by Pete Sampras
The kid on camera accepting the U.S. Open men’s singles trophy was me. I had arrived, at blinding speed. But now I found myself in territory that was unfamiliar, and for which I was unprepared. There would be payback, because nobody gets a free ride.
When I won the 1990 U.S. Open, I found myself the youngest American champion since the beginning of the twentieth century. You might think that savoring a huge win is part of the deal, but you don’t have time to do that, because the real chaos begins the moment the last ball is called. You’ve earned the right to take a deep breath, sit back, and savor the moment. But it doesn’t happen that way. The only time you have is those few moments between the handshake with your opponent and the trophy presentation and speeches. Everything that follows, for hours, is a kind of dog and pony show as you make all the appointed rounds of the media and accept congratulations from anyone whose credential gets him near you.
Of course, in ’90 I wouldn’t have known what to savor; I was too young to appreciate what I’d done. After the match, I kind of floated through it all in a happy daze. I was shell-shocked, and so were a lot of other people. I had been in the zone. None of the weaknesses or green elements in my game came into play. Pressure? What did I know from pressure? I was a kid who just threw up the ball, hit it, and watched as it hit lines, one after another, time after time. And if you hit lines, nobody is going to beat you, period.
My family back at home was stunned, too. It took me forever to get back to the Parker Meridien hotel in Manhattan after the final, and the first thing I did was call home. When Stella got on the line, she was crying and I grew alarmed. “What’s the matter,” I asked. “Why are you crying?”
She was crying because she was so happy; everyone else at home was feeling pretty good, too. Dad was in a great mood. I knew that on this occasion, there was no way he could use that dreaded word, “lousy.” It was satisfying to know that all that money he had poured into my development, the endless hours various members of my family had spent ferrying me around to lessons and tournaments, all the sacrifices the entire family had endured to enable this to happen—all that was now justified.
That evening I clearly remember Joe Brandi saying, “Well, Pete, this is where your work really begins.” At that moment, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Winning the Open was something that just kind of happened and it was definitely cool. I’d had a blast in New York. But the big question left in the wake of my win was one of which I was blissfully ignorant: how would I handle the newfound fame and the expectations that came with it?
I’d be crazy to look back at winning that first Open title with regret, but I honestly wish I had been a little older. I wish I had been a little better developed, both as a player and a person, a little wiser to the ways of the world and what it expects of you and how it judges you. I didn’t know it then, but that win was a one-way portal; once I went through it, there would be no turning back. Maintaining a high position was a big responsibility and it called for a lot of work and a certain kind of maturity and toughness that I lacked. There were tricky times ahead.
In the hours after the match, my agent at the time, Ivan Blumberg, was going crazy. He was giving me minute-by-minute updates: “Okay, we’ve got CBS Morning News lined up.” “Good Morning America wants you.” “Do you want to do Larry King Live?” I was just like, “Okay, okay, great. . . sure!” But I had no idea what he was talking about. I was a shy, introverted kid, and I had not undergone the kind of media training that is routine for up-and-coming players today.
It’s a pity that in today’s game, going to college is no longer an option for a gifted player. At one time, right up to the early years of the Open era, when the United States still dominated tennis and set the tone and values of the game, most of the more promising players went to school—powerhouse, traditional tennis universities like UCLA, USC, Stanford, Pepperdine, and Trinity (the one in San Antonio, Texas). The kids had a “normal” late adolescence, and in the summers between semesters they played the major tournaments. That all changed as the big money came into the game and forced people to focus exclusively on tennis at ever-younger ages.
The rewards and opportunities that came my way for winning a Grand Slam were mind-boggling. Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, was in the stands the day I won the U.S. Open, presumably watching his star client, Andre. He was so impressed by my performance, he wanted to sign me up. But I would later learn that he never got the chance; Blumberg had jumped the gun before Knight could get into the bidding war. Besieged by shoe and clothing guys as I became more and more of a force at the tournament, Blumberg watched the numbers grow and when Italian sportswear company Sergio Tacchini guaranteed me a million dollars a year for the next five years, Blumberg decided he couldn’t let that offer pass. He signed me with Tacchini before I played my quarterfinal. By the time I beat Andre, I probably could have named my number for Nike, but I was already locked down by Tacchini.
People bombarded Blumberg after my first Open win; they wanted me for exhibition matches (usually one-night stands against a fellow pro, with the result having no bearing on your official ranking). I was offered product endorsements, one-off appearances, charity events. . . . I had walked into the USTA National Tennis Center a few weeks earlier very much in the red, careerwise, with memories of my dad playing that ATM like a slot machine. At the end of two weeks, I was well into the black and a made man. I was a nineteen-year-old millionaire, but I didn’t really think about that, either. Nothing about what I had accomplished sank in, except that I had won my national title.
I returned to Los Angeles the following day via a connecting flight. When I got off to change planes, a CNN crew ambushed me at the airport. Another television crew had gone to Palos Verdes High School, stalking my sister Marion. All of that struck me as weird. Johnny Carson called, too, and it finally hit me: this was a big, big deal. It might’ve started as just another tennis match to me, and an occasion on which I had nothing to lose, but it became a life-altering event. Soon I would have to deal with something I had not known in my entire life: pressure. The pressure to defend my position, the pressure to carry myself like a man and champion, the pressure to meet demands and obligations that came with my new station and wealth, the pressure to take on the obligations that come with being a “professional” anything, and, most demanding of all, the pressure to win, day after day, round after round, to hold my new position and potentially improve on it.
