June 18, 2000
Are you being served?
By Scott Athorne
Portrait: Chris Floyd
If he wins Wimbledon this year, Pete Sampras will break yet another record.
But what the deuce is the terminator of tennis really like off court?
High up in Beverly Hills, a tennis ball is being given a right old hiding. You can hear the blows reverberate through the trees and down a steep, winding drive. U2's Rattle and Hum rocks loudly from the house above, but the quaking heartbeat of the ball thunders louder. The tennis court has been expertly cut into the side of the hill. There, a player with hunched shoulders and a lazy, lolling tongue walks slowly between points. While serving, his head thrusts forward, mouth slightly ajar, in a half-smile of catlike concentration. His skin is deep olive, his locks frizzy black. Crack! The body becomes a cannon and the small yellow ball a blur.
This is Pete Sampras' oasis, the home the 28-year-old tennis star retreats to when he's not chasing yet more titles. It is also his favourite practice spot, and today, Cecil Mamiit, a pro ranked 93rd in the world, is being used as a battering ram. It's hardly surprising that Mamiit is one of only a local lads up to this task, for the two of them are hitting the ball awfully hard.
After practice, the sweating host serves drinks from an industrial-size fridge and disappears to the shower. The house is neutrally styled in a homely, bachelor-pad way. In the living room, six gold trophies are displayed: "Wimbledon Champion 1993, 94, 95..." The room looks out onto a lush green lawn and baby-blue pool.
When Sampras returns, he looks just as you would remember him: there's the trademark baggy, knee-length shorts and plain white T-shirt; the bee-stung lips and hirsute body. But his personality is nothing like his subdued tennis alter ego. He bristles with confidence and cynical wit and is neither shy nor coy, more like a cheeky boy racer out to conquer the world. His bushy eyebrows rise with his big, roguish grins; his probing eyes rarely look away --- he is always gauging reactions.
"You just don't get my sarcasm, do you?" he says, after agreeing that my question --- what's it like being a tennis star? --- is cheesy. Actually, it turns out to be revealing.
"It's nice to be able to call any restaurant and get in, to play the best golf courses in the world and fly in a private plane," he says. "But do I want to have dinner and have someone ask me for a picture? No, not really. You have your moments when you might be getting out of your car and people go straight to you like flies. Sometimes you just want to get away from it. Yet again, these people are my fans."
Friends, like his coach, Paul Annacone, call him an emotional introvert. He says that what people think they know about Sampras is usually false, the result of his on-court personality --- or lack of it. You could watch every pro match the guy has ever played and still not know a thing about him. On the court, he becomes a pure conduit for his tennis, his personality all but erased.
Of an estimated 100m players and 1,000 professionals the world over, Sampras has found a plateau all his own. Conventional wisdom was that it would be impossible for any one player to dominate the modern game in the way Roy Emerson and Rod Laver did in the 1950s and 60s. But at 19, Sampras became the US Open's youngest men's champion, and by the end of 1998 he had held the world's No. 1 spot for a record six consecutive years. Perhaps his greatest achievement is to come: if he wins Wimbledon for a seventh time this year, he will beat Emerson's record of 12 Grand Slam singles titles.
By any standards, these are great accomplishments, but tennis also relies on spectacle --- the caustic histrionics of John McEnroe, the strutting arrogance of Jimmy Connors, the jackass antics of Ilie Nastase --- and for a time, Sampras had no place in this world. In 1994, when he won Wimbledon for the second time, by trouncing Goran Ivanisevic in straight sets --- 6-0 in the third --- the tabloids went to town. "Personality Pete puts Wimbledon to sleep" was one headline in The Sun, which added that "he serves up yawn tennis that is the perfect cure for insomnia". The cruel lines hurt him, but the sledgings have since stopped. "At the beginning l don't think the media really understood me. I just played and didn't say or do too much to make headlines. Apparently that came across as boring." Are you? "No! But on the court... it's the way I handle situations. I internalise a lot."
Think of Pete Sampras as though there are two of him: one for public viewing and another for secure private occasions. Today's version is probably a bit of both. For all his laid-back conviviality, he has the look of somebody who has been hurt before. When I spoke to his coach, the anodyne Paul Annacone, in a downtown New York caff, he said that Sampras hates it when people make a big deal of him, that he's anti-celebrity. "If I had Pete's success, I think I'd be a little more unbearable to be around. He's a very private, introverted person, but if you're in a personal group with him --- at a ball game or out to dinner --- he likes to kid around and has a great sense of humour. Pete is one of very few guys who have a combination of great talent, a great heart and a great head."
