October, 1990 (date not confirmed)
Focused
By Bruce Newman
"Now that he has served up a U.S. Open title at 19,
Pete Sampras insists he won't 'flake off and get a bad attitude'"
Pete Sampras is trying not to change: change clothes, change his game, change lanes, change the music, change his smile, change rooms, change the cute way he scratches his head when he answers questions. Whoa!
"I think what's so cute about him is he's just another kid," says Ivan Lendl. " I don't think he's fully realized what's happened to him."
To Pete: A cute and sweet guy. Don't ever change.
Change cars, change religions, change your hair, change any bill larger than a 20, change phone numbers, change the water into wine, change partners and dance. "Dear Pete," writes Marie Shay, an admirer from Haverford, Pa. "Please continue the same dress code and don't let the designers change you. We need a clean-cut young person like you to set an example for the kids." Marie adds, for good measure that Andre Agassi "looks as if he came out of a ragbag and a dark closet."
Hey, Peeeeeete! Stay just the way you are and don't ever change. Pete.
Sampras Has been trying not to change. "I'm a nice kid with a good attitude," he says, as if trying to remind himself, "and I'm not going to change."
There, you see, Ever since Sampras ragbagged Agassi in straight sets in the finals of the U.S. Open last month, people who had never even heard of him before his victory here have been telling him, begging him, not to change. At 19 he is the youngest men's winner in the history of the U.S. championships, just over five months younger than Oliver Campbell was when he won the title in 1890. "I think of Pete not as a man of 19," says his father, Soterios, know to nearly everyone as Sam. "I think of him as my little boy."
Maybe that's it. Maybe that's who Pete Sampras is after all. America's little boy. "I'm just a normal 19-year-old growing up with a very unusual job," he says.
Peeeeeete! Don't forget to take out the garbage and put away the Grand Slam. Pete?
"If I flake off and get a bad attitude, I'll be disappointed," says Sampras. "I want to be the same person that I was two months ago."
One reason Sampras is running so hard to stay in place is that he has done almost nothing but change for the past five years. He has gone from short (5'5") to tall (6 feet), become a high school dropout, changed rackets (wood to graphite), changed his ranking (off the computer to fifth in the world), changed his backhand, changed coaches and, like most kids, changed his mind. One of his minds, anyway.
After Sampras became the first American male to prevail at Flushing Meadow since 1984, when John McEnroe won the last of his four titles there, and had sent his 13th ace (and 100th for the tournament) whizzing past Agassi's earring on championship point, the first person he thanked on national television was Dr. Peter Fischer, a California pediatrician. "I don't know if I would be here right now if it wasn't for him," Sampras said, leaving a breathless nation to wonder whether Fischer had cured him of some particularly lethal strain of the mumps. Would future teen champs thank their orthodontists?
Fischer, however, had done something far more medically complex than merely treating Sampras; he treated him like a sacred, if somewhat empty, vessel. "He's a very weird guy, but brilliant," says Sampras. "Maybe too brilliant. He wanted to put his brain in my body." Fischer came remarkably close to completing this transplant, until Sampras began about a year ago to develop a mind of his own, at which point it began to get crowded in there.
If you had to have someone trying to stick his brain into you body, chances are you would want that person to be Fischer, who has so many brain cells to spare that they appear to have formed a lava dome at the top of his head. Fischer has an IQ of 190 perched atop a body that never quite knew how to take instructions. Only by dint of sheer determination did Fischer forge himself into a B-level tennis player with a game that, by his own description, "aspires to be mediocre."
When Sampras and his father first encountered Fischer, in 1979 at the Jack Kramer Tennis Club near their home in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Fischer lacked the game, the golden tan and even the fleecy white hair that are standard issue for modern-day tennis coaches. Fischer was hitting with a ranked junior player the day that Sam approached him about coaching his son, who was seven at the time. "I guess I must have looked good," says Fischer, "or Pete's dad knew very little about tennis."
"So how much do you charge?" Sam inquired.
Fischer, whose previous coaching experience, as someone would later point out, consisted almost entirely of teaching newborns how to take their first few breaths, thought for a moment and replied, "Nothing."
"You're hired," said Sam.
The elder Sampras still refers to tennis as "a sport for the upper class," and rarely does he miss an opportunity to distance himself from the ranks of the dread Tennis Parent. The son of Greek and Eastern European immigrants, Soterios grew up in Chicago before moving to 1965 to Washington, D.C., where he met the woman he would soon marry. Georgia Vroustrous had left Greece when she was 19, with no more of an idea of how to speak English than how to put it on a tennis ball. She was working in a beauty parlor when she and Sam were married.
