third consecutive major. He was No. 1 in the world, and his career was still on the rise.

As Sampras got up to leave the restaurant with his dining companions, a man walked up and extended his hand, introducing himself as an executive with a major movie studio. Sampras politely shook the man's hand and chatted, but when he got back to his car, he grinned widely and recreated the conversation for his dining partners.

"Did you get a load of that guy?" he said. "I'm from Paramount Pictures," he repeated, mocking the man's self-importance. "What's he going to do, make me famous?" He then laughed at the double-edged absurdity of the idea: Sampras, at age 23, was already famous, the top player in a worldwide sport and seemingly destined for more greatness. But Sampras was also laughing at the idea that "fame", more than "the game", would have any appeal for him.

Fame has never distracted Sampras in the way that it has some of his peers, including the main rival of his generation, Andre Agassi. But that disdain of fame has arguably deprived Sampras of accolades by a media determined to prefer flashier and angst-ridden personalities. Riding a roller coaster may be more fun than riding the commuter train, but in the end you haven't gone anywhere.

For the last decade, even through personal crisis and high expectations that have derailed other players, Sampras has kept winning. He has done so with a quiet confidence out of step with our age, when every tackle on a football field is celebrated with a dance and when every dunk on a basketball court is cause for fist-pumping --- no matter what the score.

He has been the most reliable engine in tennis, and, according to the past champions whom he most resembles in playing style and temperament --- players like Stan Smith, Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall and others --- that's what determines greatness. But how has Sampras been able to achieve such consistency? The answer lies not simply in his superior talent or his iron will, but a combination of the two that adds up to 12 Grand Slam titles and counting.

First, he has superior physical gifts that give him a head start over his adversaries. As Arthur Ashe once said of Sampras, he "is a natural talent who can do almost anything with the ball." Smith, winner of the 1971 US Open and 1972 Wimbledon singles titles, first saw indications of that ability when he was working with the junior Davis Cup team. Though Sampras at age 16 was by no means the best junior at the time, he demonstrated his athleticism during a drill Smith later named after Sampras.

With Smith at the net, he hit a ball to Sampras' backhand, then volleyed the return shot wide to the forehand side. As Sampras ran for the ball, Smith called out "cross," "line" or "lob" to tell him where to hit his forehand. "The better the players are," says Smith, "the longer you can wait before you call it out, and he was able to make that adjustment the best of any of the guys."

Sampras' success in that drill foreshadowed his mastery of the running forehand, a shot that relies on a physical skill Sampras doesn't get much credit for: speed. "He doesn't look like he's working as hard as others," Smith says, "and therefore he doesn't look like he's as fast, but he's very fast."

Of course, all the past greats interviewed commented on Sampras' serve, but not so much the pure velocity of it as the continual velocity of it. Fred Stolle, winner of the French Open in 1965 and the U.S. Championship in 1966, says of Sampras' power: "We had people who could hit the ball as hard as he could but not as consistently hard."

More important even than the pace of the serve is the ability to hit the big serve on the big points, and this is where commentary on Sampras' physical abilities intersects with his mental skills. "I think he's a genius the way he handles stuff at Wimbledon," Stolle says, using a word that is usually reserved for intellectual accomplishment. "He gets first serves in and finishes off the volley. He does that with great precision and to me it's fabulous to watch."

In an article in "The New Yorker" magazine last summer, writer Malcolm Gladwell examined the performance of people he termed "physical geniuses" and tried to determine what raised their performances above that of their equally talented peers. "If you think of physical genius as a pyramid," he wrote, "with, at the bottom, the raw components of coordination, and, above that, the practice that perfects those particular movements, the faculty of imagination is the top player."

What separates Michael Jordan, Yo-Yo Ma and neurosurgeon Charlie Wilson [and we can add Sampras to that list] from others, Gladwell writes, is the ability to create, to improvise, to invent ways to succeed in the face of adversity. Without this ability, Jordan would be no better than Karl Malone, Sampras no better than Richard Krajicek.

