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batsplat · 1 month ago

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agassi/sampras please tell us more! the only thing I know about that rivalry is that sampras was very boring and they they disliked each other. but the way you talk about it sure makes it sound fascinating!

in a nutshell, the appeal is this

"pete. as always, pete"

imagine your whole career ends up being defined by one guy who you consider the "quintessential opposite" to you, who feels incomprehensible to you, who comes seemingly out of nowhere to beat you again and again and again and again. who is everything you could never force yourself to be. who seems entirely comfortable in a life that torments you. he denies you in what should have been your crowning moment. and then he ends his career by denying you again. inescapable and inevitable

agassi hated tennis with a passion. he hated tennis throughout his career - the sport he was never given a choice but to play, the sport he was forced to excel at. it's not an uncommon story in many respects, an ambitious father who sought greater things for his son... a cocktail of lofty expectations and the pressure applied to achieve them... the predetermined path in life agassi had been moulded to follow. and all of this forms the foundation for his fraught relationship with the sport (x)

as a seven year old, he already dreamt of quitting the sport, of just walking away and playing with his siblings, sitting with his mum - anything but tennis. except even then, it wasn't that simple. as much as he wanted to flee the sport, something about it also forced him to keep coming back for more. as he details in his autobiography:

Doesn't that sound nice? Wouldn't that feel like heaven, Andre? To just quit? To never play tennis again? But I can't. Not only would my father chase me around the house with my racket, but something in my gut, some deep unseen muscle, won't let me. I hate tennis, hate it with all my heart, and still I keep playing, keep hitting all morning, and all afternoon, because I have no choice. No matter how much I want to stop, I don't. I keep begging myself to stop, and I keep playing, and this gap, this contradiction between what I want to do and what I actually do, feels like the core of my life.

his father's favourite training method was to use a ball machine that andre nicknamed 'the dragon' - quite deliberately designed to look frightening, making andre flinch every time it shot balls at him. it spat out balls in unpredictable ways, all to make it impossible to hit it the same every time and forcing agassi to adjust anew for each ball. he was constantly instructed by his father - an iranian erstwhile boxer - to take the ball earlier and earlier, training his reflexes and adaptability through sheer brute force of repetition. what was being forged in the process was a game that was built to react to what the guy on the other side of the net was doing. in tennis, you can win both by attacking and by defending, by acting and reacting. agassi was moulded to do the latter

My father says that when he boxed, he always wanted to take a guy's best punch. He tells me one day on the tennis court: When you know that you just took the other guy's best punch, and you're still standing, and the other guy knows it, you will rip the heart right out of him. In tennis, he says, same rule. Attack the other man's strength. If the man is a server, take away the serve. If he's a power player, overpower him. If he has a big forehand, takes pride in his forehand, go after his forehand until he hates his forehand. My father has a special name for this contrarian strategy. He calls it putting a blister on the other guy's brain. With this strategy, this brutal philosophy, he stamps me for life. He turns me into a boxer with a tennis racket. More, since most tennis players pride themselves on their serve, my father turns me into a counterpuncher - a returner.

the biggest and most important weapon in tennis is the serve, and sampras had one of the best serves this sport has ever seen. like agassi a child of immigrants, his personal history is largely free of the angst of agassi's tale - though it should hardly be surprising that he had a strict father of his own to push him along his path. the type who was perfectly willing to make his disappointment felt whenever pete didn't live up to his exacting standards, even if pete was generally a pretty obedient kid, attentive of what his father demanded of him. take this anecdote about young pete speaking to a reporter after a big win at juniors level (from sampras' autobiography):

The next day, on the very same court, I lost something like 6-1, 6-0 to Mal Washington. I mean, he really schooled me. So after that match, the same reporter went over to Mal and got an interview from him. My dad pulled me aside and said, "You see that guy who talked to you yesterday? Now he's talking to Mal, because it's all about how good you are every day, not one day."

tennis parents. gotta love them

anyhow, sampras says he learned his lesson - and he also learnt to live by his father's straight-talking, honest ways. blunt and to the point. sampras was generally a considerably more straightforward character than agassi, "boring" as some might put it. he didn't hate the sport - he was good at it and he wanted to be better, always working tirelessly towards that goal like the perfect professional he was. to that end, he had to make some major adjustments to his game as a teenager, making the radical switch from a two handed to a one handed backhand and uprooting his whole style of play to make him the ultimate attacking player

But there were uphills and downhills, and my toughest challenge was changing my mindset from grinder to attacker. I had to learn to start thinking differently, and more. A grinder can lay back, waiting for a mistake, or tempt you to end points too quickly. An attacker has to think a little more: Flat serve or kicker? Charge the net, or set up a groundstroke winner? Is my opponent reading my serving pattern or shot selection? As a serve-and-volleyer, you attack; as a grinder you counterattack. The basic difference between attacking and defending is that the former requires a plan of attack and the latter calls for reaction and good defence. In both cases, execution is paramount.

