Agassi edges Sampras, reaches fourth consecutive final
CNNSI
Thursday January 27, 2000
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) -- Andre Agassi hammered winners through the few openings Pete Sampras left him Thursday night to advance to his fourth consecutive Grand Slam tournament final.
The 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (0), 7-6 (5), 6-1 victory sent Agassi into the Australian Open title match against the winner of Friday's semifinal between defending champion Yevgeny Kafelnikov and No. 12 Magnus Norman.
Sampras, serving at up to 206 kph (129 mph), hit 37 aces and played a perfect tiebreaker in the third set, but Agassi bounced back with pesky returns and winners crosscourt, down the line or into Sampras' body.
Agassi is the first player since Rod Laver in 1969 to reach four consecutive Grand Slam finals. He won the French and U.S. Opens last year, in between losing the Wimbledon final to Sampras, whom he replaced later as No. 1.
Sampras, who skipped the Australian Open last year because of fatigue and missed the U.S. Open with a back injury, was seeking to finally break Roy Emerson's record of 12 Grand Slam titles.
In his first loss in nine five-set matches at the Australian Open, Sampras looked in a strong position when he scored a minibreak with a forehand cross-court passing shot for a 4-3 lead in the fourth-set tiebreaker.
"I felt like that was my chance. I let it slip away in the tiebreaker and I just got a little down on myself," Sampras said.
Agassi broke back for 4-4 with a serve return that skipped off the net cord, forcing Sampras to volley wide.
On his first set point, Agassi pounced on a short volley by Sampras for a forehand winner.
He followed up by breaking Sampras in the second game of the final set with a forehand serve return down the line, and gained one more break in the sixth game with a backhand cross-court pass.
Serving for the match, Agassi saved one break point when Sampras hit a backhand long, and ended the 2-hour, 47-minute match with a serve that Sampras blocked wide.
He bowed and blew kisses to the crowd after scoring his 12th victory in 29 meetings with Sampras.
"The match was so close to being won in the fourth set," Agassi said. "You can't expect him to be perfect. He was in it until then, but I just went away with it in the fifth.
"You only ever get a couple of chances against Pete. I let a few opportunities slip by in the second set. He let a few go by in the fourth," he said. "In the fifth, I played well at the right time."
In the 7-0 third-set tiebreaker, Agassi added, "I was a spectator."
Both players said the cold, windy conditions made it hard to play good tennis.
"It was an emotional match," Sampras said. "In the span of five minutes, the whole match changed."
He smiled when asked about the end of his perfect record in five-setters at the Australian.
"I was doomed," he said.
"I'm disappointed but I'm not walking out of here with my head hung down," Sampras said.
He said he and Agassi would play many more matches, and "there's a lot of tennis left for this year."
He said, however, he would need an examination of a right hip muscle he strained early in the first set. He and Agassi both are scheduled to play in a Davis Cup competition next week in Zimbabwe.
"It took me a set to figure out how I was going to deal with [the injury]," he said, but the cause of losing was that "he outplayed me."
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Agassi sweats out five-set win
Conditioning keys victory over Sampras
By Rachel Alexander, Washington Post
Friday, January 28, 2000
MELBOURNE, Australia -- To understand how Andre Agassi managed to claw back from two sets down and climb over Pete Sampras to win, 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (0-7), 7-6 (7-5), 6-1, Thursday night and advance to the Australian Open final against Yevgeny Kafelnikov, you have to know about Christmas Eve.
That night the streets around Las Vegas were teeming with carloads of people making their way to dinners and parties. Agassi can vouch for this; he saw them clearly from his vantage point at the top of a hill he likes to call Magic Mountain. The hill, near Agassi's house, is where he runs sprints, and on that night he was working up a serious sweat. When he got to the top, he could see all the cars. When he got to the bottom, he could see pavement, which meant it was time to go back up to the top again.
"He's out there when everyone else is having a good time -- this is after an extraordinary year, when it would have been so easy to rest," said Agassi's longtime trainer, Gil Reyes. "It's about 320 yards of sprinting, and all you could hear was his breathing."
Sometimes, when two players so elite, so experienced and so skilled face each other, the match ceases to be about tennis and becomes more about will. Both Sampras and Agassi can hit forehands, serve, return and volley as well as anyone in the game, but previous to Thursday, it was Sampras who was known for his will, his absolute, cast-iron will to win.
It was Sampras who battled through this tournament in 1995 when his coach and close friend, Tim Gullikson, became seriously ill with brain cancer. It was Sampras who was so sick at the U.S. Open in 1996 that he threw up on the court but still managed to come from behind in a five-set match and later win the tournament.
But on Thursday, it was Agassi who flashed the kind of will that wins the toughest of matches, the same kind of will that prodded him up that hill Christmas Eve. When Agassi fell behind, two sets to one, and then found himself two points away from a loss in the fourth-set tiebreaker, he fought back, hard, pushing the match to a fifth set and back to even ground.
