By Nirmal Shekar, The Hindu
Monday, June 26, 2000
LONDON, JUNE 25. Three days back, during a regular practice session with his friend Tim Henman at the Aorangi Park courts in Wimbledon, Pete Sampras felt a twinge in his back after a fall and abruptly stopped in his track. Never one to push his luck or play a dangerous game of dice with his own over-worked limbs, the great man quickly made a decision, leaving the court for an alleviating rub in the locker room.
Watching Sampras leave the court with an idiosyncratic frown on his face, you somehow seemed convinced that celestial forces were at work to stop history itself in its tracks. While the whole world was talking about Wimbledon 2000 as the platform on which Sampras might celebrate his ascent to the ultimate summit as a Grand Slam champion - winning a record 13th title - here was the genial genius, a few days ahead of the championship, not even sure if his back would hold up through the fortnight.
And to think this was the man who, a year ago in this very championship, played the finest tennis anybody has ever on a grass court to beat an in-form Andre Agassi in straight sets in the final!
Approaching age 29, Sampras may never be able to recapture that piece of sublime magic ever again. And he may not need to, either. If he can do just over half as well as he did on the first Sunday of July 1999, nobody might be able to stop him in the first championship of the new millennium.
This, of course, means that barring the intervention of a suspect back, it might very well take celestial forces - forces not at the beck and call of mere mortals such as Agassi, Mark Philippoussis, Lleyton Hewitt, Patrick Rafter and Richard Krajicek - to deny Sampras next fortnight his place in history as the most successful Grand Slam champion of all time.
No male player has dominated these championships as comprehensively as Sampras - Bjorn Borg, who won five in a row, included. And nobody has ever instilled in opponents such a feeling of utter helplessness as does Sampras on the Wimbledon grass.
In sport there are times when you watch a contest and go back with the distinct feeling of having witnessed two entirely different games. You'd know all about this feeling if you had the privilege to watch Tiger Woods win the recent U.S. Open by a record 15 strokes.
And, surely, you would have had exactly the same feeling if you had watched Sampras take the hottest player of the Tour - Agassi - apart. Agassi was playing great grass court tennis. Sampras was playing something else, stuff not accessible to ordinary mortals.
So what do you - if you were the opponent - do when someone plays at such stratospheric levels. Just grin and bear it, perhaps - as did Woods's colleagues at the U.S.Open, as did Agassi here last year, as did the rest of the pack when the late Aryton Senna was on his magic-on-wheels routine on rain soaked Formula One tracks many years ago, and as did NBA rivals when Michael Jordan single- handedly decided play-off matches.
But, the problem is, sport is a cruel business, and its caprice can consume the very best of `em. The goddess of sport takes great pleasure in dropping its chosen ones from celestial heights to abysmal lows.
Sampras, of course, knows all about this. He will be the last one to imagine that his seventh title here is for the asking. He also knows that time is running out and there are now other priorities in his life - he recently got engaged to a former Miss Team America and Hollywood actress Bridgette Wilson - which might very well affect his focus in the years to come.
The great man opens the centre court proceedings at 2 p.m. on Monday against Jiri Vanek of the Czech Republic. And, back permitting, he may not have to dig too deep until a possible quarterfinal clash with the teenaged Australian Hewitt, who beat him in the Queens final.
Wimbledon chief referee Alan Mills has said that Sampras's physio assured him that nothing was seriously wrong with the champion's back and the decision to suspend practice was only a precaution. Which, of course, is good news for the champion's fans.
For the man who is seeded to play Sampras in the final, arch- rival Andre Agassi, all the good news seems to have dried up recently. Right from the time he won the French Open in 1999 and began his much-publicised romance with Steffi Graf, Agassi was on a roll, right until this year's Australian Open where he beat Sampras in a memorable five set semifinal thriller.
But, since then the Agassi Express has been chugging along rather laboriously and Agassi himself admits that the ``last few months haven't been great for my confidence.'' For all that, with a couple of matches under his belt, Agassi might very well acquire the glow of a champion, although he has been handed out a tough draw with a prospective second round meeting with Todd Martin.
The top two seeds apart, there are only a handful of men who might reasonably expect to win the championship. At the head of this list are Philippoussis and Hewitt - strange indeed that they should have so quickly taken over the mantle from a man who seemed a grass court natural, Rafter.
Philippoussis was a touch unlucky last year when he had to quit after winning the first set against Sampras because of an injury. And this year he will be inspired by the presence of Boris Becker as his advisor.
Becker flew into Paris on his private jet to spend time with Philippoussis during the French Open but the German's expertise will be of greater benefit in these parts. And Philippoussis himself admits that he learnt more about championship tennis in an hour with Becker than he had in six previous years.
Meanwhile, we have learnt in the last two weeks that a slender pony-tailed Davis Cup team-mate of Philippoussis is no push-over on grass. Hewitt has a tremendous attitude, he is one of the finest movers on the court and his return of serve is next only to that of Agassi.
The blond teenager reminds me of the great Bjorn Borg although Hewitt has a long way to go before he can hope to accomplish half as much as the Swede did in his career.
In the third rung, as contenders, one might place men such as Richard Krajicek, Tim Henman and Greg Rusedski. As for the French champion Gustavo Kuerten, his victim Magnus Norman, the Russians Yevgeny Kafelnikov and Marat Safin...well, they might need a giant slice, or two, of luck...of the sort no man has come by in these parts since Jan Kodes in 1973.
Meanwhile, it appears that a few Spanish stars are peeved at Wimbledon's decision to ignore their claims in ranking terms and promote men like Henman, Rusedski, Rafter and Krajicek in the seedings. While, on the face of it, it does appear that the Spaniards - Alex Corretja and Albert Costa - may have a case, it may be ridiculous to say that the Wimbledon Committee may have done it for commercial gain.
For, this is the very committee that chose to ignore Anna Kournikova's claims as a crowd pulling megastar and has seeded only the top 16 ranked players in the women's singles, leaving No. 17 Kournikova out in the open and facing a stiff first round examination against 10th seeded Sandrine Testud of France.
Millions of hearts will be broken should Kournikova - a player who has 18,000 web pages devoted to her on the net and has over 10 million hits on an average day - fail to get past the first round but it will hardly concern any of the genuine contenders for the women's championship.
The confidence of the defending champion Lindsay Davenport may not be at an all-time high but she is a natural on this surface and should fancy her chances even more than Martina Hingis, who has not won a Grand Slam title since January 1999.
Down the rungs, the Williams sisters can be a huge threat and Mary Pierce would like to believe that, at long last, she'd be able to master the slick grass of the All England Club.