A Champion's Mind - Pete Sampras

A Davis Cup squad has two singles players, a number one and a number two, and a doubles team. The
three-day tie begins on Friday, with two singles (pitting the number one from one nation against the
number two from the other). Saturday is doubles-only day. And on Sunday, the “reverse” singles pits the
number one and number two guys from each nation against each other. A draw determines who plays the
first match (or “rubber”) of a tie, and from there on a formula takes care of the rest.
I was our number one singles player, but the draw determined that France’s number one (Forget) would
open the proceedings against our number two, Andre. I watched from the bench, cheering Andre on as he
took care of business to put us up 1–0. I was impressed and slightly intimidated by the crowd. The place
held just over seven thousand, but it was sold out, so the overall effect was of a huge, deafening crowd.
My moment of reckoning was rapidly approaching; I was up next, the U.S. number one against France’s
number two, Leconte.
What happened was, I froze. It was that bad. It was deer-in-the-headlights-grade paralysis. Notice that I
didn’t say I “choked.” As I wrote before, there is a big difference. Freezing is worse. It prevents you from
getting to that critical point where you can choke (or not).
The score just seemed to fly by, like so many of Leconte’s winners. When I was serving, I’d stand up at
the line and wait, while the crowd was going nuts. I just stood there, absorbing all the karmic energy,
waiting for them to quiet down. That was a big mistake—I should have asserted greater control over the
situation by walking away from the service notch to wait until they calmed down. That would have
represented control, and playing at my pace. It was something I learned in Lyon that would come in handy
in many later matches.
I lost to Leconte in straight sets and left the court shell-shocked. On Saturday, the French won the
doubles to take a 2–1 lead. On the decisive final day, I faced Forget in the first singles match to keep the
U.S. hopes alive. I hadn’t had enough time to process what happened on Friday, or to identify the lessons
from my awful first-day experience. I gave Forget only token resistance as he clinched the Cup for France
in four sets.
I felt terrible afterward. I’d been overwhelmed. For all the talk about Davis Cup being a team thing, I’d
felt very lonely out there—as alone as I would ever feel on a tennis court. Sure, the other guys were right
there on the bench, encouraging me. And you have your captain sitting on court with you so you can talk
and get advice on changeovers. But people make too much of that. It’s not like you can hand your racket
off to a teammate and say, “Hey, I’m struggling with this, how about picking up the slack?”
It was a tense and miserable week. Gus, who was my roommate on the trip, tells me that the night we
lost, we went to sleep pretty early. I woke some hours later, clearly in the throes of some nightmare, and
screamed—at the top of my lungs—Go USA! Then I went back to sleep. I think it was a reaction to the
crowd noise during the tie. I had never been exposed to anything like that, and maybe I just needed to fight
back or assert myself, even if it was just in a dream and too late to matter.
The explanation for this disaster seems simple. I was the wrong man for the job. And to this day,
whenever anyone brings up that tie in Lyon, I just shrug, grin, and tell them “Wrong man for the job.” I
don’t want to blame Gorman, or anyone else, but the one thing that was painfully clear by the end of the
final against France was that Pete Sampras, a raw youth, was completely unprepared for the demands of
Davis Cup play. He was the wrong man for the job.
There was, however, a personal silver lining. Tim Gullikson, waiting in the wings to take over as my
coach, saw how much I struggled against the French lefties. He felt that I stood too far to my right when I
was receiving serve, exposing too much of my backhand. He wanted me to stand farther to the left to send
the signal that I was looking to touch off a big forehand return. It was a cagey move, because lefties just
love attacking a righty’s backhand, especially in the ad court. The results were remarkable; I think I won
my next thirty-two matches against left-handers after he passed on that tip.
I shudder to think how different my rivalry with Goran Ivanisevic, another lefty, might have turned out