But when Sampras found himself in a similarly tight space just a few minutes later, going down a break after having come so close to winning, he faltered. In fact, he seemed to just give up. Part of Sampras's sense of futility came from a hip flexor strain that had been bothering him from midway through the first set, although he later said, "I am not sitting here with an excuse why I lost -- he outplayed me, and I had my chances."
The rest of it just came from frustration.
"I was disappointed," said Sampras, whose dashed title hopes mean he will have to wait another few months to try to break Roy Emerson's record of 12 Grand Slams. "I felt like that was my chance (in the fourth set), and I let it slip away in the tiebreaker. I got a little bit down on myself, and he just took advantage of it. There was an early break, and that was pretty much it."
Sampras's hip tightened up after the match -- so much so that he was having some trouble walking -- and he was to undergo tests today. But while he was still on the court, Sampras's movement was relatively fluid, and for the first four sets, the level of tennis was close to perfect.
In a tense atmosphere usually reserved for the most highly anticipated of Grand Slam finals, Agassi and Sampras both came onto the court with such focus and determination that the entire first four sets featured just two breaks of serve, one for each player. Swirling winds and an unseasonable chill blanketed Melbourne Park, but the sellout crowd of 15,037 was too spellbound to shiver as the first set belonged to Agassi, the second to Sampras.
In the third, Agassi had two set points but wasted them, forcing a tiebreaker with momentum clearly in the balance. Sampras stepped up his game. Immensely. In fact, he put on such a display in his 7-0 run that Agassi later said made he felt like a "spectator."
"I had no say in that tiebreaker, and then you sit down there and you think about those two (set point) opportunities," Agassi said. "But then you try to forget about it, and earn another set in the match."
Much of the crowd was convinced that there was little more Agassi could do-by the end of the fourth set. He had not broken Sampras for 34 games, and Sampras had already piled up 34 of the 37 aces he'd end the match with.
But Agassi, who came back from two sets down to beat Andrei Medvedev in the French Open final last June and from two sets down to beat Todd Martin in the U.S. Open final in September, never had any doubts. He just continued to peck away at Sampras, and by the time he cracked a cross-court forehand to win the fourth-set tiebreaker, 7-5, all Sampras could do was stand at mid-court, stupefied.
It was the same look Sampras had a few minutes later when Agassi broke him in the second game of the fifth set, and the No. 3 seed never was able to recover. The top-seeded Agassi walked away with the victory and a finals date with Kafelnikov (Cable 19, Saturday at 7 p.m. PST). Kafelnikov, the defending champion, advanced with a 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 thrashing of Sweden's Magnus Norman. Agassi is the first man since Rod Laver in 1969 to make the final of four consecutive Grand Slams.
That's why Agassi worked so hard over Christmas. That's why he worked so hard Thursday.
"He doesn't want to look back five years from now and think about what he might have missed -- he's already done that," said Agassi's coach and close friend, Brad Gilbert. "Besides, he's 29 years old. He knows that he can't get another crack at this in three years. It's now or never, and he's picked now."
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Sampras tears hip flexor in loss to Agassi
Associated Press
Monday, January 31
MELBOURNE, Australia -- Pete Sampras will miss the United States' Davis Cup match with Zimbabwe next week after injuring his hip at the Australian Open, he said Friday.
Sampras said he has "a pretty substantial tear" of his right hip flexor muscle and is expected to need 3-4 weeks to recover.
Sampras tore the muscle scrambling for some shots early in his five-set, semifinal loss Thursday night against Andre Agassi.
"It certainly didn't help my movement," Sampras said. "But he played great. I didn't come here to talk about the match."
Sampras, who had declined to play Davis Cup last year, declined to say how new U.S. captain John McEnroe reacted to news of the injury.
"He was at dinner," Sampras said. "It probably wasn't the best news he's had."
Dr. David Bolzonello, the tournament doctor, said that trying to play again too soon would risk further problems.
Bolzonello said an MRI showed that in the hip muscle, "about 30 percent of the fiber is damaged. There is a lot of bleeding around that."
Sampras, who served 37 aces in the match, appeared on the verge of victory in his fourth-set tiebreaker against Agassi after a minibreak put him ahead 4-3. But Agassi rebounded for a 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (0), 7-6 (5), 6-1 victory in reaching his fourth consecutive Grand Slam tournament final.
It was Sampras' second five-set match of the tournament.
In what had been considered a preview of the Davis Cup first-round meeting, he had come back after losing the first two sets to beat Zimbabwe's Wayne Black 6-7 (9), 3-6, 6-3, 7-5, 6-3.
Sampras said the new injury was not related to the back injury that kept him out of the U.S. Open last year.
"I don't know if it's a result of too much tennis," Sampras said. "I had a break last year."
Sampras skipped last year's Australian Open, citing fatigue. Set back also by his absence from the U.S. Open, he dropped to No. 3 after holding the year-end No. 1 ranking for six consecutive years.
He beat Agassi in the Wimbledon final, but Agassi won the French and U.S. Opens and climbed to the top rank after falling as low as 141st in November 1997.
Thursday's injury came "at a point where I did a lot of running," Sampras said. "I kind of played through it the rest of the match. I did a lot of scrambling, and I felt it happen."