by Pete Sampras
Bridgette wasn’t exactly barefoot and pregnant. Still, we had gotten married shortly after she finished The Wedding Planner, and her film career at the time was rising—dramatically. A short while later she was totally out of her career loop, sitting around a house in London, and dealing with morning sickness, while I was gone all day, struggling with my tennis, and stressing out about it when I was at home.
That schmuck Huber probably just liked that remark. He probably thought it sounded cool, or it might get him a laugh. The guy could have said I should throw my rackets off a cliff after that performance at Wimbledon and jumped after them, and I couldn’t have cared less. But what he did say got to me. It made me livid. I told myself, Someday, I’m going to see that motherf#$@&%r again.
If I had to find some crazy, even remotely positive thing in all this, it would be that the hardship brought Bridgette and me even closer, in that it was testing both of us in a kind of marital trial by fire. If we got through it, Bridgette and I would appreciate each other that much more. Over the next days, we talked—we talked a lot—and I was never one to talk much. We acted like a family. We circled the wagons.
I realized that despite Jose Higueras’s great abilities, I wasn’t getting what I needed coachingwise. He had been up front with me; he was at a stage in life when, after the intensity of his relationship with Jim Courier, he wouldn’t ever get so emotionally vested in a player again. But what was I going to do? I couldn’t go back to Paul, not after cutting him loose the way I had. He had moved on, he had another job.
Bridgette and I kept talking about these things, and the “R” word became part of our dialogue. The debate was building inside me, and it all came to a head one night while we were lying around in bed. It occurred to me that maybe I was spinning my wheels, making life miserable for both of us, when we had so much to celebrate and be happy about. Thinking aloud, I asked myself: “Is it still worth it? What else do I have to achieve in tennis? Why should I put us through all this?” Bridgette just looked at me and said, “You’re my husband, and I love you. I don’t care what you do, but promise me one thing—when you decide to quit, when you do go out, promise me that you’ll do it on your own terms.”
That comment immediately put everything in perspective for me. It was like a huge weight was lifted off me, and the future looked less clouded. Some of the turbulence I’d been feeling melted away. I said, “You’re right. I need to relax here and just get back to work. First thing, let’s figure out this coaching situation.”
The next morning, I got up and called the one guy I had left. I put my pride and fear aside and dialed up Paul Annacone.
Paul didn’t say a word about the past; he just said he would do it, and could probably sort it out with the USTA, for whom he had been working. If the conversation had gone any other way, or if either of us ended up feeling weird about the situation, that might have been it for me. I had nowhere else to turn. Within days, we figured out a plan of attack for the summer. The one thing I could do to show my appreciation to Paul was offer him a serious commitment of my own: I agreed to hire him for two years, although it was hard to imagine that I would continue playing for that long—especially if things didn’t work out.
We went back to the basics in our first training sessions shortly after Wimbledon. Paul lifted my spirits from the get-go. It was great to hear his voice again, and to tap into his way of thinking. It may sound crazy, but to hear Tim Gullikson say, with a sly grin and a twinkle in his eye, that my serve down the middle was like a Green Bay Packers power sweep, that meant something. And to hear Paul say he wanted me to go and impose myself on my rivals, that I should remember that I was Pete Sampras and they were not, that meant something, too. It meant more than I had imagined it would.
It may sound like I just wanted to get stroked, but there was something else in play. I worked so hard to suppress my own emotions, and to stay levelheaded, that it was extremely valuable to see that someone else—someone I trusted, who knew the game, and who had always been square with me—could still get emotional about my tennis. No matter how selfish tennis players are, it’s also true that they spend a lot of their lives playing for others—for coaches, for parents, for spouses. Paul showed great faith in my game and that inspired me.
At the Canadian Open, I lost to Tommy Haas, a solid top-five guy at the time, in a third-set tiebreaker. At Cincinnati, I lost in the second round to Wayne Arthurs, the southpaw Aussie throwback, again in a third-set breaker. There’s nothing wrong with your game when you’re getting to third-set tiebreakers; the only thing lacking was my ability to make that final, confident push to finish off an opponent. But I was getting my self-assurance back, one stroke at a time.
