by NIRMAL SHEKAR, The Sportstar
July 19, 1997
You'd have thought he was from Mars. There was a perceptible tone of awed wonderment to many of questions that were asked at the post-match press conference on the day Pete Sampras won his fourth
Wimbledon title, as well as two days earlier when he played the semifinals. It was almost as if we were sitting in front of an alien superman.
The line of questioning had little in common with other post-match conferences you have attended after a title match. And, in a, way it was understandable, too. The questioners wanted to get to the bottom of
one thing, as the Americans would say. How can somebody play as well as Sampras did? It was this amazement that was translated into many different questions.
In the event, as he was leaving the interview room on the day he beat Todd Woodbridge in the semifinals, the world champion turned around,
smiled and said, "You know, it's not that complicated guys." Of course, what Sampras really meant was there was nothing complicated about his being as good a he is on a tennis court. And, therefore, the attempts to get under the surface and bring out the mysteries, to unravel the secret of his success, were rather amusing to him.
In fact at one point, Sampras explained how simple grass court tennis was. "It's very simple out there, I mean, you just have to hold serve and hopefully you'll have a couple of chances to break if you return well. That's really it out there."
The message was clear. What Sampras was trying to say was, there was nothing astonishing about his tennis, nothing to be in awe of, it's all quiet simple.
Simple indeed. But, then, so Van Gogh might have thought after painting Sunflowers. So Beethoven might have imagined after composing a symphony. So Nietzche might have thought after writing 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'. After all, masterpieces are simple to great masters. So it is on a tennis court to Sampras, too.
And, yes, his tennis is simple too; just too simply awesome-something that complicates things for people whose job it is to describe its breathtaking quality to readers. Little wonder it appeared on that
Sunday at the All England Club that the world's sport media was trying to collectively solve some kind of puzzle.
Actually, there is a simple solution to the puzzle - which is to accept that when Pete Sampras is at his peak, he plays at a level that, probably, no tennis player in history had ever achieved. Simplified, this means Sampras is, arguably, the greatest player that ever lived.
Comparison across generations is a complicated business. It is a fraught exercise that will take you along a road packed with potential landmines. Nor will numbers - major titles won, lost, etc. -do. As useful a yardstick as they maybe at times, it doesn't help this case.
And, then, men like Bill Tilden and Rod Laver never had the use of the modern graphite racquets. Playing in the high noon of the era of professional tennis, Sampras has certain unique advantage over Laver
and Tilden. But in much the same way, he carries a greater burden too. But, the point is, given the advantages, given the way sports and sportsmen evolve, Sampras is perhaps the best all-round player we have seen. He is to tennis what Michel Jordan is to basketball. Until a few years ago, John McEnroe had always insisted that Rod Laver was the best player he saw. On the morning of the final, before
Sampras beat Pioline to win his fourth title at Wimbledon last fortnight McEnroe wrote this in the SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: "Pete is in a different world. He looks like the best player I've ever seen in this
sport."
That's what Sampras has done this year - he's forced so many people to revise their opinions. Grand Slam titles no. 9 and no. 10 are nowhere as significant, by themselves, as this unique achievement of the great player.
Pioline is an introvert bloke, a man of few words. If he had Ilie Nastase's sense of humor, the Frenchman might have well said something similar to what the Romanian did after losing the 1976
final to Bjorn Borg: "He is from moon. We play tennis, he plays something else."
Indeed, when Sampras is at his best days, you often get the feeling that you are watching two different games - one by the great man himself and the other by his opponent. If this makes for rather undramatic one-sided contests, such as this year's Wimbledon final, then Sampras is the guilty party - he is guilty of putting on a show a level of excellence rarely seen in any sport.
"It was a pleasure to be out there playing against him today, because not many people get to appreciate how good a player he is because they have never been on court with him," said Woodbridge after losing to
the great man in the semifinals. "It's something I'll talk about when I am finished, how good he was."
Boris Becker, for his part, has always been talking about how good Sampras was. "For me, he was always the most complete player. He had power, he had speed, he had touch. You can't compare 60's with 90's, but I always felt he was for me the best player ever," said the German half an hour after he had told Sampras at net after their quarterfinal contest that he had played his last match at Wimbledon. So, where does Sampras go from here? He'll be only 26 next month and in the
middle of a year when he is playing the best tennis of his career, the world champion feels there is still room for improvement, and that he can actually become a better player than he is today. "I feel like I can get better as long as I am working hard and
staying healthy," says Sampras.
Getting better! Is he kidding? Already guys are getting blown off the court. And, at a time when a handful of players who can stand on the court and engaging him in an absorbing argument have all disappeared one after another - Stefan Edberg has retired , Boris Becker is on his way out, Andre Agassi is enjoying the longest honeymoon any tennis player has ever had - Sampras' domination of men's game is inevitable.
Of course, we said the same thing of John McEnroe in 1984, a year when the left-handed New Yorker lost just one match of any significance. But, at the end of the following year, McEnroe took a sabbatical and he was never the same player on his return to the game. And what of Borg? In 1980, when he was still the Mr. Invincible of the famous lawns, who would have expected the unflappable Swede to quit the game just over a year later.
In any event, who can say confidently that Sampras will not suffer the kind of mid-career blues that signaled the beginning of the end for men such as Borg and McEnroe?
Well, it's not impossible. But, given how much he is enjoying his job at the moment, given how different he is as a person, compared to Borg - who imposed a monastic life on himself without quite realizing
that he was not the kind of person who could enjoy it - and McEnroe, it seems unlikely that Sampras would go the way the two past world champions did. The other day Michel Stich pointed out that Sampras was as successful as he was because all he thought of was tennis. The World champion said something that was at once logical and revealing. I've got the rest of my life to do what I want when I'm finished at 30 or whenever I stop. So I feel like when I am done, I don't want to look back at my career and have years and months when I wasn't into the game at all. This is my job and this is what I love to do," said Sampras.
The Stichs of this world, as gloomy and ordinary as they are, will never understand that "love", the love of what they might imagine is hard grind. It is love of perfection and the willingness to strive for
it, no matter the cost. It is a sage's love for icy heights. Men like Stich can never contemplate it, much less understand it.
This is precisely why Peter Sampras is as great as he is.