A Champion’s Mind

by Pete Sampras

  After three straight 7–5 sets, Corretja won the fourth 6–4. As we slogged through the early games of the fifth set, I started drinking Coke. I needed something—a pick-me-up, a little sugar, a little caffeine—and I needed it pretty badly. Underneath it all, I was aware that this was my last chance to win a major in 1996, and it was slipping away. That self-inflicted pressure made things worse. I was bruised, battered, and exhausted, but I was still able to put one foot in front of the other. I was able to keep fighting.

  I hit a wall late in the fifth and felt like I was going to die. But I knew in the back of my mind that I had one chance to win—one chance at salvation. This was the U.S. Open, and that meant that you played a fifth-set tiebreaker. I kept telling myself to hang in there and just get to the tiebreaker; the match could not go on forever. I hung on and got to the breaker, but by then my head was spinning and things were getting a little blurry around the edges. I then told myself that whatever else happened, I could get through this. It could be as short as seven points. It was just a tiebreaker; I had played a million of them before, and none of them lasted forever.

  At 1–1 in the tiebreaker, all the pain and distress and nervous energy got to me and I got sick. My back was cramping and my legs felt like they were made of wood, and not entirely under my own control. I remember playing a tough point and all of a sudden I had this realization: Holy shit, I’m going to throw up. I’m going to puke—in front of the whole friggin’ world!

  It was coming up and there was no way I would stop it. I staggered back from the baseline, and up came the Coke and acid and whatever else—thankfully, it wasn’t much—that was still in my stomach. By the time it actually happened, though, I didn’t care. I didn’t really hear or see anything. I didn’t care how I looked or what anyone thought. I was in my own little world of pain, and as bad as it was, I wasn’t going to quit the match.

  When you throw up like that, and it’s happened to me in training sessions, it’s a sure sign that you took yourself to the absolute limit—the point of no return. But I needed to push on, I had to get through a few more points. I was staggering around, my senses dulled and my body aching. I remember playing a hard point and getting through it, and then it would take me two points to recover. I was aware enough to think of only one or two things, strategywise. I had to put all I had into the serve and, if I saw a forehand, I had to let the sucker ride.

  We lurched along to 6–6 in the tiebreaker, with me serving. It was time to decide things. I went for broke on my first serve end and missed. My second serve went wide to his forehand and, to my everlasting good fortune, Alex guessed backhand. There was nobody home. The ace brought me to match point. By that stage, the atmosphere was totally supercharged. People were leaning over the railings in the stadium, hanging into the court, screaming encouragement at me. I didn’t know it, but all over the United States and the world, things in many places came to an utter standstill as people got sucked into the drama of it all.

  And then Alex blinked. He did the one inexcusable thing, under the circumstances: he double-faulted at match point. I won without having to take that additional step—one that I might not have been capable of making.

  I left the court completely spent, dehydrated, disorientated, and vaguely aware that I had made a spectacle of myself. I went right into the doctor’s office under the stands in Louis Armstrong Stadium and collapsed. They immediately hooked me up to an IV bag. Paul went to gather my things from the locker room, and when we finally opened the door to leave the doctor’s office, I saw a sea of faces, members of the press who had staked out the room.

  But I didn’t need to talk to the press that day; they already had their story and it was one that more or less wrote itself. The Corretja match quickly became engraved in everyone’s mind as my defining moment—my warrior moment. And I was lucky, because other players have won matches like that, but few have done it at such a conspicuous, crucial moment. If I had played that very same match against Alex in the second round at Monte Carlo instead of at the U.S. Open, I doubt it would have had anything like the same impact. It might have been a footnote in the roundup section of most U.S. newspapers.

  But it had occurred in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open, a Grand Slam event and my native major, in the prime-time slot right after Labor Day when everybody was back from vacation, under the gaze of the international press corps and before an international television audience. So it became something special, something the entire world saw and everyone commented on.

