A Champion's Mind - Pete Sampras

The Aussies have a great tennis tradition, yet even their icons tended to be regular, plainspoken,
understated guys, somewhat like me. That was an immediate affinity I felt with Australia. The Australians
also are a friendly, easygoing people, and the atmosphere at their major is laid-back; that also suited me.
You could get gut-shot in the street there and if you crawled up to a guy for help he’d probably say, “No
worries, mate!”—and then do all he could to help. The facilities at Melbourne Park, including Rod Laver
Arena, are modern and first-class. You don’t have that feeling of chaos and crowding that characterizes
the other majors; even the media presence is considerably smaller. So you have a little less of that
intensity and crazy pressure.
My beef with the Australian Open started with the balls. The balls always seemed to play a little
differently down under. It was like they couldn’t decide whether they wanted a fast, hard ball or a soft,
slow one—one that fuzzed up like a kitten, or had a tighter, shorter nap and flew faster. One year the balls
left little black marks on the composite surface, like you see on a squash court.
In Melbourne, you could always count on a few days when the temperature pushes the one-hundreddegree
mark, and even though it isn’t very humid, the heat can be draining. It was a special problem for
me, because I secretly suffered from thalassemia, a mild disease common to men of Mediterranean
descent. It’s basically a blood-iron deficiency that causes anemia, and those who have it are prone to
wilting in intense heat. I knew thalassemia ran in my family, but chose not to deal with it until fairly late in
my career. Curiously, the guys who did best down under were the Swedes—people from a cold northern
climate who appreciate and love the sun and its heat in the winter. The Russians are usually competitive
there, too.
Another unpredictable thing about the courts at Melbourne Park was the Rebound Ace surface (which
was replaced by Plexicushion for 2008). Rebound Ace was a rubber compound that they painted over the
typical hard-court base of asphalt. The surface provided a little cushioning and slowed the bounce, but it
did strange things in the heat. It was so hot in Melbourne one year that a TV crew cracked an egg on a
court and, using time-lapse photography, recorded it frying. The heat made the Rebound Ace very sticky.
Gabriela Sabatini once blew out an entire tennis shoe while making a change of direction (the shoe stuck
and tore as she pushed off). Others took nasty tumbles and turned ankles.
Yet the conditions in Oz can change in the blink of an eye. The difference between playing day and night
matches there is huge (the Australian and U.S. opens are the only two majors that have night tennis, and
the retractable roof over the Laver Arena means you can have night indoor tennis). The surface reacted
easily to ambient changes of any kind; it was simply a different court when the temperature was a
comfortable seventy-five or eighty degrees—which was often the case during the night matches that
followed scorching afternoons. To me, the Australian major was a crapshoot in the areas where I most
preferred consistency—the surface, the balls, and the ambient conditions.
In Australia in 1996, on the anniversary of Tim’s collapse, all the old wounds associated with that event
were reopened. So I didn’t really mind leaving Melbourne and putting all that behind me. Back at home,
Tim was going downhill fast. I frequently found myself taking stock and realizing what I was losing.
When you’re a top player instead of just a guy hell-bent on improving and figuring out your game, you
are not hiring a coach purely for his command of the x’s and o’s. Those are usually sorted out in the first
six or eight months. After that, it’s all about how you interact with and influence each other; it’s about the
confidence and trust you build, and about loyalty.
By the time Tim collapsed, our relationship was about things other than how to return on grass, or how
to throw your chest out in a Grand Slam final. But I didn’t really think about that part until after he became
ill. Tim had gradually become my stability—the guy I talked to (to whatever degree I talked), and in
whom I confided in my own limited way.