A Champion's Mind - Pete Sampras

Although I missed the Australian Open, I started 1991 on a pretty good note at my old standby
tournament, the Pro Indoor in Philly. I made it to the final, notching up another win over McEnroe, but
Lendl, perhaps still stung by my win over him at Flushing Meadows, wore me down and beat me in five
sets in the final. I made it out of the second round in just one tournament between the end of Philadelphia
and Wimbledon, and that was a relatively minor event in Orlando. Even there, I lost in the semis to
Derrick Rostagno, one of those guys who was occasionally a giant-killer but never played consistently
well against his peers.
I stank the joint out at the big warm-up for Wimbledon, the tournament at London’s Queen’s Club. I lost
to barely known Mark Keil in straights in the first round. Although I bagged a semi at Manchester I was
beaten by Goran Ivanisevic. At Wimbledon, I crashed in the second round, and by then I just wanted to get
off the grass and away from London as fast as I could. The truth was that grass baffled and frustrated me,
even though I was theoretically groomed to be a guy who would play like four-time Wimbledon champ
and grass-court wizard Rod Laver.
The cure for my grass-court blues was right on the horizon, though, because the American hard-court
season starts right after Wimbledon. I always liked the laid-back atmosphere at those events, and I was
first and foremost a hard-court player. I tore it up in the summer, getting a little revenge for a spring that
you didn’t have to be Sam Sampras to call “lousy.” In the three big summer events I entered—all of them
basically tune-ups for the U.S. Open—I made three finals and won two. I beat Brad Gilbert in Los
Angeles and Boris Becker at Indianapolis. At Cincinnati, the biggest of those three events, though, I lost to
the tricky southpaw Guy Forget. But I was in good shape for the Open.
I got off to a great start at Flushing Meadows, with Joe Brandi by my side. I gave up just five games to
a good fast-court player, Cristo van Rensburg. I was clubbing Wayne Ferreira into submission in the
second round when he retired with an injury. I dropped a tiebreaker set in my next match, and a poorly
played first set in the fourth round to a talented but overshadowed American of my own generation, David
Wheaton. All the while, though, the pressure was mounting. I was the defending champion, and I was
coming to understand something: the greatest challenge in my sport is defending a major championship.
Period. Everyone is gunning for you.
All the pressure was quietly building, and I carried it into my quarterfinal match with Jim Courier; it
was on my back like a ton of bricks. When we met that day, the friendship between Jim and me was
already cooling down. Our gifted generation was emerging, and we were becoming rivals. Michael Chang
had, surprisingly, set the bar for all of us when he became the first to win a Grand Slam (the French Open
in 1989; Michael was just seventeen). I was next, in 1990. Andre made the third final of his career at
Roland Garros in 1991, and that’s where Jim made his move, inflicting another bitter and unexpected loss
on Andre. So Jim, Michael, and I each had a major, Andre had been to three finals, and from then on it
would be every man for himself. Each of us was trying to carve out his niche, and looking to separate
from the pack. Trying to sustain a friendship under those intensely competitive circumstances would have
been a sham, and we all knew it.
I felt anxious about my match with Jim, even though I had tagged him in straights in two of the three big
hard-court events that summer. I was a little shaky and tight in the early going; my nerves were getting the
better of me. I also chose to play Jim from the baseline, which was a mistake necessitated by my poor
serving. By contrast, Jim was highly focused and on top of his ground game. I won just two games in the
first set. I lost the next two in tiebreakers, 7–4 and 7–5, respectively. As I said in the interview afterward,
“I felt like I was on my back foot and he was on his front foot. I certainly wasn’t going out there to try and
lose, but today, not serving well, I had to stay back a little too much, and he was wearing me down from
the backcourt.”
Still, it’s not like I folded up in those tiebreakers. I was struggling with my serve, and I made more than
two dozen backhand errors. In a larger way, I was just confused and writhing from the pressure. Another