July 2000
The one & only Pete Sampras
By NIRMAL SHEKAR
AND then he cried. His ears shut to the roar of the crowd, bent down and his face hidden from the hundreds of flashbulbs that popped simultaneously, shining through the evening gloom and turning the court into a Michael Jackson stage, his mind benumbed by the monumental meaning of the moment, he broke into tears, weeping like a child.
Who was this? This couldn't be him. This couldn't be Mr.Cool, the poker-faced robot that unfailingly turned up on the second Sunday of the Wimbledon fortnight, scorched the green, green earth of one of the most famous pieces of sports real estates in the world, pummelled flesh-and-blood opponents into submission and walked away with the Challenge Cup.
And again he sobbed. Wiping the tears trickling down from his eyes with his shirtsleeves as the whole world watched him, Mr.Ice Man melted, swirling in a warm emotional whirlpool.
Who was this? This couldn't be Pete Sampras! This couldn't be the ice-in-his-veins master pro who kept his emotions -- if he felt any -- to himself as he blew opponent after opponent off the centre court at Wimbledon while winning title after title on the famous lawns.
Was it a Sampras look-alike, tongue lolling out, head stooped, who did a fair imitation of the champion with the iron mask but, then, at the moment of triumph couldn't keep up the act anymore, the greasepaint melting away to show the imposter for who he was?
What folly! How vulnerable we are when it comes to myths in the world of sport! How ready we are to swallow what is passed on as popular perception!
Indeed, it was the great Pete Sampras standing out there on a piece of turf that he could claim to be his own on that unforgettable Sunday evening at Wimbledon, shortly before 9 p.m., when he left every other great player, or legend if you like, who played the game before him some way behind.
It was not that the mask had slipped. For, there never was a mask in the first place. It was merely that a very private man was so overwhelmed by the enormity of a moment of history unparalleled in the sport of his choice that he could no longer guard the privacy of his emotional psyche.
Really, it was as simple as that. With Sampras, it has always been as simple as that. Of all the great sportsmen we might have seen in the high noon of modern professional sport, there is no more uncomplicated legend than Sampras. He is a simple genius -- if this is a contradiction in terms, then so be it. He is the boy-next-door who became one of the true giants of modern sport and never lost his boy-next-door simplicity and humility.
The problem is, of course, with us -- with the fans, with the media, with everybody who follows sport. In a world of Maradonas and Laras and Tysons, we have come to expect the greatest of sporting icons -- well, we seem to almost will them to -- to be complicated two-faced supermen.
Or, in the least, we expect them to give us a lot more than what their primary -- and perhaps only -- role would suggest they would. Yes, Sampras is a great tennis player. And yes, Sampras plays great tennis. The question is, is that all there is to him?
Spoilt by the likes of Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, many of us no longer seem to be able to yearn for the purists' joy derived from sporting excellence. Led down the garden path by greedy image makers in a multi-million dollar business, we have come to believe that great sportsmen, as entertainers, should have "personality" -- which, almost always, means they have to be brash and offensive.
Would Sampras be perceived as a greater champion than he is if he were to make finger gestures to the crowds a la Connors? Would he be a bigger megastar than he is if he were to blow kisses north, west, south and east on the courts after each victory a la Agassi?
Yes, of course, he would be. Perhaps he could have earned a few million more in endorsements and made a lot more headlines for the wrong reasons. But that is not what Sampras wanted. He never played for the millions, nor for the headlines.
He played to be the greatest player there ever was. And, in gathering darkness on the greatest stage in the game on that historic Sunday, he came to be widely acknowledged as the best player to ever pick up a racquet.
"Sampras is the greatest of all time and I give him a pat on his back for getting there, because the tournaments are a little deeper these days," said Roy Emerson, with whom Sampras had shared the Grand Slam record (12) for a year until this year's Wimbledon.
Little wonder that, for once, the great man could no longer contain his emotions. For him, it had been a very, very difficult two weeks at Wimbledon. A painful injury to his left shin reduced him to helplessness early in the first week but the great man courageously continued to do battle.
