by Pete Sampras
I served the first game of the fifth set and led for the first time in the entire battle. The desperate straits I was in earlier had kept me distracted and preoccupied, but now that I had a bit of breathing room, things started to unravel. As I sat in my chair on the change of ends, I started thinking about Tim; I had a flashback to the hospital, and how vulnerable and sad Tim had looked. Moments later, I fell apart.
I had all this stuff pent up inside of me, all of these powerful emotions, and I had kept them bottled up. They needed to come out, they demanded to come out, yet it wasn’t like me to let things out—and certainly not during a tennis match. So I didn’t know where to go with those feelings, and what made it even worse was that as I struggled to contain my emotions, I realized how proud Tim would have been about the way I’d clawed my way back into the match.
When we started to work together, I was a so-so competitor, prone to getting discouraged. I wasn’t a great come-from-behind player. But in this tournament alone, I had come back from two-sets-to-none deficits in back-to-back matches, and that had a lot to do with what Tim taught me, the work ethic he impressed on me, the pride he instilled, and the confidence he showed in my game. I could see his face, the eyes lighting up and his lips taking on this sneaky little smile as he told me—how many times he told me this—that my big, flat serve down the T from the ad side was just like the famous Green Bay Packers power sweep.
When Tim first floated that analogy, I just looked at him, puzzled. Maybe even rolled my eyes, wondering what kind of Tim-ism he was going to follow up with. I didn’t know about any famous Packers power sweep. But Tim was from Wisconsin, and a rabid Packers fan. And he told me the punch line with relish: “You know it’s coming, but there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
Tim loved that line; he used it all the time, trying to pump me up before a big match. And there I was, trying not to think about any of that at two-sets-all and 1–0 up in the Australian Open quarterfinals.
Something in me cracked. All these thoughts and feelings came bursting out, the way liquid under pressure eventually blows out if its natural outlet is blocked. I was sobbing on that changeover and my shoulders were heaving. And then I had a sensation that ran contrary to everything I was feeling. Suddenly, it was like I was able to breathe again—to breathe, after not being able to for a long time. It actually felt good.
By the way, there’s a myth about this entire incident, the idea that my breakdown began when a fan yelled out, “Come on, Pete, do it for your coach!” That isn’t true. I didn’t even hear the guy. Anyway, I struggled through the next two games, unable to control my emotions or tears. I tried to go on, as if nothing was wrong, but I couldn’t do it. I had to step back to take a little extra time, try to gather myself. I didn’t want to throw Jim off his game, but by this time he could see that something was wrong, although he didn’t know what it was.
At 1–1, after the first or second point of that game, I had another minibreakdown, taking a little extra time before getting ready to play the next point. By then, everyone in the stadium knew I was going through something unusual and emotional. It was very quiet, I was struggling to pull it together, and then I heard Jim’s voice from across the court: “Are you okay, Pete? If you want, we can come back and do this tomorrow.”
I thought he said that with a little bit of that soft, sarcastic tone that Jim sometimes has—a tone that I knew well. I wasn’t sure how to take his remark. The fans actually laughed about it. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I felt he wasn’t happy about the way things were going. Maybe he thought I was cramping, and trying to buy time. Worse yet, maybe he thought I was stalling, hoping that the lack of activity would worsen his own cramps. But I didn’t even know about his cramps until much later.
Jim’s remark threw me off and it irked me. It also snapped me out of my awful state. I had to regroup, fast. Suddenly, instead of thinking about Tim, or struggling to fight back tears and welling emotions, I knew I needed to win the match, and I needed to win it right then and there. Jim had let me off the hook, and I sensed that his nerves were fraying; I had to stop wandering around like some sort of Hamlet, as much reason as I had to be distracted.
That was probably the longest ten minutes of my life, all of it taking place on this stage where almost twenty thousand people, including an international television audience, could see me writhing like a bug under a microscope. It was excruciating, but Jim’s crack snapped me back into reality, and I responded well. I broke Jim in the eighth game of the set and made it stick; the match fell just two minutes short of the four-hour mark. As Jim himself said later, “At four–three in the fifth, either one of us could have collapsed, but he was the one left standing. Pete’s pretty determined, and certainly at a Grand Slam he’s going to do whatever’s in his power to win.”
