Pete Sampras

Pete Sampras: The Quiet Assassin of Grass

On a September afternoon in 2002, a 31-year-old whose ranking had slid and whose career was widely assumed to be finished beat Andre Agassi in four sets to win the US Open. It was his fourteenth major title, and he never played another tour match — the only man in the Open Era to win the final Grand Slam tournament he entered. He announced his retirement almost a year later, in August 2003, at the tournament he had just declined to defend. It was a characteristically undemonstrative exit for a player whose entire method was to give away nothing.

A Racket in the Basement

Born on 12 August 1971 in Washington, D.C., Sampras was the third child of Soterios "Sammy" Sampras and Georgia, née Vroustouris. The family was Greek Orthodox and attended church regularly; his father was born in the United States to a Greek father, Costas Sampras, and a Polish-Jewish mother, Sarah Steinberg, who had emigrated from Sellasia, near Sparta, at nineteen. At three, Pete found a tennis racket in the basement. In 1978 the family moved to Palos Verdes, California, where year-round play was possible.

His idol was Rod Laver, whom he met and played with at eleven. As a teenager he trained under Robert Lansdorp, who drilled him to drive through the ball rather than pile on extreme topspin — the origin of the flat, low, punishing groundstrokes that would later look almost old-fashioned beside the heavy spin of the players who followed him.

The Backhand Decision

The single most consequential act of coaching in Sampras's life came from Dr Peter Fischer, who coached him until 1989 and converted his double-handed backhand to a single-handed one. The stated reason was Wimbledon: a one-handed backhand suited grass, suited coming forward, suited the game Fischer thought his pupil would eventually play. It was a long-range bet made on a boy, and it cost him results in the short term. It also produced seven Wimbledon titles.

Nineteen Years, Twenty-Eight Days

Sampras turned professional in 1988 at sixteen, losing his first match to Sammy Giammalva Jr at the Ebel US Pro Indoor in Philadelphia and finishing the year ranked No. 97, up from 893. Two years later he won the 1990 US Open at nineteen years and twenty-eight days, the youngest men's singles champion in the tournament's history, beating Thomas Muster, Ivan Lendl, John McEnroe and Agassi in succession. That is a draw that would flatter a veteran; he was a teenager who had not previously reached a major final.

In April 1993 he reached world No. 1, and won his first Wimbledon and his second US Open that year, along with an ATP record of more than 1,000 aces in a season. He held the top ranking for 286 weeks in total, third-most of all time until Roger Federer passed him in 2012, and finished six consecutive years as year-end No. 1, from 1993 to 1998 — an ATP record. He also collected five Tour Finals titles and two Grand Slam Cups.

Seven Finals, Seven Wimbledons

Sampras won fourteen major singles titles, a record at his retirement until Federer surpassed it in 2009: seven Wimbledons (1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000), five US Opens (1990, 1993, 1995, 1996, 2002) and two Australian Opens (1994, 1997). His final record in majors was 14–4. He played seven Wimbledon finals and won all seven, the only man in the Open Era to do so. "In a lot of ways," he said, "I felt like I was born to win Wimbledon."

The hole in the record is Roland Garros, where he never got past the semi-final, reached once in 1996. Clay slowed his serve, blunted the flat drives and rewarded exactly the patience his game was designed to avoid needing.

Sampras and Agassi

The defining rivalry of 1990s men's tennis was a stylistic argument: the supreme server against the greatest returner of the era. Sampras led 20–14 overall and 9–7 in finals. They met in the 1990 US Open final, Sampras winning in straight sets; Agassi took their 1992 French Open quarter-final; Sampras won a five-set Wimbledon quarter-final in 1993 as the newly minted No. 1. In 1995 they played five times, Sampras taking the Indian Wells and US Open finals. His straight-sets win in the 1999 Wimbledon final has been described as one of the greatest performances in a Wimbledon final. And their last meeting was that 2002 US Open final — the last match Sampras ever played.

The Serve

"Pistol Pete" was an all-court player built around serve-and-volley, and his serve is routinely rated among the finest in the sport's history: powerful, precise, and — the underrated part — heavily disguised on both first and second deliveries, so that returners could not read direction from the toss. He produced aces at the moments where the point mattered most. He hit winners off both wings with pace and a flat trajectory, and used a single racket model, the Wilson Pro Staff Original, for his entire career. "When you have two guys that serve extremely big and volley well," he said of his matches with Boris Becker, "you aren't going to have long rallies." He achieved all of this while carrying β-thalassemia minor, a genetic trait that can cause mild anaemia, though it did not significantly affect his performance.

Why Pete Is Called a Genius

Sampras's case rests on physical craft and competitive temperament rather than intellect, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The craft is real and specific: a service motion so economical and so well disguised that opponents could not anticipate placement, married to the willingness to play the highest-risk shot in tennis — the second-serve ace — at the exact moments when a normal player retreats into safety. The genius, if the word applies, lives in that decision-making under pressure, and in the compounding effect of a coach's structural bet on a one-handed backhand made a decade before it paid off at Wimbledon.

The testimony from peers is unusually strong. Roy Emerson, whose thirty-year record Sampras broke in 2000, said: "Sampras is the greatest of all time, and I have to give him a pat on the back." John McEnroe called him the toughest opponent he ever played. Boris Becker, after losing the 1995 Wimbledon final, surrendered the territory outright: "I can't say that this is my place anymore. I used to own it." In 1997 a panel of a hundred players, journalists and tournament directors named him the best player of the previous twenty-five years.

The counter-case is the clay. A player who never reached a French Open final has an incomplete claim to universal mastery, and Sampras's game was narrower than that of the man who eventually overtook his records. He was a specialist of extraordinary depth rather than a universalist — which is a genius of execution, not of range.

Legacy

He married the actress and former Miss Teen USA Bridgette Wilson on 30 September 2000; they have two sons, born in 2002 and 2005, and both retired from their careers to raise them in Lake Sherwood, California, away from the public eye. He was ATP Player of the Year and ITF World Champion in six consecutive years from 1993 to 1998, was named the US Olympic Committee's Sportsman of the Year in 1997 — the first tennis player to receive it — took GQ's Individual Athlete Award in 2000, was named the greatest player of 1965–2005 by *Tennis* magazine, entered the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2007, and was ranked the third-greatest male player of all time by the Tennis Channel in 2012. In 2009 he sat in the stands at Wimbledon and watched Federer break his record of fourteen. He applauded.