  The New York crowd had been a tough nut for me. I’m not sure they were ever all that fond of me or my game. They were accustomed to blustery, bombastic showmen who were great competitors, but not necessarily elegant or classic players. It’s hard to beat a pair of acts called Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe. Sure, I had this easy, natural game. I had won half a dozen majors. But I wasn’t very Broadway. I wasn’t very flamboyant. They weren’t sure what I really had in the way of grit, and didn’t understand the degree to which I was a fighter. Unlike Connors, I had made no widely disseminated remarks about leaving my guts out there for them. Being typically skeptical New Yorkers, they had never been sure what they were buying.

  After the Corretja match, they were finally sold.

  I went on to win the U.S. Open (my eighth major) of 1996 but I was troubled by how I got sick on the court, and how weak and ill I felt. I thought back to the ulcer that went undiagnosed earlier in my career, and wondered if something else might be wrong. Was this a physical problem, or a mental one related to the stress I put myself under when I decided to try to shoot the moon in tennis?

  It had freaked me out that I went all the way to the Open before I bagged my slam. I had set a high bar for myself in previous years, and you never really want to lower it—you want it to stay in the same place, or go higher. Maybe I was getting a little obsessive and unrealistic; maybe I was setting myself up for an inevitable fall. But I couldn’t help myself. I would finish number one for the fourth consecutive year, just one behind Jimmy Connors’s record of five. I realized I wanted that record but, unlike, say, winning Wimbledon or the Davis Cup, getting it meant two more years of struggle. Two more years of, first of all, playing enough tournaments to keep myself in the hunt.

  I talked all this over with Paul; I told him what I wanted to accomplish. We decided that I needed to take a few steps back, think over my mental and physical approach to the game. I needed to pace myself, without losing drive or intensity. I had to embrace the mission, but not put too much pressure on myself, because that would tear me up inside. Was it possible to reconcile all those conflicting desires? We didn’t really have an answer, but we agreed that the first thing I needed to do was get myself checked out, physically. In the back of my mind was a word that I feared a little, and had chosen not to deal with: thalassemia.

  As I’ve noted, this mild form of anemia afflicts people of Mediterranean descent. It causes fatigue, especially in the heat, and I’d certainly battled listlessness and loss of desire on some very hot days—including during my seminal first win at Wimbledon. But you know, nobody wants to go to a doctor and be told that he’s got something wrong, something that would justify underperforming. I knew that thalassemia occurred in my family. My mother, Georgia, and sister Stella have it, although the Sampras men do not. I chose to ignore the possibility that I suffered from it until right after the Corretja match.

  Within days of testing, blood work revealed that my red blood cell count was abnormally low—a sure sign that I was suffering from the condition. It wasn’t life-threatening, but it could certainly affect my on-court performance. However, it was easily addressed. I had to start taking iron supplements and ramp up my intake of meat, eggs, and other protein.

  This would have been just something else to deal with until Tom Tebbutt, an enterprising journalist and tennis nut from Toronto, broke a story in Tennis Week, a small bimonthly magazine published out of New York City. He speculated that I suffered from . . . thalassemia
. I have to hand it to Tom; he did his homework. I was a little annoyed, but I had to be impressed. Somehow he had heard about the disorder and started poking around. He had a doctor and some other folks confirm that thalassemia could easily have been a factor in my breakdown in the Corretja match. Then he just connected the dots and nailed me.

  I don’t recall that Tom ever tried to confirm the story with me before it was published, but that was okay. I would have denied it—as I did after the story came out. I felt bad; I tried never to flat-out lie, but I also wasn’t about to admit to having it. I just didn’t want my rivals to have that information and take comfort in or motivation out of it in any matches I might play in the future. In fact, the first person I eventually admitted it to was Peter Bodo—my collaborator for this book—in an interview for Tennis magazine that we did in September of 2000.

