December 14, 2008
Men's Tennis "Rewind" 1995: Sampras-Courier The Day The Ice Man Melted
By Long John Silver (Senior Writer)
"Rewind" is a special feature I wanted to present starting today, where anyone is welcome to join in; it is "A Walk Down Memory Lane" about a historical match that one always holds in fond (or torturous) memories, when we sit back and think about the number of years we've watched tennis.
There are always those rare matches that stand out for some specific reason, or no reason at all.
This one had everything ... except two winners. A warm Australian summer, a world No. 1 who was hurting inside because of his coach's ailment, one of his close mates on the other side of the net, a four-hour marathon, a comeback, an evening extraordinaire when a champion bared a little part of soul to the entire world, a gesture of camaraderie and genuine mate-ship which was later learned to be misconstrued … and eventually, a hurting, bawling Pete Sampras triumphing in the midst of adversity.
This was the famous 1995 Australian quarters between defending champion Pete Sampras, and his childhood mate Jim Courier. Sampras' coach and mentor Tim Gullickson was diagnosed with cancer in the middle of the tournament, and it was decided he would fly back the next day.
Quite extraordinarily, the evening before the match, Sampras, Courier, Tim and (his brother) Tom would all have dinner together before Tim left back to the states the next day.
Sampras had already come back from near brink, from two sets down (and two points from defeat at one point) against Magnus Larsson in the fourth round to win in five.
Hence he wasn't the freshest of legs going around. Courier had just stopped Sampras from making it a "Pete-Slam" in 1993-1994, by beating him on the Parisian dirt in Roland Garros.
Courier had slipped down the rankings to number nine, but as with champions, on a given day, when Courier's forehand is firing and his sense of ball-timing is well, good luck trading groundies with him on the baseline. The stage was set ... a warm evening in Melbourne was the cauldron.
Courier started the match in his own vintage heyday style. He was dogmatic from the baseline, dictating play with his pile-driver forehands, pounding heavy … and pounding relentlessly.
Sampras clung on to force two tie-breaks, both of which he lost, a resultant effect of Courier teeing off on his inside-out forehands to force Sampras to his backhand corner. High quality tennis: Courier takes the first two sets six and six.
Eventually, he had to come down to Earth a bit, and when his game ratcheted down a notch, Sampras got the first break for either player in the match snagging the third to 3. (6-7 6-7 6-3). That was all just the prelude; the best was yet to come.
At 2-2 in the fourth, Courier would break for the first time, and would go on to consolidate the lead for 4-2. What happened next is precisely the rationale as to why top level sport is entertaining, teasing, and exhilarating.
Even for a multiple slam champion, a former world No. 1 and someone as seasoned as Courier, suddenly it hit him that he was going to put it past Sampras (the defending champion and world No. 1); he allowed himself to think about the magnitude of the situation. The hairline cracks appeared in the psychological armor then … precisely then.
At 4-2, 40-15, with two game points … he would throw in a nasty double, ALSO an unintended effect of cramps as we would later learn. The thinnest of cracks appeared in Courier's arsenal, and Sampras needed no further invitation.
He sensed Courier wasn't ready to take it, and hence he grabbed that particular moment with both hands. Sampras would break back, and would break Courier once more at 5-4. (The point at (13 seconds) in this clip is scintillating.) That made the match wide open heading into the decider.
Only this time, Sampras had all the momentum. There would be one last twist in the tale.
At 1-1 in the fifth, one of the members in the audience would cry, "Do it for your coach, Pete"; little would he know the impact of those words on the rest of the match. After five minutes or so Sampras would find it impossible to compose himself, and would tear up between points.
With each minute it would get worse, it would get to a stage where he would start crying before he served the ball, and as hard as he would try, he would not be able to stop. The locked away emotions regarding his coach's very unfortunate ailment were displayed in front of the Melbourne crowd and … a global audience.
One has to keep in mind that this was not an emotional person on any given day, this was a bloke with ice running through his veins … so serene that at some points the tennis world called him "boring".
The epic continued as the clocked ticked past midnight down under, the crowd turned pro-Sampras because of his intrepid effort.
The Rod Laver Arena crowd was on its feet, living and perishing with each point. Some had to leave because of work the next day, but most of the fans stayed to watch the epic unfold into its last chapter.
From Courier's standpoint, it wasn't the easiest thing to stand across the net from a bloke who is clearly hurting inside, especially if he happens to be one of your good mates.
Courier was torn between trying to win what was clearly turning out to be an important match in his career, and looking across the net to see one of his mates in pain.
As the match progressed deeper into the fifth set, Courier would increasingly flatten his forehand more and more, resulting in more errors on that flank, more so because he was going for so much.
The increasing pressure would result in him letting the F word go at break point down, an audible obscenity warning henceforth.
You can also clearly see Courier's exhorting cries of "Come-ons," signaling to Sampras that he still wanted to win the match, given all that has transpired. There was no doubt that Courier's game fell down a notch, as opposed to Sampras's game, which picked up to another gear.
The quality of tennis was still scintillating, however. It had everything: powerful rallies, incredible gets and those exquisite touches (Sampras, especially at the net) from both players.
It was then that Courier made an error in judgment, which he would later wish he'd never done; even though it was one of those things that was only wrong because the consequences deemed it to be.
Seeing Sampras in tears before he served, Courier at 2-2, called from the other side of the net, "Are you all right, Pete? We can do this tomorrow, you know!" (After 8.00 in this clip)
While that was a genuine statement from Courier, it was perceived to be a subtle insult from Sampras, which would propel him to draw back inside his raw emotions on court and become more of the Ice-Man that he was.
Sampras would go onto say in his biography (A Champion's Mind) that the quip from Courier in essence helped to seclude his feelings and play better, but at that moment he did think it was an insult. What was even more astonishing is the fact that Sampras can fire away aces through tears.
He would later learn from Courier that it wasn't (through the press), but he does not feel the need to talk it out with Courier because he does not need to. He has known Jim for too long, and he does believe him without needing to talk to him.
The next game, Courier would quip in reaction, "I don't feel too damn good myself." As the rallies got more powerful and brutal, Sampras would clinch that all important break at 4-3, by winning a game that contained four deuces.
As a long rally ended with Courier burying a powerful forehand cross-court into the net, he knew it was as good as over.
I couldn't help wonder at this point whether Sampras was actually going to win this, it was almost inevitable. With the crowd going berserk, he would serve out the next game to win 6-3, at 1.15 morning Melbourne time.
During the embrace at the net Courier would say, "I know you're dead, because I am dead." In the press Courier would say that he felt bad, because he saw Sampras was not feeling well in the middle of the fifth set.
There was a very interesting epilogue to this epic encounter. Hours after the match, Sampras' and Courier would run into each other in the massage facility, with both of them talking about life and Tim on the massage table.
Sampras would go on to lose the final to Agassi, Courier would board Qantas to NY the next morning. Independent of the result, this was one encounter that would forever be etched in the museum of Australian Open folklore. Aus Open AO-TV Clip
A day when Sampras' showed the world that he wasn't always the ICE-Man that he was perceived to be, for this one day, the ice melted that infinitesimal bit … and let the outside world know what really went on inside … a triumph through sheer adversity.
A four hour epic with a score line that read 6-7, 6-7, 6-3, 6-4, 6-3
P.S.: By the way, I was in sixth grade back then…and pullin' for Jim with all of my heart. I can appreciate what Sampras accomplished more now, than back then. I hope this is the first of many "Rewind" series that we contribute as a group for BR-Tennis.