It might have been easier if, like a football player, I had the support of teammates and could play just once a week. But my game is played by individuals on at least four major surfaces (grass, hard court, clay, indoor carpet), almost year-round. At most tournaments, you have to beat four to seven guys to win. Those guys all play different styles and have different qualities. Just compiling a book on the guys I would run into, roughly the top hundred players in the world, would be a massive, two-year job. And while you could count on meeting the top players in later rounds, there was no telling whom you might encounter in the first few rounds. In that way, tennis is, more than any other sport, a crapshoot.
One thing was for certain: I now had a huge bull’s-eye permanently tattooed on my back.
My next event was Stockholm in late October, and I struggled through three three-set matches (including one that I won by a third-set tiebreaker over the flashy Czech shotmaker Petr Korda), and was happy to reach the semifinals, where I lost to a guy who would be one of my career rivals, Boris Becker. He handled me, four and four, with a rough, physical game that was similar to Ivan Lendl’s.
I won just three matches in my next three events on the traditional fall European indoor circuit, even though the fast indoor carpet used at most of the indoor circuit events suited my emerging game. There were two giant events on the winter European circuit: the Paris Indoors (later the Paris Masters), and the season-ending ATP finals. The ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals), which started as the players’ union, is like the PGA. At the end of every yea
r, the top eight players compete in the ATP Finals, or World Championships (lately, the event has been called the ATP Masters Cup). The players are divided into two groups of four; each group plays a round-robin, and the two men in each group with the best record in that portion go on to the four-man-knockout semifinals and final.
The round-robin was a disaster for me in 1990. I got just six games off of Andre, and I lost to Stefan Edberg in straight sets, so I failed to make the semifinals. But I soothed the pain of that performance with a huge payday at a brand new and somewhat controversial event, the $6 million Grand Slam Cup.
That tournament was created by the International Tennis Federation, which is the parent group of the various national federations (like our United States Tennis Association). Those affiliates of the ITF control the respective national championships, which over time evolved into the most important tournaments on the calendar. The Grand Slams, or majors, are basically the “open” (meaning open to anyone who qualifies, based on rankings) national championships of Australia, France, England, and the United States. In order to push back against the growing power of the ATP, the ITF decided that they would stage the Grand Slam Cup as a rival event to the ATP Finals. The GS Cup would bring together the top performers in the four majors for a big year-end event. It’s a legitimate idea, but we already had the ATP Finals, so all the GS Cup did was confuse people—and dump tons of money on the players.
The Grand Slam Cup was based on a points system that measured the top sixteen performers in the majors, so there were always a few guys in the event who just had a good run at a major or two, and thereby qualified for the event. The prize money was insane; John McEnroe publicly criticized the event, calling the payday “obscene.” Even first-round losers were lavishly compensated, taking home six-figure paychecks, while the winner earned a mind-blowing $2 million (losing semifinalists took home a mere $450,000). Unlike the round-robin of the ATP Finals, the GS Cup was a knockout event with a sixteen-man draw from the start. This meant that a guy who had played over his head at one or two majors and qualified for the Grand Slam Cup was looking at a payday he was unlikely ever to see again.
The surface at the GS Cup was fast carpet, but I got mired down in three-set battles that I was lucky to win. I took out one guy who was lucky to be there (Russia’s Andrei Cherkasov), one who would emerge as my chief Wimbledon rival (Goran Ivanisevic), and my childhood rival—and the only guy from my Golden Generation to have won a Grand Slam title at that stage—Michael Chang. That brought me to the final against Brad Gilbert.
Gilbert, who went on to become more famous as Andre Agassi’s coach and a television commentator than he had been as a player, was renowned for, as the title of his own book put it, winning ugly. Unlike McEnroe, Brad found nothing obscene about the money and played his heart out to get to the final. But I never had much trouble with guys who played ugly and won in straights.
That year ended okay, and it prefigured the roller-coaster ride I would take in 1991. There were two reasons for my fluctuating results, and I could control one but not the other. My game was still developing. My serve-and-volley game was reliable, but I had great and not-so-great days with my return game (especially on fast surfaces), and with my ground strokes. That was the part I couldn’t control. The part that I could’ve controlled had to do with commitment—the desire to play my best and leave it all out there, win or lose, every time I stepped on the court.
Winning the Open had dramatically improved my lifestyle. I could eat in the best restaurants and play golf wherever I wanted, and was catered to by people, including complete strangers, in whatever I wanted. Materially I was comfortable, but I was also uneasy in my own skin. At the same time, the pressure that came along with being a U.S. Open champ—the guy who suddenly had a bull’s-eye on his back—was very quietly and slowly wearing on me. I became a little sullen and withdrawn. I resented the expectations that people had of me.
