by Pete Sampras
When I returned to the States, my family told me that Fischer wanted to get together with me, to explain his situation. I reluctantly consented and suggested to Pete that we meet for lunch at a café in Torrance, Mimi’s. The meeting was uncomfortable. I didn’t want to believe the accusations against him, but I also didn’t have the guts to look him in the eye and demand that he tell me the truth. Everything he said suggested that the charges were false, but he acted a little strange during lunch.
Once he became comfortable, he told me that while driving to Mammoth in the recent past, he had found “Mother Mary”—I presumed he meant the New Testament Mary, the mother of Jesus. This was odd because Pete was a Jew and a committed atheist—you wouldn’t find a more rational, black-and-white man on the planet. Just as strikingly, he was actually divulging feelings, something he had never, ever done before. I didn’t know what to do with all of this.
I think if Pete were still in my life, I would have needed more definite assurance of his innocence. But while I felt I owed him a certain amount of support, it was only because of the past. I supported him as a friend, and I even lent him some money (which he did eventually pay back). I know he went to our house for dinner a few times before his trial, but by then I was back on the road, playing, so my family had to bear the brunt of that situation. Thankfully, the press didn’t make a big deal out of the scandal. I was in no way connected to it, and it had been years since I had a relationship of any kind with Fischer.
This much was certain: Pete’s life was in ruins, and he didn’t have many friends left. Neither my parents nor my siblings talked much about the case; we all just kind of supported Pete through the dark times as the trial loomed and his fate hung in the balance. Once the shock of being charged wore off, some of Fischer’s signature arrogance crept back in. When the trial rolled around, my father attended for a few days. I admired that in Dad; he could very easily have cut Fischer off and left him to swing in the breeze.
The trial ended when Pete accepted a plea bargain that reduced his jail term to six years, of which he served four before being released. He told my dad that he took the plea bargain because he didn’t trust his fate to “twelve people from Norwalk” (the California site of the pending trial). I guess Fischer was saying that he didn’t think he could get a fair trial in such a conservative place. It was an odd tack to take for a man who claimed he was innocent and who had so much to lose in the event of a conviction. In addition to doing hard time, he would lose his license to practice medicine and leave himself open to civil litigation. A guilty plea destroyed the life he had built just as effectively as a guilty verdict. The only difference would be in the amount of time he served.
Right before Fischer went to jail, he spent a little time at our house. His fiancée was still in the picture, but she would soon leave him. He talked about jail in an almost upbeat way, saying crazy things, like he was going to learn French, use the time to expand his horizons. Meanwhile, we were thinking, Pete, whatever the truth is, you’re going to prison. Your life is ruined. It’s going to be horrible. How could you get yourself into this?
After Fischer went to jail, he started writing me letters. I could barely read his handwriting in those long, rambling communications. They were often written after he watched a match I played. I read a few of them, or parts of them. He was very complimentary. He reiterated that I was going to make people forget Laver, just writing the same stuff he used to say.
The European clay-court season had been a disaster, the Pete Fischer scandal had thrown me for a loop, and Jonas Bjorkman of Sweden had bounced me out of the big Queen’s Club tournament. But Wimbledon . . . Wimbledon was a different story. It had become a place of refuge for me, and I really needed that in ’97.
I rolled through my first three opponents at Wimbledon, giving up an average of a shade over ten games per five-set match, meaning I was winning three games to one against my average opponent. Although I had struggled on grass in the past and would struggle on it again in the future, in 1997 the game just felt . . . easy. It felt so easy that when I beat my rival, Wimbledon hero Boris Becker, in the quarterfinals, he made a surprising declaration up at the net when we shook hands. He told me he had just played his last Wimbledon final—he was retiring.
I was stunned by that; I had no idea he was even considering it, although by then he was slightly past his prime. I learned later that it was just his emotions getting the better of him; apparently, I had played such a commanding match that he figured, “Why bother?” I was happy when, come 1998, he changed his mind and was back at Wimbledon.
