A Champion's Mind - Pete Sampras

comment I made in that fateful press conference shows just how lost I was: “. . . There was a lot of
pressure involved. I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s not exactly like a release, but now I won’t
have to be that thing that everyone was talking about and looking at and criticizing. It’s over, it’s done
with, and now I can just go back to being myself.”
Even I am surprised today at how bitter and defensive that sounded. What’s worse, another sentence I
uttered during the press conference would haunt me for a long time to come. At one point, I admitted, “I
feel like a ton of bricks has been lifted off my shoulders.” Jim followed me into the interview room, and
when my comment was related to him, he carefully replied in that low-key way of his: “There are a lot of
guys out there wishing they had that load of bricks on their shoulders.”
That was all the press needed; they were off and running, and I was embroiled in the first real
controversy of my career. I was able to avoid the blowback from my comments the day after I made them
because, since I wasn’t entered in the doubles, I just left town as soon as possible after my loss. But in
New York over the next few days, reporters sought out player after player, looking for analyses of my
comments as they worked on stories about my character.
One guy who called me out was Jimmy Connors, who was still in New York because he was in the
midst of that great late-career run that captured the imagination of the entire nation. That was both good
and bad luck for me. Jimmy’s heroics had become the main story of the Open, so that took the heat off me.
On the other hand, Jimmy’s own reaction to my words was broadcast from a huge bully pulpit. In a good
example of standard-issue Connors self-promotion, he said, “Here I am almost forty years old and busting
my hump and these young guys are happy to be losing. I don’t know about these young kids anymore. . . .”
When the comment reached me, it stung. I was always sensitive to what Jimmy said about me and my
whole generation. As much as we—meaning the “stars”—say we don’t care about what people say, we
do. And one way or another, we hear everything. Jimmy had been reasonably friendly toward me, but I
always felt that he didn’t go out of his way to give anyone in my generation credit. We were stealing his
thunder. He would just say things like, “I brought the ball to the five-yard line, it’s up to them to take it in.
. . .” I understood, even then. Jimmy was never close to his peers; he saw everyone on the planet as his
competitor, and he was on his way out of the game, clinging to the last rays of glory. I was fine with that;
his clinging didn’t bother me.
Jimmy’s comment added fuel to the fire, and the incident took on a life of its own. The story was no
longer just about what happened at the Open and what I said about it, it was about what Jimmy Connors
had said, and then it became about how I felt about what Connors had said, and so forth. . . . That’s the
media snowball effect.
It’s not easy being called out by a great player, but there are ways you can rationalize anything. So in
my own mind, I had a problem—or I didn’t have a problem. My loss to Courier was symptomatic of
something—or it was just a tough loss. I had exposed a deep fault line in my competitive makeup—or I
was just a little out of sorts and had bad luck in the tiebreakers. . . . I wasn’t certain what was going on.
But the controversy touched on some realities that, one way or the other, would have to be faced, and
how I responded would have a shaping influence on my career. At the time, though, I kind of hid from the
significances. Many years later, Jimmy and I happened to be sitting a few rows apart at a Los Angeles
Lakers game, and I decided to reach out to him. I got his attention, and we exchanged pleasantries. I asked
for his telephone number and called him a few days later. We scheduled a round of golf, played it, and that
was the end of our communication. It may be surprising, but Ivan Lendl, who many people thought was a
cold fish, was a stronger rival as well as a better, warmer friend and role model than Jimmy.
One odd thing about the “ton of bricks” incident is that all I had really done was tell the truth about how
I felt, but you all know that line Jack Nicholson famously said in A Few Good Men, “You want the truth?
You can’t handle the truth!” I felt it was a little like that in New York in 1991. I gave the press a sincere,
open statement about what I was going through, and I got hammered for it.