A Champion's Mind - Pete Sampras

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.