Wimbledon is a place full of complex rituals and traditions, but the thing I most cherish about the tournament is the simplicity of tennis on grass. It’s easy and natural. It’s a no-frills undertaking played on a clean, elegant, quiet stage. That remained true even after the “grass tennis is boring” debate led Wimbledon to slow the game by changing the balls and grass mix. Although that process was ongoing in the second half of my career, I hardly noticed. I played the same serve-based, attacking tennis from the beginning to the end of my Wimbledon career.
I like that grass-court tennis is (or was) serve-based, and I’m not just saying that out of self-interest. Historically, the game was always serve-based—the serve is the most important stroke in tennis. It’s also the one over which you have total control, because the ball isn’t moving when you start your shot. The entire game, including the scoring system, is built around the idea that having the serve gives you a big advantage.
It doesn’t matter how good your backhand or forehand is, there’s only one way to win a set or match. You have to break serve more often than you are broken. This is still true in the tiebreaker era given that the only way to win the tiebreaker is by scoring at least one “minibreak”—that is, winning at least one more point off your opponent’s serve than he gets off yours. It’s a bit of a shame that in this era of slower courts, great serving is not as well rewarded as it has been in the past, and that the coaches and players today overlook the extent to which a player with a great serve can build his entire game around the shot. To me, a match with a lot of service breaks is as unsatisfying as a match with none, because a great match is only supposed to have a handful of decisive moments (as entertaining as all the other points may be). It’s just like a book or movie is supposed to have just a handful of key scenes or plot twists.
Although tennis on grass came easily to me, it was also mentally debilitating. I served and volleyed and returned, biding my time, trying to stay focused and positive. I tried to be ready for the moment when a little daylight came filtering through the crack in the door. Grass-court tennis between power players was often compared to a crapshoot. (In the 1991 Wimbledon semifinal between Michael Stich and Stefan Edberg, there was just one service break in the entire match, and the guy whose serve was broken, Stich, ended up winning the match! The scores were 4–6, 7–6, 7–6, 7–6.) But winning was anything but a roll of the dice. A better analogy is that grass-court tennis in my era was like an old-fashioned Western gunfight—you didn’t want to be the one to blink, tip your next move, or fumble as you dragged leather.
On grass, momentum often shifted in the blink of an eye. No points anywhere else were big points in quite the way they were at Wimbledon, because you often got only two or three swings of the racket with which to win a set. At Wimbledon, a match might be determined by a sloppy second serve that leads to a service break early in the first or second set. You paid heavily for your mistakes on grass. Breaks were rare and precious, and I really felt the heat when I gave one away—and it was really dispiriting to blow a chance to score one.
People sometimes said that the “problem” with grass-court tennis during the years I dominated at Wimbledon was that a big server could just serve any opponent off the court. But the reality is that winning at Wimbledon was never just about serving big. The biggest servers in the game didn’t win Wimbledon; the great servers who did take the title often won other majo
rs as well. Goran Ivanisevic could serve me off the court anywhere, he was scary to play. Yet he only won one title at Wimbledon, and that was very late in his career. Roscoe Tanner, one of the most deadly servers of the Open era, got to just one Wimbledon final, and lost to Björn Borg.
Actually, Wimbledon has produced fewer one-slam wonders than the serve-neutralizing, theoretically “level playing field” of Roland Garros clay. The bottom line is that the big titles are almost always won by great players, because they have superior execution (everyone has great basic strokes) and the strongest hearts and minds, and they find ways to win.
Todd Woodbridge had a career singles run at Wimbledon in 1997, making it all the way to the semifinals. Although he is one of the all-time doubles greats, Todd had trouble translating his skill to singles. He had great technique and finesse, and he was very crafty. But he didn’t make a lot of power and he didn’t move great (in doubles, he only had to worry about half the court). Todd’s weaknesses played right into my strengths, and I had little trouble with him. Once again, I found myself facing Cédric Pioline in the final.
