Sampras Jabs a Finger in Federer’s Eye
By HARVEY ARATON
Sports of The Times
July 5, 2007
Wimbledon, England
With all the Family Williams trials and tribulations, along with Venus’s smashing triumph over Maria Sharapova and Andy Roddick’s smooth advancement to the quarterfinals under the watchful eye of Jimmy Connors, another American tennis icon was heard from yesterday on the Fourth of July. It was the seven-time champion, the Yankee king of the grass courts speaking out from his retirement throne in Los Angeles.
More expert analysis from Pete Sampras on the current state of Wimbledon affairs made its way here via news agencies and the Internet, days after he first complained about it in an interview with The Times of London.
In summary, Sampras doesn’t think much of the grass-court tennis currently being played. He doesn’t sound terribly convinced that he — soon to turn 36, five years after he walked away from tennis after winning his 14th Grand Slam title at the United States Open — couldn’t still get to the net against these guys, put away vintage Pistol Pete volleys.
These guys would include the four-time defending champion, Roger Federer, whom Sampras recalled sparring with in Los Angeles this year and, as he said Tuesday during a conference call to promote World Team Tennis, “holding serve pretty handily.”
The “sad” problem, as Sampras sees it, is that players have surrendered to the slower conditions, the stronger rackets, the fear of risk. He has been watching Federer hang on the baseline, toy with lesser players who won’t dare push him the way Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg and Goran Ivanisevic and Patrick Rafter used to chip, charge and challenge Sampras across the 1990s.
“If there is anything Roger doesn’t like to see, it is someone coming in and serving and volleying, someone putting pressure on him,” Sampras said. “I think my game matched up reasonably well against his.”
We would love to hear Federer’s version and his opinion on their exhibitions scheduled for later this year. Sampras, with at least one foot grounded in reality, said he would be ecstatic if he could push him to a few tie breakers. In due time, perhaps. We do expect a Federer sighting today for his quarterfinal match against Juan Carlos Ferrero.
Had Sampras accepted the wild card that the All England Club reportedly made available to him this year, he might have had all the time with Federer he wanted, given Federer’s astonishing five days off to — as Roddick joked yesterday — busy himself by “taking the double-decker bus red thing tour.”
Roddick was in a playful mood after erasing a 5-0 deficit in a third-set tie breaker and finishing off Paul-Henri Mathieu, 6-2, 7-5, 7-6 (6). But his demeanor noticeably chilled when Sampras’s comments were raised. You got the feeling — more from the tone than the words — that Roddick not only had read them but had also heard it all before to the point of wanting to say “enough.”
“I agree that’s the best way for him to win, yeah,” he said. “But is it the best way for a lot of guys to win? No. You know, obviously you can’t sit here and question Pete’s opinions on how to play grass-court tennis. But I don’t know if you can generalize it by saying that’s the best way for everybody to play.”
•
The rumor mill has had Sampras contemplating a return, if only to play Wimbledon, where he was last seen losing in the second round to George Bastl, the world’s 145th-ranked player. That was one year after Sampras was beaten in the fourth round in five sets by a young and largely unknown Swiss player in a short ponytail and white headband. Makes you wonder how Sampras could possibly last that long with Federer now.
Lately, he has been beating up on a variety of retirees on the seniors tour and preparing for some team tennis, too. Could he be speaking out to convince himself that he really could fashion a proper Wimbledon ending in an era when almost nobody plays the way he would?
“When he was in Boston playing the seniors tournament, he told us no, no, no, no, no,” Bud Collins said when I began my investigative reporting by standing up from my desk and walking seven steps to the row behind mine in the media center, to seek the required counsel for tennis journalists.
It is Collins’s opinion that Sampras will not try to rewrite the storybook ending he wrote when he beat his generational rival, Andre Agassi, at the 2002 Open, his last Tour match, and that his comments are just the kind of critiques — not necessarily off target or unfair — that champions from bygone eras tend to make.
It’s all part of the fun and fabric of sports, and no one has ever stitched together so many tennis generations as a Boston Globe scribe and network analyst like Collins, who, you may have heard by now, is being “retired” by NBC after this Wimbledon.
•
For 35 years, Collins has worn the (loud) pants in that television tennis family, become the sport’s voice of America, the welcoming franchise player for countless people like me, dropping in from time to time. The decision not to have a place for a man who knows everything about a sport and who has devoted a lifetime to promoting it so eloquently reeks of the most profound corporate stupidity, and demands this last bit of commentary.
As I did some online research yesterday on Sampras, I came across a Wikipedia posting with highlights of his career.
The first paragraph reported that none other than Collins had named Sampras one of the top five men’s players in history, which was good enough reason to come to the conclusion that Sampras has every right to brag on his grass-court era and nothing to prove by trying to play in this one.