But by then, the “R” word was firmly established as part of the dialogue about my career. It came up in every single press conference. I don’t think the media should ever press a player on the retirement issue, at least not when he’s struggling. It’s almost an insult. But it’s also an easy sound bite, and a tool for getting a reaction out of a player. I guess some of those guys just figure, Heck, let me take a shot—I’ve got a heck of a story if Pete says, “Yeah, as a matter of fact I’m retired as of now because you suggested it. . . . Why couldn’t I see it myself?” Such fishing expeditions cost a reporter nothing, but they can exact a toll on a player.
But it wasn’t just the press raising the “R” word. Ever since my loss to Lleyton Hewitt in that Open final in 2001, more and more players were weighing in on the issue. I was hardly surprised when Yevgeny Kafelnikov said I should retire, because Yevgeny was a pretty out-there dude. He was one of the first guys to buy a jet, which was a pretty extravagant thing for a guy who wasn’t a regular winner at majors. He later told me that he once landed in an Australian airport without bothering to get clearance. When the plane touched down, there were police cars and SWAT team types all over the place. Yevgeny seemed to get a big kick out of that.
Yevgeny also bragged about how smart he was, getting his prize money in cash. He seemed to enjoy throwing his dough around. He once boasted about having dropped fifty thousand dollars on lottery tickets—at one pop. After leaving the tour, he turned up as a pro poker player. But back when we were both playing, our regular, good-natured exchange in the locker room consisted of him asking when I would retire, so he could win a few more Grand Slams, and me answering that I’d keep playing as long as he did, just to keep him from getting those majors.
In my last tune-up before the U.S. Open at a small tournament on Long Island, I lost a tight three-setter in the first round to the French player Paul-Henri Mathieu. I said in the ensuing press conference that I felt I had a good shot at the Open, I felt I might even win it. One of the guys in the room laughed, out loud. I started to get up from my chair. I wanted to go and punch the prick in the face. But I got hold of myself, swallowed back my pride, and sank back into my chair. I patiently answered the rest of the questions put to me.
I won my first match at the Open, beating Albert Portas pretty handily. After the match, Ian O’Connor, a reporter with the Journal News of Westchester, New York, came into the locker room to give me a surprising heads-up. He had called Pete Fischer during the match, and Fischer had pretty much trashed me, using words like “atrocious” to describe the way I’d played. Ian felt bad, but he wanted to both warn me and ask if I had any reaction to Fischer’s comments.
I hadn’t been in touch with Pete Fischer since around the time of his trial. He sometimes wrote to me from jail. The letters were increasingly long, rambling, and all but impossible to read because Fischer’s handwriting was so bad. I tried to wade through some of them, but gave up quickly. I never answered him.
I’d come face-to-face with Pete only once since he was released from jail, and that was at the Los Angeles tournament. I was making my way along a path, avoiding eye contact (if you make eye contact with people, you never get where you’re going because everyone wants to talk, get an autograph, take a picture), when suddenly Pete just
materialized in front of me, stepping in my way.
I was startled. I just looked at him and said something inane like, “Hey, it’s Pete Fischer!” That was it. I just kept walking. But I was a little rattled; it was like an apparition, coming back to haunt me. When I played my match that evening, I easily blocked out the knowledge that Fischer was probably up in the stands, watching. It was weird. As a little kid, I used to get so nervous, knowing he was watching. I wanted so much to live up to the standard he expected. But this time, there was no reaction or emotion, no feeling at all. If he was up in those stands, he was just some other guy, watching Pete Sampras play a tennis match.
Not long after that, I got a few more letters. I glanced at them and saw that they were very critical of my tennis. Again, I ignored them. I figured maybe he wrote them because he was angry that I never replied to his previous letters, or showed any interest in maintaining contact with him.
When O’Connor filled me in and told me how negative Fischer had been, I got angry. It was a low blow at a time when I was down. I thought, You motherf#$@&%r . . . After all I’ve done for you, supporting you, giving you money, and now you’re just constantly taking shots at me. That’s it. I’m done. No more contact—at all.