I felt for Cédric, because even though he had played a previous Grand Slam final against me at the U.S. Open, this was different—no tournament feels as historic as Wimbledon. There was no pressure on him; I was the prohibitive favorite. His best chance lay in going out there and just letting it rip—what did he have to lose? But that’s easier said than done.
Once again, as in our U.S. Open final, Cédric seemed overwhelmed. I won the first two sets, giving up just six games. I was on top of my game and in touch with the Gift. It seemed like just minutes after the start of the match, yet there I was, serving at 5–4 in the third. I found myself thinking, Wow, this is too easy. I don’t mean to be disrespectful toward Cédric. It was just that the match was on my racket, far sooner and with far less difficulty than I expected.
I had this flash as I got within two points of the match: Man, this is so big, what I’m doing—this is it. Wimbledon. It’s huge. . . . And I was immediately overcome by this feeling of insecurity. I panicked, like someone having an anxiety attack. I thought, Is it really supposed to be so easy? Am I missing something here? Is this all going to turn out to be some kind of joke or hoax, on me? In a very real, visceral way, it was like a great dream, the kind in which you feel omnipotent, but a part of you knows that at any moment you might wake up and destroy the illusion.
But I didn’t wake. I coasted across the finish line in straight sets, giving up a total of ten games. It was a fitting end to one of the least eventful or significant of my Wimbledon tournaments. I didn’t have any epic battles or showdowns with career rivals. Yet my performance at Wimbledon in 1997 may have been my best, in terms of having full control of my game and using it to maximum advantage for the longest sustained period. One stat said it all: I served 118 games, and held 116 times.
I had every reason to feel confident about the U.S. Open a couple of months later. I was playing some of the most dominating tennis of my career, and I had a great draw for the year’s last major. For starters, I sliced my way through three relative unknowns—Todd Larkham, Patrick Baur, and Alex Rădulescu, losing just thirty games (numbers almost identical to my previous Wimbledon stats) as I cruised into the fourth round and came up against the mercurial Czech player Petr Korda.
It rained on and off on the day we would play. It was a herky-jerky match in every sense, including the way we played. I was playing okay—I won the first set in a tiebreaker. But then I lost the next two sets, reviving just in time to win the fourth 6–3. When I rolled to a 3–1 lead in the fifth, I think everyone (myself included, to be honest) thought we had passed the turning point. But I have to give Korda credit. He hung in there. He was right at my side, hitting his unpredictable and sometimes dazzling winners each time I threatened to open a bigger lead. He broke me back, forced the tiebreaker, and won it 7–3 to take the match.
That was one of Korda’s signature, streaky performances, on a day when my own nerves were a bit frazzled and thin—mostly because of the somber, gray atmosphere and the annoying rain delays. I had two majors already that year, and taking the U.S. title would have made ’97 my best year, productionwise. And to rub salt in the wound, Korda didn’t even play his next match because, he said, he was sick. Like almost all top players, if I was going to lose I wanted it to be to the guy who would win the tournament.
Korda would go on to win the Australian Open in 1998; it would be his lone Grand Slam title. But shortly thereafter, he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in what was the first high-profile drug suspension in my era. He was subsequently fined and suspended from the game.
Steroid abuse wasn’t a big story in tennis until many years later, so I’m no expert on the subject. But I believe that 99 percent of the tennis players are, and always have been, clean. It isn’t in the nature of most players to mess with drugs—tennis players who make the tour level are shaped in an information-rich environment, usually by people who are sophisticated and knowledgeable; they aren’t naive or ignorant of the long-term dangers posed by performance-enhancing drugs the way some young players might be in some of the more popular sports.