"If it was not Wimbledon, if it was another event, I don't think I would have played," Sampras admitted after beating Pat Rafter in four sets in the final on that rain-hit Sunday to break his tie with Roy Emerson and pick up his 13th Grand Slam title, and his seventh at Wimbledon.
A man with a great sense of occasion, of history, Sampras would not have wanted the world record to come anywhere other than on a court where he has won 53 of 54 matches in the last eight years.
"This court is very special. This is my home away from home. And this is a great moment in my life," said Sampras. "It hasn't hit me. It won't hit me for months. I am just kind of still spinning a little bit."
On the other hand, maybe it has not hit us, too, for what it really it. Maybe it won't for months, even years to come. Don Bradman's contemporaries, for all the praise they heaped on him, seldom realised the historic significance of his achievements. But we know now, for sure, that no batsman of our time, or any time, will ever be quite as prolific a run getter in Tests.
In the event, long after Sampras' career is done, long after this generation of tennis players has passed into history, we will perhaps tell our grandchildren stories of the greatest's unmatched excellence on court, and not the least of the day the Greek-American's emotional roller-coaster ride in the 2000 Wimbledon championships climaxed in semi-darkness to mark the beginning of a new chapter in the sport's history, its record books.
"Pete, in my eyes, goes down as the greatest player ever," acknowledged Rafter, after coming rather close to ending Sampras' domination of the Wimbledon turf.
Playing the best grass court tennis of his career -- and for the first time in many months free of any injury worries -- the handsome Australian received a huge boost to his morale on beating Andre Agassi in a thrilling five-set semifinal.
And he seemed to be picking to playing just such an impressive brand of serve-volley tennis in the final too as he staved off breakpoint after breakpoint in a rare show of defiance and raw courage in the first and second sets.
Having taken the first on a tiebreaker where Sampras double faulted twice in a row in the end, Rafter was three points away, two of them on serve, from opening up a two-sets-to-love lead as he was ahead 4-1 in the second set tiebreak.
"When he was serving at 4-1 I really felt it was slipping away," said Sampras. "He lost his nerve there. We were both feeling it. I lost my nerve in the first set," he said.
The difference between the greatest of champions and the ones that are just great players -- which, of course, in this context simply means the difference between Sampras and Rafter -- is that the latter breed more often than not will lose their nerve at the crunch.
And, as he has done many, many times in the past, Sampras found a way out as only he can, first breaking down Rafter's resolve, and then his serve.
But people who know Sampras, what he can do in a Wimbledon final, knew the moment he had won the second set that the match was over. And indeed it was, in rather quick time, once Sampras broke Rafter's serve in the fifth game of the third set.
"With a great champion like Pete, you have to take your chances. I got mine and did not take them," said Rafter.
In the second set, Sampras got his, to become the most successful champion in history. And he took it and never looked back.
What's left for you to accomplish in tennis now? he was asked at the post-match press conference.
"From an achievement standpoint I have done what I wanted to do. But I still love competing and I love playing," said Sampras.
Should this love affair continue through a few more seasons, who knows how many major titles the great man will end up with!
And, for that matter, who knows too, how many this year's woman's champion will collect in the years to come!
Having soaked up the enormity of her achievement in the company of her father and sister, and a few close friends, Venus Williams sat there smugly self-assured on that Saturday, a young woman who knew the world was at her feet and was quite in control of herself and her emotions in the finest moment of her life.
"Can you appreciate how hard it would have been for Althea Gibson," asked a questioner at the post-match press conference, referring to the first black woman to win the Wimbledon title 43 years ago.
"Yeah, it had to be hard because people were unable to see past colour," said Venus Williams, champion of the millennium Wimbledon championship. "It's hardly any different these days. How can you change centuries of being biased in 40 years. Realistically, not too much has changed," she said.
Across the Atlantic, in a dilapidated apartment block in New Jersey, a frail Gibson, a winner on court but bruised an beaten through a life of hardship and living alone now on the fringes of poverty, would have worked up a sardonic smile had she heard what her African-American successor had to say.
