by Greg Cote, Miami Herald
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Those emotional thank-yous on each end of the East Coast on Monday -- the retirement of tennis great Pete Sampras in New York and the celebration of a Little League team in Boynton Beach -- were considerably closer in meaning than in miles.
A shared feeling may be drawn when marking what Pete Sampras meant to his sport and what a show that bunch of 11-- and 12-year-olds just gave us. At the intersection of one great professional career and one remarkable kids baseball tournament, you found something that made you wish neither had to end.
Simple sportsmanship.
A font of grace.
The game at its essence, splendidly unadorned.
There is a wistfulness in saying goodbye to Sampras and to those Little League moments, because they were an island apart from the coarseness that too much of athletics has become. They were a nice place to visit; the kind of place that makes you sad to leave because you're not sure if you will ever get back there again.
Sampras and those boys, in their own way, were a picture of sports the way Norman Rockwell might have drawn it.
The sullying of sports' good name can begin awfully early now. A loud minority of boorish parents, cheating coaches and preening kids have become graffiti on youth sports, spelling out an obsession on winning.
Two years ago, the Little League World Series was scandalized by the revelation a star pitcher was overage. Just last year in Williamsport, Pa., young players from one U.S. team peacocked and showboated as if choreographed by Deion Sanders.
It made this year's showing all the more impressive. It wasn't so much that the Boynton Beach team won the national championship, but its sportsmanship in doing so. If anything, Boynton's loss to Japan in the world final Sunday night showed the class of the local kids and coaches even more clearly, well-earning the heroes' welcome that awaited the team upon its return to Palm Beach on Monday.
Even crushed to be losing, Boynton infielders slapped hands with Japanese base runners after big hits, a charming, nearly unheard-of display of goodwill. The Japanese kids returned the sportsmanship, forming a human trampoline and tossing a smiling Boynton player in the air during a postgame celebration involving both teams.
Some seemed put off by ESPN and ABC televising so much of the Little League series, perhaps recalling those preening kids who had used the stage for self-worship.
But you know what? In an age when the bar has been grievously lowered on what deserves to be on TV, those young players we saw Sunday night earned their moments in the spotlight, as opposed to some idiot willing to eat worms on ``reality TV.''
And here's another reality to consider:
Those kids would have been doing the same things whether ESPN was there or not. Their smiles would have been just as wide, their tears just as real, even if the only people watching were a small crowd of proud parents.
What those Boynton Beach kids accomplished -- which was not less than polish the name of youth sports -- is precisely what Pete Sampras has been doing so well for so long in the play-for-pay division.
Simply: doing things right.
It isn't so much that Sampras won a record 14 Grand Slam singles championships, the number alone qualifying him unequivocally among tennis' all-time greats.
It is that he always demurred to not bugle his greatness or plan his own parade. He was the gentleman's champion. Fittingly, U.S. Open officials had to convince Sampras that his retirement should be the stuff of ceremony Monday night.
Sampras began to emerge nationally just as John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors were winding down circus-like, bellicose careers personified by their pantomime of outraged complaint over dubious line calls. Sampras worked roughly the same timeline as Andre Agassi, who served up a contrasting persona introduced by the Canon camera ad in which he declared, ``Image is everything.''
Now Sampras leaves his sport to Andy Roddick, who, for all his potential, thus far remains closer to Anna Kournikova than to Sampras in accomplishment: a pinup as much as a player, another ''image is everything'' star.
Sampras was all steak, light on sizzle, an old-schooler who seemed like he ought to have been playing inside a black-and-white TV in the era of Rod Laver and Stan Smith.
The gentleman champion retires but leaves us with an encouraging reminder that an athlete's great success and equally great humility need not be mutually exclusive.
Likewise, those boys from Boynton Beach reassured us that plenty of kids still play youthful games with eyes on a championship, but with hearts and minds on being good sports and having a ton of fun.
May their lessons prove contagious.