Tennis great retires, ending legendary career
Pete Sampras will make his retirement official Monday at Flushing Meadows as the U.S. Open begins without him. He�ll be there � but not as the guy who rifled one concluding, blistering serve-and-volley through Andre Agassi last Sept. 8 to seize his fifth championship and a record 14th major. So it will be a sad so long to a certified god in a game that he made look so easy.
by Bud Collins, MSNB?C
August 22, 2003
THE MAN AT FLUSHING MEADOWS
As a gangling 17-year-old he took a quick look at Flushing Meadows in 1988, losing in the first round.
But a year later you could tell he was going to stick around for a long while as he dethroned the defending U.S. Open champion, Mats Wilander, and progressed to the last 16.
Twelve months after that, Sampras went all the way, at 19 the greenest ever to rule the U.S. Open, and he did it at the expense of Agassi � a certain symmetry to their simultaneous careers.
For 15 straight years he was The Man at the Meadows (although he didn�t play the U.S. Open in 1999, suffering a back injury in practice).
No American male had been such a dominant figure in the U.S. Championships over a similar span � 12 years between first title and last.
Big Bill Tilden had held the record: nine years, 1920 and 1929.
An Australian, the ageless Ken Rosewall, bridged a 14-year gap, 1956 and 1970.
A LOSS FOR TENNIS
I hate to see Sampras depart the sport because he was so good to watch
He seemed the DiMaggio of tennis, killingly graceful and effortless in movement, making the big plays as though routine, ever on offense with sparkling volleying.
Is that why some found him boring?
I thought that judgement absurd.
How could you not admire such silken, fluid, unflappable performances?
He was greatness on the sneakered hoof.
An all-timer, a sure-fire entry to the International Tennis Hall of Fame at Newport, R.I., in 2007, Sampras was the player of his generation � No. 1 a record six consecutive years (1993-98).
Certainly he was the man of the century at Wimbledon with his seven titles, and the disaster of the century at Paris: 0-for-13 at the French Open, never making it close to playing in a final on the red clay.
A MEMORY FOR THE AGES
For me the pinnacle of Sampras� greatness occurred in Moscow in 1995 � the Davis Cup final on a sluggish clay court built specifically to bog him down.
Yet, Sampras was a one-man gang for the U.S. (with Todd Martin for company).
Outlasting stubborn Andrei Chesnokov in five draining sets, he collapsed at match point, dehydrated and exhausted.
Nevertheless he volunteered to return the next day, with Martin, to subdue Yevgeny Kafelnikov and Andrei Olhovskiy in the critical go-ahead doubles, and completed the 3-2 triumph on the third day by blowing Kafelnikov out of the Olympic Stadium to the dismay of 15,000 stunned partisans.
MORE OF A CHAMPION�S STORY
Sampras showed gumption at the 1994 U.S. Open, gamely losing his title in the fourth round to Jaime Yzaga in five painful sets on raw, blistered feet, 7-5 in the fifth.
And again on his way to the 1996 U.S. Open title, a quarterfinal when he was �Puking Pete.�
Sick and staggering, he somehow hurdled a match point to overcome Alex Corretja in a fifth-set, tie-breaker, 9-7, in a match that lasted four hours and nine minutes.
�That�s when Pete was especially dangerous,� recalls Jim Courier. �When you thought he was dying, he rose up and killed you.�
Others will have numerous indelible Sampras memories and all of us will have one of two reactions: (1) Why did he wait so long to arrive at his decision to retire?
Pete was inconsiderate of his public, leaving them hanging for a year. (But maybe it really took him that long to decide the motivational fire was no longer in his belly).
And (2) Doesn�t he have the right to do it on his own terms, saying farewell at the site where he first achieved fame?
GOING OUT WITH CLASS
I thought that at 32 Sampras had some winning left in him.
I hoped to see him take another shot at Wimbledon, where he�d been humbled by unremarkable George Bastl last year.
But, having set the highest personal standards, Sampras is conducting himself as a man who can�t outdo his valedictory at Flushing Meadows a year ago, and he doesn�t want to take a chance on tarnishing it by looking human once again.
So I suppose I should declare, �Say it ain�t so, Pete!� � not now, but in the future if he�s ever tempted to make the traditional comeback of early retirees.