Looking back on Pete’s impact on my career, I feel some ambivalence about the credit he always gets. I don’t want to undervalue him or anyone else involved in shaping my game. But Pete loved to position himself as a mad genius—the guy who had created the tennis version of Frankenstein’s monster. And that’s an overstatement. Fischer was an important figure in my life, all right, and a strong force in my development. But genius? I don’t know.
Pete has worked with a number of other people since my time with him, and nothing much came of any of them. He worked with a girl named Alexandra Stevenson, loudly proclaiming her “The Next Martina Navratilova.” It was a familiar boast from the guy who had proclaimed me “The Next Laver.” But Alexandra didn’t pan out. I’ll never dispute that Pete handled my development very well; a lot of other coaches, in similar circumstances, might have blown it. But at the end of the day, it’s always the player swinging the racket. It’s the player who has to live with the short- and long-term pressures of the quest to win, to excel. Fischer was less like a genius than the guy who catches a world-record fish. He may be an excellent fisherman, but there are a lot of those out there. He also happened to get lucky—once.
I had another bizarre incident to deal with shortly after the Fischer interview, and it became a big story early in the U.S. Open. After winning his second-round match to earn a spot opposite me, Greg Rusedski popped off in his press conference, saying I was no longer the same player as in the past. He suggested that I was a step slower, and he thought he had a pretty good shot against me.
Of course, the press threw that right out there when I met with them, and I famously answered that Greg was a guy with issues—in fact, I said, “Greg’s issues have issues.” That went over big—the press loves trash talk. But what the hell. Rusedski was a cocky guy who seemed arrogant and rubbed many people the wrong way.
Rusedski was born and raised in Canada, but once he got onto the pro radar he took advantage of his mother’s British citizenship and emigrated to London. England, after all, was desperate to have quality players to call its own, and didn’t much care how they got there as long as they had that U.K. passport. So this big, raw-boned, hard-serving Canadian kid moved to England and within weeks he’d decked himself out in a Union Jack headband and mastered this heavy British accent. He went around saying “telly” instead of “TV” and “petrol” instead of “gas.” Usually when Greg said things I just shrugged and said, “Whatever.” He was a funny character, and he presented a pretty broad target. So I took a shot.
I have to hand it to Greg, he subsequently pushed me to the limit. I’d won my first two matches at the Open decisively, but I needed every bit of confidence I could muster to stop him 6–4 in the fifth. I was lucky to have won two of my sets in tiebreakers against one of the hardest-serving guys in the business. Surviving that serving contest on the fast courts of New York was a confidence booster, because it reminded me of enduring all those Wimbledon matches with Goran Ivanisevic, or indoor battles with Boris Becker. It felt awful good afterward.
Despite all the turbulence and controversy I was dealing with, I didn’t play the Open feeling any anger. Nor did I feel I had a point to prove. Down deep, those coals were burning, but I was focused on the task at hand. I was fit. I felt good. I had been written off, but that only makes someone like me more dangerous. I didn’t fantasize about walking into those press conferences and saying, “I told you so,” and in my mind little tiffs like the one I had with Rusedski bordered on comedy rather than high drama. As that Open played out, it was about one thing and one thing only for me: I wanted one more major. I had one more major in me; I knew that. That’s what had kept me going, and why all that other stuff fell away so easily.
I don’t really know why I felt so confident and calm, or why I needed a last Grand Slam so badly. It wasn’t like I needed another major; I had the record. It wasn’t like I hadn’t passed the trial by fire at the U.S. Open; I’d bagged a few titles there. It wasn’t like I told myself that I wanted to win one for Bridgette—I’d done that in a way that would be hard to top, when she sat in the guest box at Wimbledon and watched me break Emerson’s record. It was just that some crazy conviction inside me said I had one more Slam to go. There’s a ham actor in every player, and I wanted to have one last scene that brought down the house.