Sam worked for seven years as an aerospace engineer for the government during the day and at night ran a delicatessen in which he was a part-owner, in McLean, Va. He and his wife saved enough money to move their four children. Gus, now 22, Stella, 21, Pete and Marion, 17, from the chilly East to the more Mediterranean climes of Southern California. They set out across the continent with everything they owned lashed to the top of the family car. Six people and a parrot named Jose crammed into a Ford Pinto for seven days. "We looked like the Griswalds in Vacation," says Gus.
Not long before the family moved to California, Pete had discovered an old wooden tennis racket in the basement and spent hours down there whacking balls against the wall. When Pete was six, he and Stella went with their father to a court at a public park in Torrance, down the hill from their new home in Rancho Palos Verdes, and Sam watched in amazement as his son ran down the balls and gracefully stroked them back with fluid, two-handed strokes. "I had never seen anybody get on a court for the first time and hit the ball so smoothly," Sam says. "Like it was the easiest thing in the world."
Pete and Stella became fixtures on the courts. Sam and Georgia took turns hitting basket after basket of balls to their kids, despite the fact that neither parent played, to save the expense of lessons. A membership in a private tennis club was out of the question at that time, but not for financial reasons. "I was going to let them grow up like normal kids and forget about tennis," Sam says.
However, two strangers who happened to see Pete Hitting in the park one day convinced Sam that his son was a prodigy. The two men persuaded Sam that the boy needed the sort of guidance he could get only at a club, never dreaming that when they said Pete should work with a teaching professional, Sam would begin mulling over the names of some of his tennis-playing acquaintances, a CPA with a strong overhead, a gynecologist with a fair forehand. So he turned Pete over to what was certainly the country's top pediatrician specializing in serve-and-volley. "I had never been a real coach for anybody before Pete," Fischer says. "But as time went on, I learned to coach and he learned to play."
Most of the time it is all Sampras can do to keep from laughing during his matches; he is still amused and amazed by the things he can do. The disarming grin that followed both the winners and the blunders at the U.S. Open has always been there. "Since he was a little boy we always called him Smiley," says Robert Lansdorp, the teaching pro who helped tutor Sampras on his ground strokes. "People always wanted to watch him because he always had that smile on his face."
He has existed in on almost perfect state of grace, doing exactly what he wanted to do with his life from such an early age that he has no memories of life before tennis. "He was seven and swinging as hard as he could," recalls Fischer, "and he was hitting lines and smiling. Pete always loved the things he could do with the ball."
To make sure there was nothing he couldn't do with it, Fischer the pediatrician referred Pete to a series of specialists in other fields, a footwork coach, a volley coach and Lansdorp, who had tutored Tracy Austin before she became, at 16, the youngest player to win the U.S. Open. Lansdorp frequently dismissed Fischer as a "well-intentioned amateur,: but by the time Sampras was nine, Fischer was firmly entrenched as the architect of the boy's game, and he had already conceived a grand design. "The concept of what makes a tennis player is mine," says Fischer. "That's a hundred percent me. What I was really offering was a thought process, not my ability to hit tennis balls. It was a challenge. This was an opportunity to see if I could do something that hadn't been done since Harry Hopman's days. The idea of taking somebody from ground zero, organizing a whole career, and possibly even changing the way the game is played." Oh, is that all?
The idea was fairly simple: If at all possible, Sampras should be Rod Laver. "I want to be him," Pete said once, almost plaintively. Fischer borrowed old 16-millimeter films of Laver's matches, and together he and his little lab project would sit in a darkened room at Pete's house and peer into the flickering reflection of a lost time, an image when tennis players wore white and their rackets came from trees.
"My ideal was always Laver because he could win on all surfaces," says Fischer. "He could win any way he wanted, and do it with class." If Fischer could not inhabit Sampras' body, he came close to taking control of his mind. "We were a left-brain, right-brain couple," says Fischer.
"Pete is very instinctual and I'm analytical. The two of us meshed perfectly."
Fischer began taking many of his meals at the Samprases' house, imparting tactics between bites. "He seemed like part of the family," Pete says. "Here I was, this little kid, and he was trying to make me into a great tennis player. I was just playing along, doing what he was telling me to do."
Sampras played in one of his first junior tournaments when he was nine and lost, oh and oh, in the first round, primarily because he was playing in the 12-and-under division. From the start, in fact, Fischer had him playing in age groups higher than his actual one, which meant Sampras lost a lot to bigger, stronger players. "He was always short, just a little skinny kid," says Stella.
In addition, Fischer had him serving and volleying despite the fact that most of the top pros at the time were baseliners, save for McEnroe. Moreover, Sampras was still too short to have much more than a popgun serve. "If you're a little kid playing serve-and- volley," Fischer says, "you're going to get passed a lot. And Pete got passed a lot."
