August 02, 2008
Memoir gives unique insight into Sampras's mind
By STEPHANIE MYLES / The Gazette
A Champion's Mind: Lessons from a life in tennis, by Pete Sampras with Peter Bodo, Crown Publishers, 306 pages.
One thing hard to fathom about Hall of Fame tennis player Pete Sampras during his career was what was in his head. He took extraordinary pains to keep that to himself.
So it's fair game to wonder if there was just air up there, whether he was merely a see-ball, hit-ball guy who kept everything pretty simple.
Whether it was the rock-bottom expectations, or the eagerness for this tennis lover to find out anything heretofore unknown about a great champion, Sampras's new memoir is a most pleasant surprise.
Sampras, who turns 37 on Aug. 12, explains enough about how he grew up to make how he turned out make perfect sense. He shares his anxieties and struggles at the various stages of his career. He outlines the personal sacrifices he made to get to where he was, not with regret or boastfulness, but matter-of-factly.
And he talks about what was on his mind throughout all those dramatic moments in his career, when the media characterized him and his tennis as boring.
That hurt, by the way. But it turns out "boring" meant "in control." And "in control" meant 12 Grand Slam titles and a privileged spot in the "Greatest of all time" debate.
Somewhere, Sampras's introverted personality and the bubble-like existence needed to get to the very top of his sport merged. They were a perfect, winning fit.
Sampras's tennis career, as so many are, was a matter of talent meeting opportunity. Had he remained in the Washington, D.C., area, who knows what would have happened? But in 1978, father Sam moved the entire family --- wife Georgia, four kids (Sampras was the second-youngest) and a parrot --- in an old Ford Pinto to Los Angeles. The area was an aerospace hotbed, which was the reason for the move. It also was a tennis hotbed.
Little Pete had coaches for everything: the great Robert Lansdorp for forehands and groundstrokes, another for his serve, another for his footwork and balance, and another for his volley. All of that was paid for by his father, and even at that, he was a good, but not great, junior.
His family stayed out of it. They were the anti-Djokovics; there was no chance you'd see them sitting courtside, dressed up in matching warmup jackets, making a stink when anyone rooted against their boy.
They left the development of Sampras's tennis career to the experts, supporting him from the side and paying the bills.
And that's only one of the lessons Sampras imparts in his book. Not only does the family not need to make it the family business, it needs to understand what an absolute lottery it all is.
"A lot of kids are told they're great, believe it, work toward it --- and eventually fall by the wayside," Sampras writes. "They may not have the right temperament, or long-term physical assets; they might not be able to handle the expectations, they may have insurmountable flaws in their technique, their dedication or approach to their career. The idea that none of the things that could go wrong, do go wrong, is borderline preposterous --- except when it isn't.
"Some of those juniors were like starving guys, eating everything on the table while the eating was good. They didn't think long term; they lived and died by their daily results, ignoring the fact that what worked in the juniors wouldn't necessarily be useful on the pro tour."
He's talking to a wall there; parents of junior players tend not to listen much to common sense. They all think their kid can be like Pete. But he's right.
The book chronicles his career, and ends upon his retirement. And if there's something missing, it's that's there are almost no anecdotes involving other players, beyond the ones everyone has already heard.
Sampras rips John McEnroe a little bit, mildly, mostly for not cluing in that not everyone wants to be like McEnroe.
His contact with Andre Agassi, the yin to his yang, seems limited to casual dressing room chats about sports. He writes that after that 2002 U.S. open final, won by Sampras, the two vowed to stay in touch, because they had so much history and so much in common, including two kids apiece.
You wonder if that ever happened; the two lead contrasting lives in retirement, just as they did during their careers.
What emerges in this book, which gets better and better as it goes along, is a portrait of a man who had a lot more inside him than we knew. And though he refers often to "the Gift" --- a bizarre, out-of-character reference to his talent --- you can see that his career was the result of much more than that gift.
His retirement is far less publicly fulfilling than that of Agassi, who devotes himself to his monumental charitable works and to business interests.
Sampras clearly was bored enough to start playing again, senior events and those exhibition matches against Roger Federer.
But what he has, a happy, stable family life with wife Bridgette Wilson and his two sons, seems to be all he wanted.
After a long career during which he deprived himself of any semblance of a "normal" life, perhaps that is the real gift.