I’ve never asked Jim just how he meant that remark about coming back to finish “tomorrow.” We’ve talked about it through the media, and he knows that I took it as a caustic jibe, even though he has said that it was a spontaneous and sincere reaction to the unusual situation. One day, I guess, we could talk it all through, but that isn’t even necessary. I never held a grudge about it. It was a tough situation loaded with a lot of stress for both of us. We were both big boys, we were intensely competitive, and sometimes big boys play rough.
After the match, I felt really embarrassed and very exposed. You know that feeling when you just want to cry and you need to talk to a family member? That’s where I was. I needed to hear my mother’s voice, and when I did, it kind of melted me. I called home and Mom answered. She tends to lapse into a compassionate drawl when one of us kids needs support, and I clearly remember how sad she sounded as she said, “Aw, Petey. I saw what happened. Are you okay?”
I just broke down and wept again.
Tim learned the result of the match while he was still en route to Chicago, changing planes in Los Angeles. He told reporters who met him at LAX, “I didn’t see the match, and I didn’t leave Australia by choice. If I’m not healthy, I can’t help him. Pete deserves a lot of credit for coming back against a great player like Jim. I’m very proud of him.”
The following day, the match and all the histrionics that went with it were all over the newspapers—the incident was the talk of Melbourne, and probably New York, Paris, and London. Walking onto the grounds, and in the locker room, I could feel people looking at me and talking about me, and all the attention made me intensely uneasy. I told Paul I had never felt so vulnerable in all my life.
If there was ever a tournament that I seemed destined to win, it was that 1995 Australian Open. But it doesn’t always work that way. I beat Michael Chang in the semifinals, but ended up losing the final to Andre Agassi despite winning the first set. It was Andre’s second consecutive Grand Slam title (and the only time in our careers that he beat me in a major final). I was emotionally drained by the day of the final, but that’s no excuse. I’ve never blamed Andre for ruining the storybook ending, either. You live by the sword and you die by the sword.
After the tournament, some of the things I heard and read really bothered me. People were writing things like, “See, Pete Sampras really is human . . . he shows emotion!” or “It took the illness of his coach to bring out emotions in Pete Sampras and make him seem human . . .” I suppose that some of those comments were meant to be flattering. Some certainly were wrapped in stories that were otherwise positive descriptions of how I had managed to beat Jim. But I had the uncomfortable feeling that some commentators really did believe my effort not to show emotion meant I didn’t have emotions, at least not to a sufficient degree. The inference seemed obvious: in some vague way I was less “human.” Coupled with the Wimbledon “Sampras is boring” theme, this was a heavy one-two punch at my personality and nature.
I guess it was a sign of the times. Things in tennis and society had changed an awful lot since I was a little kid. It seemed that people increasingly craved sensation and they were also much more prone t
o letting it all hang out—letting their feelings be known, pursuing their goals with abandon, without apologies, oblivious to any message they were sending or how it reflected on them. This was supposed to be more “real” than cultivating discipline and behaving with dignity. In tennis, those floodgates had been flung open by Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe; in their wake, it was all about “personality.” For me, it’s always been about discipline.
Those who wanted me to show more “emotion,” to be more “human,” seemed to discount that there are many different personalities out there, and how they conduct themselves, in private or public, has nothing whatsoever to do with the depth or nature of their emotions—their “feelings.” Actually, I never trusted people who were always talking about their feelings, or expressing their emotions. I don’t think flying off the handle, pandering to sentiment, berating others, making crazy, diva-like demands, or telling people what they want to hear is a sign that you have deeper emotions, stronger feelings, or are more human. You’re just less able to exert self-control, or are more demanding, or more willing to pander or make a horse’s ass of yourself.
