A Champion's Mind - Pete Sampras

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