In the beginning, when his family lived in Potomac, Maryland, and later in Washington, DC, Pete was just another kid, with an annoying habit of whanging a tennis ball endlessly against the basement wall. Then the family moved southern California and his father, an engineer for Nasa, started taking him to the Jack Kramer Tennis Club on the outskirts of Los Angeles. There he asked a middle-aged pediatrician named Pete Fischer to hit with his son. Later, he asked him how much he would charge to do it regularly. "Nothing," said Fischer. And so began an unlikely partnership.
From the outset, Fischer made Rod Laver the competition: the quiet, self-effacing Australian who became the only player in the history of the game to win the Grand Slam --- all four main tournaments in the same year --- twice. Fischer would show Sampras tapes, and talk about how he was going to win Wimbledon and outshine Laver. "He said a lot of things, but they went in one ear and out the other," says Sampras. "I didn't take any of it seriously."
What Fischer did do for the underdeveloped lad was teach him the serve-and-volley game. Up to the age of 14, Sampras's best shot had been his trusty two-handed backhand, and he rarely made it into the net. The new strategy changed his psyche, he explains, as it dawned on him that being a "puncher" (an attacking, serve-and-volley player) could be far more enjoyable than being a "counter-puncher" ( a defensive, baseline player).
But performing for his hard taskmaster wasn't all jolly times. "He was very difficultlt to please," Sampras explains, furrowing his brow even more than usual. "He was never happy with the way l played. I mean, if I waIked off the court in a junior match after winning, Pete would still say, 'Uh, at 15-30, you made a stupid shot.' He's very blunt and not always very sympathetic." In 1990 the two split under acrimonious circumstances. "When I turned pro, he wanted a contract, and it got a little touchy. Later, some things were written about him and his case," says Sampras, making reference to Fischer's six-year prison sentence in 1997 for molesting one of his patients. "I was absolutely shocked, very surprised. I had no suspicion of it. I always felt very safe around Pete and I stand by him. Obviously it's a sad situation and it's not easy taking about it publicly. I mean, for the rest of his life he'll be labelled."
As the child prodigy grew up to become a big cat, he employed the services of more benign coaches. Joe Brandi, who coached him when he came out of nowhere to win the US Open in 1990, was a quiet caretaker; and Tim Gullikson, who coached him between 1992 and 1996, before succumbing to a brain tumour, wholeheartedly supported his serve-and-volley game. In 1994, Gullikson said: "Sampras could be the most classic role model ever of how to be a champion."
With his present coach, Annacone, Sampras appears to have a close relationship. "He knows me well enough to know what I want to hear and what l don't want to hear," says Sampras. "He knows the players, and what I need to do to win tennis matches. We have a great relationship, and the communication is key. He's so relaxed, that's the way my make-up works, and it has worked out well."
Tennis has always been an automatic process for Sampras. Many players compromise their game by being too inventive, but he plays like he swallowed the tennis textbook whole, "I think my game plan through, then I just step up to the line and know where I'm going to hit the ball, and from then on it's just boom, boom."
His approach to the game is the opposite of his arch-rival Andre Agassi's. Agassi likes to dissect every point with his coach, Brad Gilbert, and has skills that are oddball, eccentric and not even inherently athletic. Sampras, on the other hand, seems to play by sheer instinct alone. He is loose, flowing, silent. Their rivalry began in the junior ranks when, at the of 10, Agassi thrashed Sampras, 9, by using an impressive array of trick shots. Today, their professionall head-to-head stands at 17-12 in Sampras's favour, yet no one has beaten him as many times as Agassi. So, are they friends? The competitive demands of the sport can make friendships hazardous, Sampras explains. "It's not like other sports, like golf, where you're playing against the course. With Andre, I'm looking straight into his eyes, and we're playing for major, major titles. But I think we handle it very well, we get along great."
The biggest difference between the two may be that Sampras operates in the knowledge that he hasn't yet laid eyes on a player who can take him down when he's playing well. But because he usually underplays his abilities in post-match interviews, some have accused him of false modesty. "Well, I'm confident, I believe I'm the best," he says, eyes unflinching and without a hint of irony. You sense an unwavering self-belief when you first meet him, and you know it when he speaks. It is not a conceited confidence, but an unfaltering, almost noble belief in his own abilities --- and many others share it.
Andre Agassi: "The one thing Pete has over me, that I wish l had, is a simple approach and raw belief that he is just better than everybodyd else."
Boris Becker: "He [Sampras] is the best player ever."
This may have been Fischer's greatest gift to the budding junior --- the feeling that he could, and should, control his destiny whenever he stepped onto the court. "I always feel like my opponent must be feeling as much pressure as I'm feeling," says Sampras. "It's whoever handles it better, and that's what gives me the confidence to know that I'll find some way to win."
