by Chuck Culpepper, New York Newsday
August 26, 2003
They held the unconventional retirement ceremony for the greatest tennis player since Rod Laver an unconventional 351 days since the player last played. Unconventionally, it occurred on a Monday night.
Unconventionally, he took the court in a black suit with a gray collar poking out over the lapels and a patch of upper-deck seats unfilled.
The fete for the male player with the most major titles wound up tucked between a Kim Clijsters-Amber Liu first-round match and a Lleyton Hewitt-Victor Hanescu first-round match in the throes of late August, which hardly seemed conventional. So, how fitting. What fine appropriateness. What virtual poetry. Pete Sampras arrived in 1990 as unconventional and remained unconventional all the way through, so he certainly shouldn't depart with some endless Michael Jordan extravaganza. He should depart . . .
Between matches on a Monday in the throes of late August, with a hovering blimp offering electronic congratulations, Andre Agassi's big bald head on the video screen paying tribute, Sampras taking a lap around the court holding his 9-month-old son while Pearl Jam played.
The program notes could read: Here played a star who craved no starshine, a quiet mower mulching the louder opponents of tennis for a decade and then some, a great who had to cry or vomit on court to hoard affection.
Here's the third of the four children of Greek-American immigrants who moved to California in the 1970s with a Pinto and a parrot and Pete still a tyke. His first tennis coach? Not some fuzzhead living in shorts, but a neonatologist, a position which evidently involves very small people and medicine. His style? Serve and volley, while the other Americans resided on baselines. His backhand? One-handed, which pretty much looked like old black-and-white footage.
He foreshadowed his first major triumph at the 1990 U.S. Open by losing a straight-set Wimbledon first-rounder to Christo Van Rensburg. He expressed shock at reaching the semifinals. As the afterthought finalist to Agassi's unapologetic glitzy coronation, he instead crushed Agassi to become the youngest champion since that Columbia sophomore Oliver S. Campbell in 1890.
Violating various tennis statutes, he brought along with him not a family reunion or a neighborhood picnic but a coach named Joe and, often, a brother named Gus. "He's anti-entourage," noted commentator Mary Carillo. Oh, but surely his parents stood over him like oilmen judging a gusher. Actually, no: Too nervous to witness, they went to the movie "Presumed Innocent" during the semifinal and roamed a Long Beach, Calif., shopping mall, during the final. His mother allegedly hugged a TV salesman upon learning the outcome.
In a sport that begged for preening, he politely declined. Somebody said the president might call; Pete said, "The phone's off the hook." Media outlets asked to photograph his parents and he kindly said no. Probed for role models, the prodigy unconventionally reached back past Connors and McEnroe and Nastase and such to find Laver and Rosewall, Australian gentlemen from prehistoric times.
A decade's spotlight sought out a dominating champion, but his face simply refused the shine while people, all conditioned for antics and umpire abuse, tried to cozy up to this strange nonchalance. He cried at an Australian Open when his coach, Tim Gullikson, suffered a third stroke, and he vomited and required intravenous drip for dehydration on the evening of a titanic U.S. Open quarterfinal with Alex Corretja. He played the match he'd like to bottle against Agassi in the 1999 Wimbledon final, and he never looked into the stands for his parents until they turned up at Wimbledon in 2000, when he passed Roy Emerson for the all-time lead in major titles.
He also married an actress he had hoped to meet after seeing her in "Love Stinks."
Uncommon to the finish, he won his final major at the 2002 U.S. Open only as a forgotten 17th seed who'd just lost a Wimbledon second-rounder to George Bastl despite reading an inspirational letter from his wife at courtside. His final victory materialized just as GQ magazine hit the stands with a story on how marriages ruin sports careers, with himself as Exhibit A.
So of course he'd spend part of a year entering and withdrawing from tournaments and a whole year of not following tennis. Of course he'd turn up on a Monday in the throes of August and say, "I will never sit here and say I'm the greatest ever; I just won't," four decades after Ali showed us you could say otherwise. Of course he'd walk into a ceremony he didn't crave and then cry for two minutes after 13 years of almost uninterrupted stoicism.
After all, to become the best since Laver, you'd pretty much have to be unconventional.