After that match with Jim, I often felt that if anyone lacked feeling, it was the people who stated so blithely that it took something close to a public nervous breakdown to prove that I really do have emotions. The match certainly showed that I was emotionally vulnerable, it just took an extraordinary situation to expose it.
I learned in 1995 that life at the top was going to be extremely tough on a permanent, rolling basis. Who could have predicted Vitas’s death—or the sudden illness of Tim? I knew very little about the big issues in life, and those two events rocked me. How was I going to react? By having a pity party? Withdrawing from the line of fire, brooding, letting my results suffer and then crying a river for reporters who could then write about how “human” I was? Tim and I were really getting into a flow when he fell ill; I felt more than anything else I needed to push onward and finish the job we’d started.
The Australian Open of 1995 was a brutal tournament, starting with Tim’s collapse. I was lucky to be leaving Australia in the company of Paul Annacone, who agreed to stay with me until we knew more about Tim’s situation. Shortly after Tim returned to Chicago, a further battery of tests confirmed what everyone most feared. He had brain cancer. The treatment was aggressive chemotherapy and possibly surgery, and the gravity of the situation was obvious. Yet Tim was resolved to beat the disease, and he was going to keep coaching me as long as he humanly could. I was all for that. I believed that keeping him involved would also help keep his spirits up.
I had a few weeks off before my next event, Memphis, and we worked out our plan going forward. Tim would watch as many matches as he could on television, and we would talk strategy over the phone before most of them. Paul would be on hand to help me out with the daily stuff—hitting, getting my rackets strung, booking practice courts, discussing what Tim told either of us. In the beginning this worked all right, but the situation inevitably went downhill as Tim’s condition deteriorated.
Meanwhile, in a development I kept secret from everyone, I was battling physical problems of my own, although they were paltry compared to Tim’s. For more than a year, I had been struggling with bouts of nausea and an inability, at times, to keep food or even water down. The situation started sometime in 1993, and was so aggravated by the spring of 1994 that I was unable to make the start time for the final of the important Key Biscayne tournament, in which I was to play Andre Agassi.
In a gesture I still appreciate, Andre agreed to postpone the scheduled 1 P.M. start of the final for an hour, while I took an intravenous glucose drip. I had been throwing up all morning, which I blamed on the pasta dinner I’d had the night before. The IV did the job, rehydrating me, and I went on to win the final in three sets. At the time, I wanted to believe that the episodes were somehow related to dehydration.
However, the bouts of nausea had started not long after I started taking Indocin to deal with pain in my serving arm. My arm problem probably started with a change Tim and I had made in our practice routine going back a year or longer. Up to then, I rarely served hard in practice, mainly because I just wanted to hit some balls, have some rallies, work up a sweat. Tim felt I needed to do more to keep my most formidable weapon in tip-top shape.
To Tim, serving easy in practice was like a baseball player wasting batting practice on bunting because he felt he was hitting too many home runs. It was nuts. Tim wanted me to keep developing my serve, and felt that if I trained it to work hard I would end up serving even harder, with better consistency, over longer periods of time (in this he was right). He convinced me, and Todd Snyder, the former ATP Tour trainer whom I had hired to work exclusively with me, also agreed that working my serving arm harder posed no long-term danger.
Tim’s hunch was right. My serve improved, and became even more of a weapon. Unfortunately, the increased workload and all the hard serving suddenly did give me arm pain and ultimately a condition sometimes called “dead arm.” My arm ached and throbbed, sometimes in the middle of the night, or during practice or in matches. It was just a dull, throbbing pain, very uncomfortable, like a toothache in my arm. And when it was bad, it affected my service speed and, of course, my enthusiasm and confidence.
I began to take Advil, in combination with the Indocin, a very powerful anti-inflammatory. I took them religiously after practice and matches. Pretty soon I was popping the Indocin and Advil cocktails before matches as a preventative measure. But as I got hooked on the Indocin, I suddenly found myself unable to keep food down. Before my 1994 Wimbledon semifinal with Todd Martin, I drank some water and promptly threw it back up. On the morning of the 1994 Grand Slam Cup final, I woke up feeling sick. I had the dry heaves but tried to force down breakfast anyway, and it came back up. I felt awful.