  But despite this eventful end of the Grand Slam season, 1996 had one last spectacular moment in store: my match with Boris Becker in the final of the year-end ATP World Championships. By then, Boris and I had a lot of history and a lot of respect for each other. Now I had to play him indoors, in Hanover, Germany, in a huge match before a German crowd that adored him. The circumstances would inspire Boris, I knew that. While I felt that our games were similar and that I did most things just a hair better, I also knew that if he got on a roll on his home soil he could take me out.

  The atmosphere in the arena in Hanover the night Boris and I played was electric. Outside, it was bitterly cold, but inside, the arena was brightly lit, warm, packed with fans, and sizzling with anticipation. One feature I enjoyed about that event and venue was the way the players were introduced. Instead of emerging right onto the court from a tunnel, as at most events, we walked together down to the sunken court from street level, which was the top of the arena. And we came down the same aisle as a ticket holder going to one of the better courtside seats.

  The entire arena was dark but for a spotlight on us. Boris and I took that long walk down to the court with fans screaming on either side. The roar of the crowd was deafening; I got goose bumps from the sheer intensity of the moment, and thought this must be exactly what it’s like for a couple of heavyweight fighters wading through the crowd to take the ring for a title fight. The flashbulbs were exploding all around, flesh pressed in on all sides.

  Boris returned well from the start, which was always a huge factor for him. And his serve was popping. I knew right off the bat that it was going to be a very tough, long night. But I was serving big, too, and if the fast indoor carpet was ideal for Boris (hey, we were in Germany), it suited me just as well. Boris broke me to win the first set; I narrowly averted disaster by winning the next two sets, although I won them only in tiebreakers. It had to be demoralizing for him that I hadn’t broken his serve and he had broken mine, yet he was down two sets to one.

  By the same token, my two sets to one lead didn’t mean all that much to me. Would I ever break the guy? I wondered. What if my luck in the tiebreakers turned? But as the fourth set developed, I sniffed a few chances. I got the feeling that the match was right there, at my fingertips. A shot here and there and I could break. But Boris held me at bay and tenaciously held his serve all the way to the fourth-set tiebreaker. And when he won it to force a fifth set, the place erupted. It was like a volcano, spewing out this intense, guttural chant: Bor-is, Bor-is, Bor-is . . .

  We went into the fifth, and the situation was starting to get to me, mentally. I had yet to break serve, and now we were even. We continued as before—each man holding serve until we got to 4–4. At that point, the door opened a hair for me. I got him breakpoint down on his serve, and he responded by going big—he hit a heavy serve to my backhand but I caught it perfectly and drove it back, up the line, for a winner—and my first break. As relieved as I felt, it was equally heartbreaking for Boris. When I reached match point in the next game, we had a point that reminded me of that great, long point Andre and I played in the U.S. Open final of 1995. It ended with Boris missing a backhand and just like that, it was over.

  We had a long embrace at the net, and some kind words for each other. At that point our lungs were still burning and we were panting. Physically, it was one of the most punishing, demanding matches I’ve ever played. That’s how it was with Boris—he always manhandled you, and most players simply couldn’t take the physical beating. The German fans were great—I think they loved it: they saw two of the great players who dominated in the 1990s playing power tennis at a very high level at the same time, in a wonderful atmosphere. And they got a great if slightly anticlimatic ending.

  I watched that match on DVD a few years later, and felt it was as good and exciting as I had remembered. It was an epic battle, bitterly and boldly fought in an attractive glow of sportsmanship and, I think, respect for the game. It was a peak moment in my career. People in Germany and the United States still contact me about that match, or mention it in conversation. It may have been the closest thing I ever played to an ultimate match—not necessarily in terms of execution, but as an example of a transcendent tennis moment.

  When the match was over, I allowed myself a special treat. I grabbed Paul Annacone and we hopped on a private plane, going from Hanover to London, and then on the Concorde to JFK. Back then, I had a time-share in a jet, and my own plane was waiting in New York; it took me right to Tampa. My reward was to get home quickly and comfortably.

