December, 10, 2010
Robbery reiterates Sampras' greatness
By Peter Bodo
Counseling criminals isn't my line of work, but I have some advice for the knuckleheads who stole the bulk of the memorabilia Pete Sampras collected during his 15-year, record-shattering career: Hump the stuff down to the local UPS store, box it up real nice (hint: use a fake return address), and send it back to Sampras.
The stuff isn't worth much to you, or probably anyone else (other than the Samprases and the International Tennis Hall of Fame), because every collector of sports memorabilia will know that unless it's one of the 13 Grand Slam trophy replicas that Sampras has at home, or on loan to his long-time sponsor, Nike, the trophies, plates, crystal vases and other ornaments are hot.
Besides, how big is the market for that dusty runner-up trophy to the Happy BurgerTennis Classic, circa 1992, anyway?
But I don't mean to make light of Sampras' loss. The thieves who made off with the collection of the odds and ends of greatness (a whole that far exceeds the sum of those parts) that Sampras had left in a West Los Angeles storage facility committed a heinous crime, robbing a man of the artifacts and totems that define his life.
Sampras said he feels "violated." His family has been unfairly deprived. But there's a life-imitates-art theme here, too, because we all know that from about the midpoint of his career, Sampras avowed that the only tournaments that mattered to him were the Grand Slam events. And though almost everything else is missing (theoretically, 64 winner and 24 runner-up trophies), all but one of the replica singles trophies awarded to the winner of each major every year is safe (the trophy Sampras earned at the Australian Open in 1994 is among the missing items).
This terrible incident reminds us that Sampras lived for the majors, and there's a ghastly kind of poetic verisimilitude in this crime. It underscores the extent to which Sampras breathed new life into the quest for Grand Slam titles, and it's worth remembering that now that Roger Federer has eclipsed Sampras.
At the time Sampras began collecting his major singles titles, even diehard tennis pundits found it hard to imagine that anyone could approach Roy Emerson's record (12). The overall men's field was much stronger; the new racket technologies leveled the playing field; the era when three of the four Grand Slam events were played on grass was long over. The physical demands on the players were greater, by multiples.
But Sampras plowed on, and he retired immediately after he won his 14th major at the U.S. Open in 2002. He thereby raised the bar to a height that few imagined possible under the evolving regimen, yet within seven years, Federer exploded Sampras' mark (Federer has 16 major singles titles, and counting). And Rafael Nadal is hot on Federer's heels.
By focusing on Grand Slam events, Sampras helped impose a new degree of order on the pro game and inspired the generation that succeeded him. And his vision and fidelity have given legions of fans, not all of them tennis nuts or purists, a handle on the game. They're conditioned to pay attention, at least four times a year. And tennis is much better off for it.
Pete retains possession of 13 of those 14 major singles title trophies. I hope he gets all the other stuff back, too, because in the end the little things are just as vital to what we might call "memory" as the big ones.