Although I missed the Australian Open, I started 1991 on a pretty good note at my old standby tournament, the Pro Indoor in Philly. I made it to the final, notching up another win over McEnroe, but Lendl, perhaps still stung by my win over him at Flushing Meadows, wore me down and beat me in five sets in the final. I made it out of the second round in just one tournament between the end of Philadelphia and Wimbledon, and that was a relatively minor event in Orlando. Even there, I lost in the semis to Derrick Rostagno, one of those guys who was occasionally a giant-killer but never played consistently well against his peers.
I stank the joint out at the big warm-up for Wimbledon, the tournament at London’s Queen’s Club. I lost to barely known Mark Keil in straights in the first round. Although I bagged a semi at Manchester I was beaten by Goran Ivanisevic. At Wimbledon, I crashed in the second round, and by then I just wanted to get off the grass and away from London as fast as I could. The truth was that grass baffled and frustrated me, even though I was theoretically groomed to be a guy who would play like four-time Wimbledon champ and grass-court wizard Rod Laver.
The cure for my grass-court blues was right on the horizon, though, because the American hard-court season starts right after Wimbledon. I always liked the laid-back atmosphere at those events, and I was first and foremost a hard-court player. I tore it up in the summer, getting a little revenge for a spring that you didn’t have to be Sam Sampras to call “lousy.” In the three big summer events I entered—all of them basically tune-ups for the U.S. Open—I made three finals and won two. I beat Brad Gilbert in Los Angeles and Boris Becker at Indianapolis. At Cincinnati, the biggest of those three events, though, I lost to the tricky southpaw Guy Forget. But I was in good shape for the Open.
I got off to a great start at Flushing Meadows, with Joe Brandi by my side. I gave up just five games to a good fast-court player, Cristo van Rensburg. I was clubbing Wayne Ferreira into submission in the second round when he retired with an injury. I dropped a tiebreaker set in my next match, and a poorly played first set in the fourth round to a talented but overshadowed American of my own generation, David Wheaton. All the while, though, the pressure was mounting. I was the defending champion, and I was coming to understand something: the greatest challenge in my sport is defending a major championship. Period. Everyone is gunning for you.
All the pressure was quietly building, and I carried it into my quarterfinal match with Jim Courier; it was on my back like a ton of bricks. When we met that day, the friendship between Jim and me was already cooling down. Our gifted generation was emerging, and we were becoming rivals. Michael Chang had, surprisingly, set the bar for all of us when he became the first to win a Grand Slam (the French Open in 1989; Michael was just seventeen). I was next, in 1990. Andre made the third final of his career at Roland Garros in 1991, and that’s where Jim made his move, inflicting another bitter and unexpected loss on Andre. So Jim, Michael, and I each had a major, Andre had been to three finals, and from then on it would be every man for himself. Each of us was trying to carve out his niche, and looking to separate from the pack. Trying to sustain a friendship under those intensely competitive circumstances would have been a sham, and we all knew it.
I felt anxious about my match with Jim, even though I had tagged him in straights in two of the three big hard-court events that summer. I was a little shaky and tight in the early going; my nerves were getting the better of me. I also chose to play Jim from the baseline, which was a mistake necessitated by my poor serving. By contrast, Jim was highly focused and on top of his ground game. I won just two games in the first set. I lost the next two in tiebreakers, 7–4 and 7–5, respectively. As I said in the interview afterward, “I felt like I was on my back foot and he was on his front foot. I certainly wasn’t going out there to try and lose, but today, not serving well, I had to stay back a little too much, and he was wearing me down from the backcourt.”
Still, it’s not like I folded up in those tiebreakers. I was struggling with my serve, and I made more than two dozen backhand errors. In a larger way, I was just co
nfused and writhing from the pressure. Another comment I made in that fateful press conference shows just how lost I was: “. . . There was a lot of pressure involved. I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s not exactly like a release, but now I won’t have to be that thing that everyone was talking about and looking at and criticizing. It’s over, it’s done with, and now I can just go back to being myself.”
Even I am surprised today at how bitter and defensive that sounded. What’s worse, another sentence I uttered during the press conference would haunt me for a long time to come. At one point, I admitted, “I feel like a ton of bricks has been lifted off my shoulders.” Jim followed me into the interview room, and when my comment was related to him, he carefully replied in that low-key way of his: “There are a lot of guys out there wishing they had that load of bricks on their shoulders.”
That was all the press needed; they were off and running, and I was embroiled in the first real controversy of my career. I was able to avoid the blowback from my comments the day after I made them because, since I wasn’t entered in the doubles, I just left town as soon as possible after my loss. But in New York over the next few days, reporters sought out player after player, looking for analyses of my comments as they worked on stories about my character.
One guy who called me out was Jimmy Connors, who was still in New York because he was in the midst of that great late-career run that captured the imagination of the entire nation. That was both good and bad luck for me. Jimmy’s heroics had become the main story of the Open, so that took the heat off me. On the other hand, Jimmy’s own reaction to my words was broadcast from a huge bully pulpit. In a good example of standard-issue Connors self-promotion, he said, “Here I am almost forty years old and busting my hump and these young guys are happy to be losing. I don’t know about these young kids anymore. . . .”