Again and again over the past decade, Sampras has shown himself capable of this kind of imaginative creativity: at the 1995 Australian Open, when he beat Jim Courier while crying for his ill coach, Tim Gullikson; at the 1996 US Open, when he beat Alex Corretja despite becoming sick on court; at the 1995 US Open, when he came out on top after a 22-stroke rally with Agassi.

"Some players have all the shots," Smith says, "and then they get into a match and they have no idea how to use those shots. A lot of guys can serve big, but they don't do it necessarily when the game's on the line. Most of the great players were able to raise their level when they really needed to. And [Sampras] seems to have that attribute of hitting the big serve when he really needs to hit it. And it's not just the big serve. You saw at Wimbledon [last] year, he hit some unbelievable ground strokes and volleys and returns of serve, and he's done that not only on grass but on other surfaces."

Six years ago, after winning the 1994 Australian Open, Sampras was counting not the endorsement dollars he would accumulate, and not the number of super-models his titles would entitle him to pursue, but the number of majors he needed to win to be the best. Only an injured back prevented him from closing the century with an exclamation point by winning the 1999 US Open to break the record Roy Emerson holds with 12 major titles.

That number itself is suspect and deserves an asterisk. Seven of Emerson's major titles came when his contemporaries --- namely Laver, who won 11 major singles titles --- were banished from Grand Slam play because they were competing as professionals. This is not to say that Emerson couldn't have sometimes beaten Laver, but it's fair to say that had the game been truly open, Laver would have surpassed Emerson in total majors.

"Sampras' record is really not much of an issue," Smith says. "Let's say he does break Emerson's record --- does that make Sampras' record better than Laver's? I don't think so. At the same time, it doesn't diminish the accomplishment, because he's playing against better players. So what Sampras has done is spectacular, and probably more difficult than what Emerson did. But that particular record is not a very good barometer of greatness."

Just as Mark McGwire banished all asterisks from the baseball record book with his 70+ home run season, Sampras could make all discussion of numbers obsolete as his career enters the 21st century. In his last 20 attempts, he has won eight majors. If Sampras plays five more years, he will have 20 more chances to win majors, and another eight of 20 to reach 20 career major titles would be difficult, but not out of the question. "I would think he'd play another three, four, five years," Laver says. "How old is he --- 28? I won the Grand Slam at 31."

When Sampras reached No.1 in 1993, Agassi said, in reference to his rival's hunched posture on court, that no one should be No.1 who "looks like he just swung down from a tree." Being ranked No.1 at year's end a record six times, Sampras has evolved into tennis' King Kong, swatting down Agassi to lead their career head-to-head matchups 16-10. The champions agree that about the only thing that can bring Sampras down from that perch is himself.

For Sampras to continue winning Grand Slam titles, Smith says, "depends on two things: his enthusiasm for the game and his fitness. If he can continue to really have a love for the game, which he seems to do, then the only thing that could affect him are his other activities. It may be a family; it may be other interests. He's relatively uncomplicated as a person, which is good and bad. It's good in that there's not quite the possibility of being distracted by other things."

Laver uses the same four-letter word to describe the key to Sampras' success: love. If he keeps his "love and respect for the game," Laver says, he'll keep winning. "It's got to be a joy to go out there and play."

That, writes Gladwell, is the key to success for a physical genius. He describes how Wayne Gretzky at age 2 would slide around on the floor in his socks, in imitation of the hockey players on TV he found so enthralling. "What he had, was what the physical genius must have before any of the other layers of expertise fall into place: He had stumbled onto the one thing that, on some profound aesthetic level, made him happy."

Sampras himself sounds a similar note about his motivation: "You have to do what makes you happy. But I will know when it is time to retire. If I feel like I can't contend at majors, if I feel like I am not having fun out here on the road, it is time to do something else."

Unfortunately for his opponents, but fortunately for 21st century tennis fans, Sampras added, "That day is a ways away."