The Australian tennis ace John Newcombe says a player is only as good as his second serve, and Sampras has the finest second serve in the history of the game. Apparently, this is also how you win Wimbledon. "People think that because you serve it hard --- at 125mph --- then that's how you win Wimbledon," says Sampras. "No, you win Wimbledon with your return of serve and your second serve --- it's overlooked." If there is any criticism about his game, it is that he can look half-paced or unmotivated at times, particularly in the early rounds of a tournament. "Obviously there are times when I play with urgency. It's important points, certain areas of the match, when you just raise it a level."
It wasn't always like this. It took a bad loss in the 1992 US Open final for him to realise he had "an unbelievable fear of losing... As a junior, I cared more about playing well than winning --- getting into the finals seemed good enough. Anyway I lost the Edberg match, kind of gave in a little, and I was going to be okay with that. But later it bothered me. At the end of the day you've got your coach telling you things, your manager, your family, but ultimately it's up to you. If you really want to dig deep on that court, no one can tell you anything".
It stand to reason that when Pete Sampras hurts, so do is parents, and it is partly because of this that they avoid watching his matches. During his first full year on the pro circuit, when his father, Sam, chaperoned him around Germany, Sweden and France, he lost all six first-round matches. A couple of years later, his parents attended the 1992 US Open final against Stefan Edberg, and the loss put them off for good. "I would definitely like them to attend more tournaments, especially Wimbledon," he says. "Each year I've got into the final, they've declined to come over. So if I get to the finals this time, I'll tell them they're coming. Wimbledon is such a big part of my career, and I want them to share that with me. Hopefully, it'll be a good story."
His mother, Georgia was born and raised in Sparta, Greece, his father is Jewish, and he has two brother and a sister. In the early days, it wasn't always easy for the family to accommodate his demanding schedule. It was an emotional and financial sacrifice for everyone. His father would spend a lot of time driving him to tournaments, which created a fair amount of animosity and jealousy between the siblings. He goes to great lengths of stress how supportive and understanding they were.
When girlfriends are mentioned, his face lights up like a beacon and the tennis autopilot runs out of puff. As a teenager, with his life divided between tennis and school, he had no time for socialising and even less for girls. He rarely drinks alcohol or goes to nightclubs. He has a well-cultivated eye for glamorous women, though. His previous girlfriend was the Father of the Bride star Kimberly Williams, but the romance fizzled out in 1998 when he was being consumed by his desire to become the first player ever to finish the year as world No. 1 six times in succession.
At the time, he confessed to becoming so unsociable that nobody wanted to know him, except those who were paid to do so. However, he has more than made up for it with his current flame. Just mentioning her name reduces him to tongue-tied, bashful laughter. She is Bridgette Wilson, 26, the actress from Mortal Kombat, and he has been seeing her for eight months.
How does he know whether someone is with him for him or for what he has become? "I'm a pretty good judge of character, of whoever l let into my life," he asserts, running his hands through his hair. "No matter how much money I have, or the trophies that I've won, all of this, I can see through people, why they're next to me. You can't go around living life being cynical and putting shields all the time. You've just got to believe in your instincts and trust people. The people I've let into my life, I'm very close to. I don't have a lot of acquaintances."
Even so, he remains firmly planted on the multimillionaire treadmill, and such questions will continue to plague him, as will the sneaking question of age. He's still only 28, but the stresses of competing week in, week out, can take their toll. Annacone, who spends 26 weeks a year touring with him, believes he still has at Ieast another five years of top-level tennis to play. "A lot will depend on the schedule. Pete's going to cut back a touch this year and try to set things up so he's playing his best tennis at the slams."
It's hard to imagine Pete Sampras not playing tennis. His Ianguid frame seems to have been running around our television screen for ever. "Whatever I choose to do after tennis, I still want to wake up in the morning and feel like I'm going to achieve something, to be fulfilled in some way. But who knows what that's going to be? I'm sure I'll be involved in the game in some way, I also want to settle down and have a family, have that chapter of my life as well."
Being a keen tennis player myself, I drop the question I've been dying to ask: "Had I brought my racket [which I had seriously considered], would you have given me a hit?" "How great are you?" he says sarcastically, and then, as he smiles: "Or is that being too falsely modest?"
Just five hours after our meeting, I spot him on television, watching his beloved basketball team, the Los Angeles Lakers, play the Detroit Pistons. He is with Bridgette Wilson, and he looks genuinely chuffed to be there, sitting in the best seats in the house.