Also, tennis is less about strength than quickness, so the premium on building muscle isn’t that high. I don’t think the NBA has a big performance-enhancing-drug problem either, because basketball and tennis are both more about quickness and good hands rather than about big muscles and strength. But I’ve come to learn that performance-enhancing drugs do have some subtle benefits for a tennis player. They enable him to train hard and recover faster—that is, to build a fitness base and stroking discipline with stamina they don’t naturally possess. Still, guys who practice the most, or who have the most stamina, aren’t the big winners.
I’m not naturally a suspicious person, but one thing that troubles me whenever there’s a doping controversy is the way guys always have the excuses: I drank my wife’s medication by mistake; the doctor wrote the wrong prescription; the testing procedure was flawed. In other words, the dog always eats the homework. I really have nothing but contempt for guys who get caught and try to wriggle out of it that way. I took a lot of pills in my time, including all kinds of vitamins, and always went to a doctor to have them checked out to make sure they were legal. And that was well before doping raised its head as a serious issue. It can be done. I’m tired of the excuses you keep hearing, and see no gray area—it’s up to you to test clean; if you test positive for steroids, you should be penalized, unless there is some clear and overwhelming mitigating circumstance. End of story.
The other thing for me was that I could never cheat. I just couldn’t justify taking an unfair or illegal advantage, and doing so would have messed with my mind so much that it would have wiped out any good that drugs might have done. Even if I was sure other guys were doing it, I just wouldn’t take steroids for ethical reasons. Not even if everyone around me egged me on, telling me that everyone else was on them, not even if it meant the difference between keeping up with the pack or falling behind. I realize it’s easy for me to take that high ground, but I believe that’s how I would have felt if presented with the option.
Here’s something else. It’s rarely the top guys who pay for the sins of the dopers. One thing drugs can’t do is make you a Wimbledon champion, or give you a game to beat Roger Federer. The guys who really get hurt are the players in the doper’s peer group, where boosting your ranking by just a few notches, or going an extra round or two at some events, can make a big difference, ranking- and money-wise. Whatever Korda ingested during that period, it didn’t catapult him to the top. He was always in the mix near the top of the game, and I had struggled with him in the past (four years earlier, he’d beaten me in the Grand Slam Cup 13–11 in the fifth).
I realize now that doping might have played a role in our U.S. Open encounter (Korda was, after all, caught less than a year later). It was a long, debilitating match, played under strange conditions, in which a litt
le extra strength might have provided him with a critical advantage. We’ll never know, because only Petr knows the truth about what he was—or wasn’t—doing. I bear him no ill will, and just write that loss off as one of those things.
After that U.S. Open disappointment, I played one of my best Davis Cup matches ever, against a strong, young Australian team on the hard courts in Rock Creek Park, Washington, D.C. I beat Mark Philippoussis and Pat Rafter in my two singles to lead the United States into the final against Sweden. We would lose that final, partly because I had to retire with a leg injury in the middle of my opening match against Magnus Larsson. I did, however, win the two big year-end events, the Grand Slam Cup and the ATP World Championships. In the process, I couldn’t help notice that I was seeing more new faces all the time—guys like Patrick Rafter, Greg Rusedski, and Carlos Moya. . . . I was beginning to feel like a veteran.
I finished as number one for the fifth year in a row in 1997, tying Jimmy Connors’s record. My mission for the coming year, regardless of my parallel quest to break Roy Emerson’s record for Grand Slam singles titles (with ten, I trailed him by two at the end of ’97), was to become the only man ever to finish number one for six years running. Unfortunately, I got off to a pretty slow start.
I had an easy draw at the Australian Open, and didn’t lose a set until the quarters, where I lost a match I’d just as soon forget to Karol Kucera. A few weeks later, I won just six games off of a resurgent Andre Agassi in the big indoor tournament in San Jose. In the two major events of the late winter, Indian Wells and Miami, I took losses from Tomas Muster and Wayne Ferreira, respectively. Both of them were in early rounds. I had just one tournament win before the tour moved to Europe for the spring, and that was at my old standby—Philadelphia.