April 6, 2000
South Bay Quickly Recognized Sampras' Tremendous Talent
By Karen Crouse
High on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the Greek god of tennis appeared as if dropped from the heavens. He scudded across the court like a cloud, carrying in his hands a thunderbolt disguised as a tennis racket.
It was on the courts of Las Canchas in Torrance that strangers first gathered to behold this wisp of a wonder. It was there two oracles took his father aside one day and augured his greatness.
Eleven years later, he would become the youngest U.S. Open men's singles champion. Twenty years later, he towers over tennis, the winner of 62 titles, including 12 Grand Slams.
This weekend, he will lead the U.S. against the Czech Republic in the second round of the Davis Cup at the Forum, not far from where he grew up.
And yet, long before the world had heard of Pete Sampras, his tennis raised plenty of eyebrows around Southern California and one inexorable question:
Would his body stretch enough to fit his genius?
Sampras was 8 when two lawyers saw him returning balls fed to him by his father, Soterios (Sam), on a court at Las Canchas. They recommended the family proceed as fast as its Ford Pinto would take it to the nearby Peninsula Racquet Club for professional instruction.
The two men had noticed immediately what was obvious even to Sam, an aerospace engineer unapologetically unconversant in tennis: His youngest son possessed uncanny coordination and quickness for someone so young.
In every other way Sampras was a normal kid. His older sister Stella and older brother Gus dragged their mother and father to the courts before dinner, and Pete, the third of the couple's four children, tagged along after them, retrieving balls and thrilling for any deflected attention.
By the time Sampras turned 10, he was routinely practicing with some of the game's top young players. The Samprases had joined the Jack Kramer Club in Rolling Hills Estates, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s was ground zero for the U.S. junior tennis explosion.
The club boasted more talented kids than television's ''Mickey Mouse Club'' would some 15 years later. There was Eliot Telscher, Derrick Rostagno, Lindsay Davenport, Trey Lewis and Jim Pugh, to name but a few.
Kids at the club called Sampras ''Smiley'' because he was the carefree exception in a cauldron of cutthroat competition. ''No one ever talked about him being a great tennis player someday,'' recalled Trey Lewis-Mason.
The reason Sampras didn't immediately register on a lot of the adults' radar was he wasn't much taller than the net. Too, he was as thin as the lines on the court. No matter how hard he tried, Sampras' well-developed skills couldn't camouflage his underdeveloped physique.
''You could just kind of tell the guy was special,'' said Eric Amend, an occasional hitting partner of Sampras' at the Jack Kramer Club. ''You just didn't know if he was going to grow.''
Amend was 16 and the national champion in his age group when he first hit with Sampras, who was 10 and so devoid of strength he gripped his racket with both hands on his forehand and backhand to generate more oomph.
In those days Stella, who is Pete's senior by two years, was his primary playing partner. They hit together often and when they kept score, it tended to be one-sided.
''I used to always win,'' said Stella, now the women's coach at UCLA. ''We played hard. Neither one of us wanted to lose.''
Back then, Stella was about the only one who could wipe the grin off Pete's face. Sometimes he would grow so frustrated after she won another point, he'd retrieve the ball and hit it back to her with such spite, it would sail over her head and ricochet off the back fence.
Such displays of emotion would disappear along with Sampras' two- handed forehand and backhand shortly after Pete Fischer entered his life. No one knew it at the time but ''Smiley'' was about to become ''Stony.''
FISCHER WAS a pediatrician and a pedestrian tennis player who was a familiar figure on the Jack Kramer courts. It was hard not to notice when Fischer was hitting, Amend said, because his form ''was atrocious.''
One day Fischer approached Sam Sampras at the club. He told him he saw tremendous potential in Pete and offered to work with him, free of charge. The father delivered his son to Fischer and receded into the background.
''Dad saw that Fischer had an unbelievable mind,'' Stella said. ''He just kind of let Fischer take Pete and mold him into the player he thought he could be.''
One day early in the partnership of the Petes, Fischer enlisted Lewis- Mason, then in her early 20s and between pro tournaments, to hit with Sampras so he could work on his groundstrokes. They hit together occasionally for the next year or two.
''I hit harder than Pete, but the thing I remember was his strokes were so solid,'' Lewis-Mason said. ''He could do anything with the ball - topspin, slice, volley. When he was 12, he beat me in one or two close sets. I knew it was the last time I'd be capable of being on the same court as him.''
John Letts started hitting with him shortly after that. Letts had just been crowned the boys' 18 national champion. He thought he was pretty hot stuff. Then he took the court with Sampras.
''I distinctly remember the first time I hit with Pete,'' Letts said. ''I'm thinking, 'I'll do this little kid a favor and hit balls with him,' and he comes out hitting good topspin shots on both sides and a great slice. He was really pounding the balls back and forth, and his serve wasn't that big, but it had a snap on it you normally don't see. I was amazed.''
At 17, following his junior year at Palos Verdes High, Sampras turned pro. In 1989, as a just-turned 18-year-old, he advanced to the second round of the U.S. Open.
In February of 1990 Sampras won his first pro title, in Philadelphia. Seven months later, he shocked the world.
At the 1990 U.S. Open, Sampras upset Ivan Lendl and John McEnroe and found himself playing Andre Agassi for the championship. Sam and Georgia Sampras didn't travel to New York for their son's first Grand Slam final. Instead, they drove to the Del Amo Mall not far from their Rancho Palos Verdes home and walked off their nervous energy.
At length they passed a bank of televisions tuned to a channel showing an awards ceremony. Georgia walked up to a man who was staring at one of the screens and said, ''Is the U.S. Open men's final over?'' ''Yeah,'' the man replied. ''The Sampras kid killed Agassi.''
The final score: Sampras, 6-4, 6-3, 6-2. Georgia and Sam let out a sound that was equal parts revelry and relief. It was safe for them to return home. Their son was on his way to immortality.