By Jerry Magee, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
August 26, 2003
He was always a person apart, a champion who shared of himself on tennis courts but away from them was somehow removed. You didn't hear from Pete Sampras how he was feeling or what he wanted from life.
At the end for him as a player, you also didn't hear why, at 32, a U.S. Open champion, he was stepping away from a game he had commanded. Oh, he would say he wanted a more settled existence than traipsing around the world represents. Nothing more.
Yesterday I put this question to Ted Schroeder, who is in his 80s but in another time had to deal with the same question Sampras answered yesterday when he showed up at the National Tennis Center to confirm that, yes, he has retired.
"Why?" I asked Schroeder, the La Jollan who was a tennis champion himself. "Why does a man forsake the game at a time when he is a leading figure in it?"
"You want to play," Schroeder said, "but you're afraid you can't win."
In 1949, Schroeder said he was beset by such thoughts. "I made the wrong decision," he said. He chose to continue playing. In the Davis Cup competition in 1950 – the Davis Cup was bigger then than it is now, and it was everything to Schroeder – he lost two singles matches and was on a losing doubles tandem in a tie against Australia at Forest Hills.
"I played a year when I should have quit," Schroeder acknowledged.
It should be remembered that before Sampras made his stunning drive to the U.S. Open championship a year ago, finishing with a 6-3, 6-4, 5-7, 6-4 flourish against Andre Agassi, he had not won a tournament in two years. Even before Sampras' conquest of Agassi, one could hear at the National Tennis Center that this tournament was going to be it for Sampras, that he would not be competing again. And he hasn't.
For pure physical skills, I don't think tennis has had a player to match Sampras. He looked to me like a guy who would make a pretty good small forward. You have seen him jump for those leaping overheads of his, haven't you? The man can sky. Coordination? He had it. A man could not serve as he has unless he had athleticism of the highest sort. He would compete, too. His body language, with the slumped shoulders and the hangdog look, could be deceiving. No milquetoast is going to win 14 Grand Slam titles.
For all that, to Schroeder, Sampras didn't get from his career what he might have.
"He could have been '15' a game better," Schroeder said. For the uninitiated, "15" is the numerical designation for the first point in a game. Unless it goes to deuce, a game is four points. What Schroeder was saying was that Sampras could have been 25 percent better than he was.
"He never made the sacrifices required to get into top condition," Schroeder said.
Then how did Sampras excel as he did?
"He was that much the best player," Schroeder said.
Schroeder's own game was based on his fitness and on a tactical approach in which he always was pressing forward, positioning himself at the net and daring his opponents to pass him. He did all right with it. He had a 7-0 match record at Wimbledon and he was 20-4 in the U.S. Nationals.
"The Williams sisters know only about 20 percent of how to play," Schroeder said. "If they ever learned 50 percent, nobody would beat them for 25 years, or as long as they wanted to play, because of their physiques and their power."
This is not meant as a critique of Sampras, I should emphasize. Every champion should be like him. For 14 years, he occupied the stage that his sport represents, and never was there an iota of taint associated with his activities, either on or off the tennis courts.
Some say he is boring. Well, he didn't bare his backside, as Jimmy Connors once did, or rage at officials, as John McEnroe did. Sampras played tennis and later he would talk about it. I found him very gracious in his dealings with the media.
His accomplishments place him with Rod Laver, a Carlsbad resident, as the ranking players of tennis' open era, which began in 1968. I would place him slightly behind the redhead from Australia. Laver twice executed the Grand Slam, sweeping the Australian, French, Wimbledon and U.S. championships as an amateur in 1962, then running the table a second time seven years later as a professional. From 1963, when he turned professional, to '67, Laver was not permitted to play the Grand Slam tournaments, which were restricted to amateurs.
Sampras never won at Roland Garros, the only blight in a career in which he scored twice in the Australian Open, seven times at Wimbledon (including seven of eight years from 1993 through 2000) and five times at the U.S Open.
Stunningly, he held the No. 1 men's ranking at the conclusion of six consecutive seasons. For 286 weeks, he was ranked No. 1 (Ivan Lendl was No. 1 for 270 weeks). Sampras was 71-9 in his 14 appearances in the U.S. event. All the while, according to tennis historian Bud Collins, Sampras was dealing with a hereditary blood problem called thalassemia, which results in chronic anemia.
Throughout Sampras' career, his stamina was suspect, a byproduct of his blood problem. One can remember the afternoon at the National Tennis Center in 1988 when he "hit the wall," according to a tournament physician, and had to be treated after being outplayed in five sets by Jaime Yzaga of Peru. There also was the evening in 1996 when he became nauseous in the fifth set of a duel against Alex Corretja, yet stayed in the match by executing a lunging volley. By this point, Sampras appeared utterly spent, but the match became his when his rival from Spain double faulted.
To my knowledge, Sampras never has sought to make his illness a matter of public notice. He wouldn't.