When Sampras was 14, Fischer told him he should abandon his two- handed backhand, his most reliable shot, because in the history of tennis there had never been a great player with a two-fisted backhand. The first time Sampras tried the new shot, the ball sailed over the fence. "Pete cried," says Sam.
"He was without a doubt the best player of his age in the world at the time he switched," Fischer says, "and he ended up losing to people he had already beaten. But he went along with it. The goal had always been to become a great pro, not to win trophies as a kid. I probably have most of Pete's trophies, and there are relatively few. He was willing to lose a few matches to learn how to play the game."
"To lose a consistent shot and have everyone picking on my backhand was very frustrating," says Sampras, "but eventually everything started coming together." At the age of 15, he made the 1987 Boys' Junior Davis Cup team and beat Michael Chang, the 18-and-under national champion, in the second round of the U.S. Open Junior Boys' championships. Chang had already been awarded a wild-card entry into the main draw of the U.S. Open, where he lost in the second round, but he still became the youngest male ever to win a match in the tournament.
By then Sampras had leveled off at his current cruising altitude of six feet, and the popgun had turned into a cannon. His deliveries were hard and well-placed, and opponents found them almost impossible to read. This, too, was designed by Fischer. "You can't read Pete's serve because his motion is the same for all his serves until he hits the ball," Fischer says. "I'd have him throw the ball up, and then I'd call the serve, flat, topspin. He couldn't have a different motion because he didn't know what he was going to serve until I called it."
It was inevitable that Sampras would one day tire of Fischer's standing over him and pulling strings as if he were a marionette. They began to disagree about whether Sampras was working hard enough. Then the money became an issue. Fischer, finally, wanted to be paid. "I don't care about the money except in terms of pride," he says. "What am I worth to him? When Pete was only winning trophies, giving me trophies was adequate compensation. He gave me everything he could. When Pete's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, it's a little bit different."
Last November, Fischer told Sampras he didn't think he wanted to be his coach anymore, not for free anyway. Then he told Sampras to think it over and call him in a year. Sampras called the next day. "Make your decision," he told Fischer. "It's now or never." Fischer said he would not be intimidated and hung up.
They did not speak for three months, until Sampras had won his first professional tournament, the U.S. Pro Indoors, in Philadelphia, where in the final he defeated Andres Gomez (who would later win the French Open). After the match, with the tournament director sitting at his side, Sampras said, "No one remembers who won Philadelphia, who won Memphis, any of those tournaments. The way you make a name is the Grand Slams." That night he called Fischer and told him he could not have won without him. "When he's playing like Pete Sampras, it doesn't matter who the opponent is," Fischer says. "It's like he's playing a girl."
Sampras hired a new coach, Joe Brandi, but he continued having trouble maintaining his concentration during matches, a longtime weakness. Once in the middle of one of Pete's junior matches, Fischer asked Gus if he knew the score of a match on a nearby court. Gus, who was watching his brother play, had no idea. "Why don't you ask Pete?" Gus replied. "I'm sure he knows."
When Pete heard in June that Fred Perry had said Sampras would win Wimbledon soon, the teenager said. "Fred, you're out of control." Then he went out and proved it by losing in the first round to the No. 41-ranked player in the world, Christo van Rensburg. But at Flushing Meadow he advanced quietly through the draw until he stunned Lendle in a dramatic five-set match in the quarters. Sampras won the first two sets with surprising ease but then suffered a letdown for two sets before overwhelming Lendl in the fifth. After two days off, Sampras was petrified about a semifinal meeting with McEnroe, who by that time had become the tournament's favorite. But this time his concentration remained steadfast and his serve never faltered. McEnroe was a loser in four sets.
Compared with those two old lions, Agassi was a pink pussycat. He had lost only two sets in the tournament, yet Sampras routed him 6- 4, 6-3, 6-2. Once again, Sampras didn't hesitate to acknowledge Fischer's contributions, when he took the microphone in the post match interview. "That was his reward," Sampras says.
Sampras and Fischer are on friendly terms, and neither man will rule out a professional reconciliation. But negotiations have stalled, and Fischer is no longer consulted on tennis matters.
At dinner that evening in New York, Sampras could scarcely stop thinking about how his life would change. "And I didn't sleep at all that night, just lying in my bed and trying to think about what happened and what the future was going to be like," says Sampras. "I couldn't believe it. I was now part of an elite group. My name was going to be on that trophy with guys like Lendl and Becker and McEnroe and Connors and", he stops to take a breath, "and Laver. I couldn't believe that Pete Sampras, a 19-year-old kid from California, was going to be on that trophy. Forever."
Some things don't ever change. Even some people.