I felt good after the Rusedski match. Tommy Haas was playing great tennis that summer, but I beat him in a very close four-setter. Next came a guy I felt comfortable playing, young Andy Roddick. He’d tagged me once, but he played a straightforward game, and not too many guys who played that way scared me when I was in peak form. I lost just nine games to Andy. More important, it was a fast match that didn’t wear me down—something I welcomed at that quarterfinal stage. I then put away surprise semifinalist Sjeng Schalken in another short match. I was back in the U.S. Open final, this time in much better shape than I had been the previous year.
At 4 P.M. on a calm and bright Sunday afternoon in early September, I looked across the net and saw the same person who had been there twelve years earlier, almost to the day, when I played my first Grand Slam final: Andre Agassi.
The Andre I saw in 2002 was someone very different from the kid I had seen in 1990, and it went well beyond the fact that the multicolored mullet had become a shiny bald head, and that lime green costume was now a fairly plain, conservative shorts-and-shirt tennis kit. I saw a seasoned, confident, multiple Grand Slam champion who was in full command of his game—a game that could hurt me. This was no stranger. This was my career rival. This was the yin to my yang.
Over time and through rivalry, though, our identities blurred a little and parts of our personalities had jumped from one to the other, like sparks sometimes do across two wires. We had a lot of shared history now. The sharp edges had been worn down and the contrasts muted. We were elder statesmen, celebrated champions, co-guests of honor at the Big Moment one more time. In many ways we were just a couple of nearly worn-out tennis players looking for one last shot at glory.
We were the oldest pair of finalists in the American Grand Slam in thirty-two years—I was thirty-one, Andre was thirty-two. We were no longer kids who, in different ways, resisted the responsibility that came with our talent and threw in the towel if you pushed them hard enough. We both had more to be proud of than ashamed about, but that wouldn’t take the sting out of the loss one of us was going to experience in the 2002 U.S. Open final.
I had no sentimental thoughts or reveries going into the final with Andre; I didn’t think at the time that it might be my last official match. There were no revenge or vindication motifs in my mind, no desire to gloat, no emotional moments spent contemplating my career or how I had arrived at another Grand Slam final. It was all about the moment for me,
it was all about the tennis we would play over the next two or three hours, and that was always how I liked it best.
The atmosphere was electric; the entire crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium seemed to expect something special. I always had a taste for big occasions, and I couldn’t ask for much more than this. I rolled through the first two sets with some of the best tennis I had played in years, while Andre got off to a slow start. He was in immediate disarray, trying to cope with my pace and the pressure I put on his service games. I was coming very close to the level I hit in my 1999 Wimbledon meeting with Andre. The New York Times reporter Selena Roberts wrote that I was “popping out aces like a Pez dispenser.”
In the third set, Andre finally got his bearings and we settled into a slugging match. When I served at 2–3, Andre made a furious charge and had three break points, but I managed to fend them off. We struggled on, and I felt a little heaviness creeping into my legs, while Andre slowly ramped up his game, shot by shot. At 5–6, Andre got to my serve again. I fended off one set point, but he earned another one. I drove a forehand volley into the net and suddenly Andre was back in the hunt, down two sets to one and encouraged by my apparent fatigue. The lights of the stadium were already on; each of our faces was sheened with sweat.
Andre would later say that one of the tricky things about playing me was that any opponent could play great against me and lose 6–4, 7–5—or play terribly and lose 6–4, 7–5. It was a reference to the way I often cruised along, unconcerned about the score or what the other guy was doing, because I felt I would hold serve and, as the set wore on, get my inevitable opportunities to break. Something like that happened in our last match. I knew I had to rally to keep the match from going to five sets, and I managed to lift my game to stop the bleeding. Once I was at an acceptable level, I awaited my chances.
We held serve to 3–4 in the fourth set, but then the script went awry and instead of holding and putting pressure on Andre’s next service game, I found myself down two break points. If Andre converted either break point to go up 5–3, we definitely would go to a fifth set. And Andre was looking stronger as the match went on. I managed to fight off the break points to even it, 4–all.