He may want to know that Collins, history’s arbiter, has spoken.
E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com
Sports of The Times
July 5, 2007
Wimbledon, England
With all the Family Williams trials and tribulations, along with Venus’s smashing triumph over Maria Sharapova and Andy Roddick’s smooth advancement to the quarterfinals under the watchful eye of Jimmy Connors, another American tennis icon was heard from yesterday on the Fourth of July. It was the seven-time champion, the Yankee king of the grass courts speaking out from his retirement throne in Los Angeles.
More expert analysis from Pete Sampras on the current state of Wimbledon affairs made its way here via news agencies and the Internet, days after he first complained about it in an interview with The Times of London.
In summary, Sampras doesn’t think much of the grass-court tennis currently being played. He doesn’t sound terribly convinced that he — soon to turn 36, five years after he walked away from tennis after winning his 14th Grand Slam title at the United States Open — couldn’t still get to the net against these guys, put away vintage Pistol Pete volleys.
These guys would include the four-time defending champion, Roger Federer, whom Sampras recalled sparring with in Los Angeles this year and, as he said Tuesday during a conference call to promote World Team Tennis, “holding serve pretty handily.”
The “sad” problem, as Sampras sees it, is that players have surrendered to the slower conditions, the stronger rackets, the fear of risk. He has been watching Federer hang on the baseline, toy with lesser players who won’t dare push him the way Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg and Goran Ivanisevic and Patrick Rafter used to chip, charge and challenge Sampras across the 1990s.
“If there is anything Roger doesn’t like to see, it is someone coming in and serving and volleying, someone putting pressure on him,” Sampras said. “I think my game matched up reasonably well against his.”
We would love to hear Federer’s version and his opinion on their exhibitions scheduled for later this year. Sampras, with at least one foot grounded in reality, said he would be ecstatic if he could push him to a few tie breakers. In due time, perhaps. We do expect a Federer sighting today for his quarterfinal match against Juan Carlos Ferrero.
Had Sampras accepted the wild card that the All England Club reportedly made available to him this year, he might have had all the time with Federer he wanted, given Federer’s astonishing five days off to — as Roddick joked yesterday — busy himself by “taking the double-decker bus red thing tour.”
Roddick was in a playful mood after erasing a 5-0 deficit in a third-set tie breaker and finishing off Paul-Henri Mathieu, 6-2, 7-5, 7-6 (6). But his demeanor noticeably chilled when Sampras’s comments were raised. You got the feeling — more from the tone than the words — that Roddick not only had read them but had also heard it all before to the point of wanting to say “enough.”
“I agree that’s the best way for him to win, yeah,” he said. “But is it the best way for a lot of guys to win? No. You know, obviously you can’t sit here and question Pete’s opinions on how to play grass-court tennis. But I don’t know if you can generalize it by saying that’s the best way for everybody to play.”
•
The rumor mill has had Sampras contemplating a return, if only to play Wimbledon, where he was last seen losing in the second round to George Bastl, the world’s 145th-ranked player. That was one year after Sampras was beaten in the fourth round in five sets by a young and largely unknown Swiss player in a short ponytail and white headband. Makes you wonder how Sampras could possibly last that long with Federer now.
Lately, he has been beating up on a variety of retirees on the seniors tour and preparing for some team tennis, too. Could he be speaking out to convince himself that he really could fashion a proper Wimbledon ending in an era when almost nobody plays the way he would?
“When he was in Boston playing the seniors tournament, he told us no, no, no, no, no,” Bud Collins said when I began my investigative reporting by standing up from my desk and walking seven steps to the row behind mine in the media center, to seek the required counsel for tennis journalists.
It is Collins’s opinion that Sampras will not try to rewrite the storybook ending he wrote when he beat his generational rival, Andre Agassi, at the 2002 Open, his last Tour match, and that his comments are just the kind of critiques — not necessarily off target or unfair — that champions from bygone eras tend to make.
It’s all part of the fun and fabric of sports, and no one has ever stitched together so many tennis generations as a Boston Globe scribe and network analyst like Collins, who, you may have heard by now, is being “retired” by NBC after this Wimbledon.
•
For 35 years, Collins has worn the (loud) pants in that television tennis family, become the sport’s voice of America, the welcoming franchise player for countless people like me, dropping in from time to time. The decision not to have a place for a man who knows everything about a sport and who has devoted a lifetime to promoting it so eloquently reeks of the most profound corporate stupidity, and demands this last bit of commentary.
As I did some online research yesterday on Sampras, I came across a Wikipedia posting with highlights of his career.
The first paragraph reported that none other than Collins had named Sampras one of the top five men’s players in history, which was good enough reason to come to the conclusion that Sampras has every right to brag on his grass-court era and nothing to prove by trying to play in this one.
He may want to know that Collins, history’s arbiter, has spoken.
E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com
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