I was really settling into my number one position by then, however, and I didn’t want to take time off; I wanted to give it the gas, so I just pushed on. Not long after that Key Biscayne match, I went to see my doctor in Tampa, and he ran tests on my upper gastrointestinal tract. It established beyond dispute that I had an ulcer, and the physician thought it was from a combination of stress and the Indocin. He said if I was lucky, and took the right medication, I could be rid of the ulcer in three months. So on top of Vitas’s tragic death and Tim’s sudden illness, now I had a three-pill-a-day regimen to follow.
By February of 1995, it was pretty clear that this was not going to be a routine year. I had a lot on my plate, including Davis Cup. I’d told the USTA that I would be available for the entire campaign, which could be as many as four ties.
Some years the Davis Cup challenge appealed to me, and some years it didn’t. It never had anything to do with money. In fact, the money was lousy by any standard. We would typically get something like fifteen or twenty thousand dollars to play, and if our home ties earned money, we got a little additional revenue in a profit-sharing system. But trust me, it was minimal. Given that a Davis Cup tie is actually a full week’s commitment (sometimes more, if you got there a day or two early), the pay was shockingly low for guys who could pull down four or five times as much for a one-night exhibition.
I understood the unique nature of Davis Cup. I had reasons other than money for running hot and cold on the competition. To win the Davis Cup requires a four-week commitment, which is the equivalent of two Grand Slams. You also aren’t sure in advance who you’re going to play round by round, or where the ties will be held. Fans often are confused by Davis Cup’s unwieldy format and traditions. A number of times, I’d be part of a winning team only to have to explain to well-wishers or even reporters that we didn’t actually win the Davis Cup that day—we’d merely won the tie to advance to the next one, months away. I understand that all that stuff is part of what makes Davis Cup compelling, but I just never fully bought into it.
My attitude might have been different if we had developed a Davis Cup team spirit comparable to that of the present U.S. squad,
with Andy Roddick and James Blake leading. They have great team spirit and camaraderie, but then they aren’t competing against each other for Grand Slam titles. My generation consisted of four Grand Slam champions (Andre, Jim, Michael Chang, and me) who were perennial top-five contenders, and a handful of lesser but still terrific players. We were rivals and competitors, and even though we all got along pretty well, we were always circling each other, sniffing, gauging our next moves. That doesn’t lend itself to creating great team spirit, because most teams rely on a dominant leader (like Roddick), and none of us was inclined to play second fiddle to anyone else.
The comparison between Davis Cup, which struggles to get adequate exposure and public respect, and golf’s hugely successful Ryder Cup is interesting: Ryder Cup is a one-week event played every two years. Davis Cup is an annual event, played in four rounds on a rolling basis in unpredictable places. I wish they would adopt a different Davis Cup model—play it in one place, over a specific period (two weeks would be ideal), and see what happens.
Davis Cup did grow on me (I ended up playing sixteen ties and helped win the Cup twice—that’s a lot more than a casual commitment), but the way my singles career unfolded, Davis Cup became a constant source of tension. I knew that it wasn’t feasible to focus on staying number one, winning majors, and also play a full four-week Davis Cup schedule. It was too much. So some years I committed to Davis Cup, and some years I declined. I skipped 1993 and was part of the 1994 squad that lost in the semifinals.
But there was another subtle factor at play in 1995. That year, my rivalry with Andre Agassi was entering a new peak phase. Just months earlier, at the 1994 U.S. Open, Andre completed his epic journey back from the netherworld of the rankings to become the first unseeded player to win the title. Then he beat me in the Australian Open final to start ’95. People everywhere were dying to see Andre emerge as my rival. That was fine by me; I knew that any player is only as good—especially in the court of public opinion—as the quality of his competition. And Nike, the company that sponsored both of us, was at the head of the parade of people doing everything possible to fire the rivalry.