A Champion's Mind - Pete Sampras

After that match with Jim, I often felt that if anyone lacked feeling, it was the people who stated so
blithely that it took something close to a public nervous breakdown to prove that I really do have
emotions. The match certainly showed that I was emotionally vulnerable, it just took an extraordinary
situation to expose it.
I learned in 1995 that life at the top was going to be extremely tough on a permanent, rolling basis. Who
could have predicted Vitas’s death—or the sudden illness of Tim? I knew very little about the big issues
in life, and those two events rocked me. How was I going to react? By having a pity party? Withdrawing
from the line of fire, brooding, letting my results suffer and then crying a river for reporters who could
then write about how “human” I was? Tim and I were really getting into a flow when he fell ill; I felt
more than anything else I needed to push onward and finish the job we’d started.
The Australian Open of 1995 was a brutal tournament, starting with Tim’s collapse. I was lucky to be
leaving Australia in the company of Paul Annacone, who agreed to stay with me until we knew more
about Tim’s situation. Shortly after Tim returned to Chicago, a further battery of tests confirmed what
everyone most feared. He had brain cancer. The treatment was aggressive chemotherapy and possibly
surgery, and the gravity of the situation was obvious. Yet Tim was resolved to beat the disease, and he
was going to keep coaching me as long as he humanly could. I was all for that. I believed that keeping him
involved would also help keep his spirits up.
I had a few weeks off before my next event, Memphis, and we worked out our plan going forward. Tim
would watch as many matches as he could on television, and we would talk strategy over the phone
before most of them. Paul would be on hand to help me out with the daily stuff—hitting, getting my rackets
strung, booking practice courts, discussing what Tim told either of us. In the beginning this worked all
right, but the situation inevitably went downhill as Tim’s condition deteriorated.
Meanwhile, in a development I kept secret from everyone, I was battling physical problems of my own,
although they were paltry compared to Tim’s. For more than a year, I had been struggling with bouts of
nausea and an inability, at times, to keep food or even water down. The situation started sometime in
1993, and was so aggravated by the spring of 1994 that I was unable to make the start time for the final of
the important Key Biscayne tournament, in which I was to play Andre Agassi.
In a gesture I still appreciate, Andre agreed to postpone the scheduled 1 P.M. start of the final for an
hour, while I took an intravenous glucose drip. I had been throwing up all morning, which I blamed on the
pasta dinner I’d had the night before. The IV did the job, rehydrating me, and I went on to win the final in
three sets. At the time, I wanted to believe that the episodes were somehow related to dehydration.
However, the bouts of nausea had started not long after I started taking Indocin to deal with pain in my
serving arm. My arm problem probably started with a change Tim and I had made in our practice routine
going back a year or longer. Up to then, I rarely served hard in practice, mainly because I just wanted to
hit some balls, have some rallies, work up a sweat. Tim felt I needed to do more to keep my most
formidable weapon in tip-top shape.
To Tim, serving easy in practice was like a baseball player wasting batting practice on bunting because
he felt he was hitting too many home runs. It was nuts. Tim wanted me to keep developing my serve, and
felt that if I trained it to work hard I would end up serving even harder, with better consistency, over
longer periods of time (in this he was right). He convinced me, and Todd Snyder, the former ATP Tour
trainer whom I had hired to work exclusively with me, also agreed that working my serving arm harder
posed no long-term danger.
Tim’s hunch was right. My serve improved, and became even more of a weapon. Unfortunately, the
increased workload and all the hard serving suddenly did give me arm pain and ultimately a condition
sometimes called “dead arm.” My arm ached and throbbed, sometimes in the middle of the night, or