For, Gibson, who picked up small change for winning the title in 1957 and 1958 in the form of a shopping vouchers that would have helped her buy a few cheap souvenirs to take back home, would have hardly felt liberated enough -- in an era when oppression of blacks was still a fact of life in the United States -- to have climbed the stands and celebrate with her family as did Venus after her victory over Lindsay Davenport.
As a sermon in race relations, Venus Williams' observation might have some truth. For, real equality between the races is still a dream rather than reality in American social life. But, a lot has changed indeed since Gibson won a pair of Wimbledon titles in the late 1950s.
For one thing, Gibson was a pure one-off. And the Williams sisters may well be the avant garde of a generation of young black women who could dominate this sport in the new millennium. For another, Venus and her younger sister Serena, the 1999 US Open champion, already have over $40 million in the bank -- most of the money earned in sponsorship, something that Gibson, an amateur could not even dare dream of.
A lot has been said about the Williams's ghetto-to-riches story. As a cliche, this seems just fine. But it is not quite true. Yes, Richard Williams and his family did live in Compton, the wrong side of the town in Los Angeles, a neighbourhood dominated by drug dealers and criminals and where a street shoot-out was not uncommon.
Yet, it was by choice rather than necessity that Richard Williams, a factory manager, chose to move to Compton from a decent Los Angeles suburb because he could make big money on property deals there.
The family was never poor. The girls went to good schools and were brought up in proper middle class comfort. It is because, in popular imagination, the colour of a person's skin and the ambience of a ghetto are closely associated that the tabloid press everywhere has played up the rags-to-riches angle of the Williams story.
It is as ludicrous to think of Venus Williams as a Ghetto Queen as it is to imagine that her success at Wimbledon last fortnight would trigger a sort of revolution in the United States when it comes to race relations.
Yes, Venus and her sister Serena are role models to thousands of black kids. But beyond a limited spectrum, their success will hardly have any influence.
The late Arthur Ashe -- whose once suffered the ignominy of not being able to wave down a cab in the Bronx in New York a little past 10 p.m. because of the colour of his skin -- always maintained that the real measure of Black Power in the United States would have to be in the real corridors of power -- in terms of the presence of blacks in politics, in the courts of law, in big business etc.
In this sense, the significance of the rise of the Williams sisters has been overplayed but there is no taking away from the monumental level of their accomplishments in the context of black women in sport in the United States.
"We are black. We fought for everything we have," said Venus after the historic triumph. Indeed they have. But she is perhaps too young to understand that there were days when her people would fight as hard as the Williams family has and still not have anything, and still end up like Althea Gibson.
Surely, everything is still not perfect for black athletes in the United States but things have changed remarkably over the last 40 years. And Venus and Serena are as much a product of the change as they might very well be its catalyst in terms of the future.
And it is Venus' triumph at Wimbledon that catches popular imagination much more than Serena's at the US Open last September. For, this is the championship that Richard Williams always dreamed one of his daughters would win some day.
"The point is, I never stopped believing. Even when I was playing badly, I knew that one day I would win here,"said Venus who, at age 20, has many more years left in the game.
Her athleticism and shotmaking skills are exceptional and with the hunger for success that has fuelled her rise to the top, Venus should be at or near the top of the sport for a long time to come.
Of course, to be fair to her final opponent, Linsday Davenport was a slightly hobbled champion on that Saturday. Her thigh strain was obviously bothering her. Never the best of movers, she was even more restricted in her movements.
This, of course, should take nothing away from the quality of Venus's tennis. She made a few unforced errors but to her credit she attacked relentlessly, speeding like an antelope and reaching balls with octopus arms.
What is more, she celebrated her singles victory well into the night on Sunday -- into the wee hours of Monday morning -- and was back on court with her sister Serena to complete a double, winning the women's doubles title beating Julie Halard Decujis and Ai Sugiyama.
In the end, headline writers would call it the Williams Wimbledon. Sounds good. But, as impressive as the Williams show was, this Wimbledon belonged to The Greatest.