  I won the Australian Open to launch my 1997 campaign, a pleasant surprise given the way I felt about the tournament. I took extra pride in the win for a couple of reasons. In the round of 16, I played Dominik Hrbaty in a five-set war that I eventually won 6–4. The on-court temperature during that match hit 135 degrees Fahrenheit. To day, with the “extreme heat” policy in effect, they would have stopped the match, or closed the roof on Rod Laver Arena. Given what had happened at the U.S. Open just months earlier in my match with Alex Corretja, I was glad to survive that test of stamina in the infernal Aussie heat.

  It was also encouraging for me that while the Australian major is a hard-court tournament, in ’97 it was dominated by slow-court players. After Hrbaty, I beat, in order, Al Costa, Tomas Muster, and Carlos Moya, to take the title. Each of those guys had won—or would win—Roland Garros. That gave me hope—maybe my fate at Roland Garros, the one slam that continued to elude me, wasn’t sealed quite yet.

  Back in the States after my successful campaign down under, I added two tournament wins to make it a pretty good little roll, although I lost in the first round at Indian Wells. That was another tournament, like the Australian Open, where the conditions were less attractive to me than you might think. While I won the event a number of times, and Indian Wells was pretty much my “home” tournament, geographically, I didn’t like the combination of wind, dry air, and ball pressure that you had in the Southern California desert. I always felt like everything flew on me, like I wasn’t quite in control. I preferred Miami, where the humidity made the air thicker, but I felt like I had greater control.

  I went to Europe in pretty good shape, but I didn’t win a single match in three tries going into the French Open. What’s worse, in Rome I got a phone call from my sister Stella that really threw me for a loop. Pete Fischer, the coach who had shaped and orchestrated my development, had been arrested and charged with child molestation. One of his former patients had stepped forward to bring charges (Pete, you’ll remember, was an endocrinologist with Kaiser Permanente, specializing in growth-related issues in young boys). The news freaked me out. I’d lost Vitas Gerulaitis and Tim Gullikson in a short span of time, and now my original coach was in disgrace. It was a repugnant charge, and I wasn’t sure what to think. Could it really be true? With the bombshell weighing on my mind, I failed to win a match on clay until I survived for two rounds at Roland Garros before falling to Magnus Norman.

  The charges against Pete Fischer really baffled me. Although Pete was a single guy, he usually had, and frequently talked about, girlfriends. He was actually engaged at the tim
e he was arrested. Nothing in Pete’s life or habits suggested that he was anything but a typical guy. He fit in fine in the locker room. He was brainy, he worked hard, and led a very disciplined, straight-and-narrow sort of life. I’d never seen him act out of character or in a way that indicated that he was not what he appeared to be. Sure, he was arrogant, but that was neither here nor there.

  I’d spent a lot of time at Pete’s house, usually with my brother, Gus, when I was a kid. I never had an inkling that he was capable of this kind of crime. But as I thought about things and reviewed my childhood experience, I saw some red flags. Pete always surrounded himself with boys; he was around them day and night, whether at his job, at the Kramer Club, or at his home. He sometimes organized ski trips to Mammoth Mountain. I went on one of those trips, and it was all boys. But it was a good mix, with some older boys along, too—kids who would be more on guard about sexual predators.

  My parents trusted Pete, and until the time we parted ways over money, nothing unseemly ever happened to harm our relationship with him. I was sure of one thing—I’d always been special in Pete’s eyes. I think he saw me as different from other kids and maybe that was something that kept any other impulses he may have had in check. There was also my dad. He was savvy, and hands-on as a parent, if not a tennis coach. It would have been very risky for Fischer to try anything inappropriate.

  By the time Fischer was arrested, he was long gone from my life. I didn’t feel obliged to call him, and I didn’t see him until I returned from Europe. My father, though, spoke with Pete periodically, and stood by him. I think it was out of sheer loyalty for the role Fischer had played in our family and in my career. My father really appreciated that. In turn, Pete turned to my family for support when the scandal broke. He resolutely clung to his claim of innocence, and my dad treated him as if he was innocent until proven guilty.