A Champion's Mind - Pete Sampras

I wasn’t very flamboyant. They weren’t sure what I really had in the way of grit, and didn’t understand the
degree to which I was a fighter. Unlike Connors, I had made no widely disseminated remarks about
leaving my guts out there for them. Being typically skeptical New Yorkers, they had never been sure what
they were buying.
After the Corretja match, they were finally sold.
I went on to win the U.S. Open (my eighth major) of 1996 but I was troubled by how I got sick on the
court, and how weak and ill I felt. I thought back to the ulcer that went undiagnosed earlier in my career,
and wondered if something else might be wrong. Was this a physical problem, or a mental one related to
the stress I put myself under when I decided to try to shoot the moon in tennis?
It had freaked me out that I went all the way to the Open before I bagged my slam. I had set a high bar
for myself in previous years, and you never really want to lower it—you want it to stay in the same place,
or go higher. Maybe I was getting a little obsessive and unrealistic; maybe I was setting myself up for an
inevitable fall. But I couldn’t help myself. I would finish number one for the fourth consecutive year, just
one behind Jimmy Connors’s record of five. I realized I wanted that record but, unlike, say, winning
Wimbledon or the Davis Cup, getting it meant two more years of struggle. Two more years of, first of all,
playing enough tournaments to keep myself in the hunt.
I talked all this over with Paul; I told him what I wanted to accomplish. We decided that I needed to
take a few steps back, think over my mental and physical approach to the game. I needed to pace myself,
without losing drive or intensity. I had to embrace the mission, but not put too much pressure on myself,
because that would tear me up inside. Was it possible to reconcile all those conflicting desires? We didn’t
really have an answer, but we agreed that the first thing I needed to do was get myself checked out,
physically. In the back of my mind was a word that I feared a little, and had chosen not to deal with:
thalassemia.
As I’ve noted, this mild form of anemia afflicts people of Mediterranean descent. It causes fatigue,
especially in the heat, and I’d certainly battled listlessness and loss of desire on some very hot days—
including during my seminal first win at Wimbledon. But you know, nobody wants to go to a doctor and be
told that he’s got something wrong, something that would justify underperforming. I knew that thalassemia
occurred in my family. My mother, Georgia, and sister Stella have it, although the Sampras men do not. I
chose to ignore the possibility that I suffered from it until right after the Corretja match.
Within days of testing, blood work revealed that my red blood cell count was abnormally low—a sure
sign that I was suffering from the condition. It wasn’t life-threatening, but it could certainly affect my oncourt
performance. However, it was easily addressed. I had to start taking iron supplements and ramp up
my intake of meat, eggs, and other protein.
This would have been just something else to deal with until Tom Tebbutt, an enterprising journalist and
tennis nut from Toronto, broke a story in Tennis Week, a small bimonthly magazine published out of New
York City. He speculated that I suffered from . . . thalassemia. I have to hand it to Tom; he did his
homework. I was a little annoyed, but I had to be impressed. Somehow he had heard about the disorder
and started poking around. He had a doctor and some other folks confirm that thalassemia could easily
have been a factor in my breakdown in the Corretja match. Then he just connected the dots and nailed me.
I don’t recall that Tom ever tried to confirm the story with me before it was published, but that was
okay. I would have denied it—as I did after the story came out. I felt bad; I tried never to flat-out lie, but I
also wasn’t about to admit to having it. I just didn’t want my rivals to have that information and take
comfort in or motivation out of it in any matches I might play in the future. In fact, the first person I
eventually admitted it to was Peter Bodo—my collaborator for this book—in an interview for Tennis
magazine that we did in September of 2000.