'serve and volleying' as a playstyle has basically died out in the modern game (it still exists as an occasional tactic), but back then it was extremely common. the principle is straightforward enough: you hit a big serve and then you follow the ball, so that when your opponent returns it, you can hit the next ball out of the air (the volley). it's the purest attacking playstyle imaginable. it simplifies every service point, focuses everything in on the execution of just a few strokes. ideally, most rallies won't last longer than three shots - serve, return, first volley, rinse and repeat. short, fast, and sweet. when it is executed well, it is as lethal as it is efficient

agassi and sampras were part of a high profile quartet of american players to turn pro in the late eighties. the first of these to win a slam was sampras' childhood archrival michael chang, still the youngest man ever to win a slam at only seventeen years of age. the fourth member of this quartet was jim courier - who had trained in the same academy as agassi as a teenager and had generally felt neglected when compared to the star pupil. young agassi was a prodigious talent with unique style and flamboyance that served to grab the public's attention; he was the one who hogged the most headlines and carried the loftiest expectations on his shoulders, anointed the new flag=bearer of american tennis... and he was soon coming under increased pressure to finally crack on and win one of these slams. an immensely promising junior, the next big thing in american tennis, the guy who was supposed to rewrite the history books... by 1990, at just twenty years of age, the public was already threatening to lose patience with him

I go to the 1989 French Open and in the third round I face Courier, my schoolmate from the Bollettieri Academy. I'm the chalk, the heavy favorite, but Courier scores the upset, then rubs my nose in it. He pumps his fist, glares at me and Nick. Moreover, in the locker room, he makes sure everyone sees him facing up his running shoes and going for a jog. Message: Beating Andre just didn't provide enough cardio. Later, when Chang wins the tournament, and thanks Jesus Christ for making the ball go over the net, I feel sickened. How could Chang, of all people, have won a slam before me? Again, I skip Wimbledon. I hear another chorus of jeers from the media. Agassi doesn't win the slams he enters, and then he skips the slams that matter most. But it feels like a drop in the ocean. I'm becoming desensitized.

in 1990, agassi competed in two slam finals. the first was on the clay of roland garros, the fetching pink of his kit (see below) drawing plenty of headlines as he (very satisfyingly) beat both courier and chang on the way to the championship match. then, in the final, he lost in straight sets - in large part because he was terrified his precious hairpiece was going to fall off. which is definitely a story that deserves more space than it is being provided here... look, go read his autobiography, it's worth it

the next slam final was on home soil, conducted in the frenetic cauldron of the arthur ashe stadium. this was agassi's coming of age tournament at the slam he most wanted to win. he had scorned wimbledon, dismissive of the stuffy atmosphere and the grass courts and the strict dress code. he simply could not be bothered to travel to australia in order to compete at the australian open. roland garros was perfectly fine - but really, it was the us open in all its boisterous exuberance he wanted to conquer more than anything. and the us open crowd was ready to watch their new great hope win. agassi beat boris becker in four to advance to the final, eagerly awaiting his opponent - either the decorated john mcenroe, or a nineteen year old kid who had previously never gotten past the fourth round of a slam. sampras and agassi had already played when they were kids, with agassi in his autobiography remembering a match back when sampras was nine years old and agassi was ten. they had faced each other for the first time as professionals in 1989 on the italian clay... agassi had previously dismissed sampras while watching him practise, critical with his team of sampras' ruined backhand in particular. in rome, agassi beat sampras easily despite the improvements sampras had made

I beat him, 6-2, 6-1, and as I walk off the court I think to myself that he's got a long and painful slog ahead. I feel bad for the guy. He seems like a good soul. But I don't expect to see him again on the tour, ever.

the following year, in 1990, they play again and sampras wins in three - fittingly on the way to his maiden title. later that season, they meet for the first time in a slam final. now, look, the problem with narrating this rivalry is that the perfect narration already exists. it is agassi's autobiography 'open' and is available at all good bookstores etc etc. here is the most relevant excerpt:

It doesn’t seem possible, but the kid I thought I’d never see again has reconstituted his game. And he’s giving McEnroe the fight of his life. Then I realize he’s not giving McEnroe a fight—McEnroe is giving him a fight, and losing. My opponent tomorrow, incredibly, will be Pete. The camera moves close on Pete’s face, and I see that he has nothing left. Also, the commentators say his heavily taped feet are covered with blisters. Gil makes me drink Gil Water until I’m ready to throw up, and then I go to bed with a smile, thinking about all the fun I’m going to have, running Pete’s ass off. I’ll have him sprinting from side to side, left to right, from San Francisco to Bradenton, until those blisters bleed. I think of my father’s old maxim: Put a blister on his brain. Calm, fit, cocksure, I sleep like a pile of Gil’s dumbbells. In the morning I feel ready to play a ten-setter. I have no hairpiece issues—because I’m not wearing my hairpiece. I’m using a new, low-maintenance camouflaging system that involves a thicker headband and brightly colored highlights. There’s simply no way I can lose to Pete, that hapless kid I watched with sympathy last year, that poor klutz who couldn’t keep the ball in the court. Then a different Pete shows up. A Pete who doesn’t ever miss. We’re playing long points, demanding points, and he’s flawless. He’s reaching everything, hitting everything, bounding back and forth like a gazelle. He’s serving bombs, flying to the net, bringing his game right to me. He’s laying wood to my serve. I’m helpless. I’m angry. I’m telling myself: This is not happening. Yes, this is happening. No, this cannot be happening. Then, instead of thinking how I can win, I begin to think of how I can avoid losing. It’s the same mistake I made against Gómez, with the same result. When it’s all over I tell reporters that Pete gave me a good old-fashioned New York street mugging. An imperfect metaphor. Yes, I was robbed. Yes, something that belonged to me was taken away. But I can’t fill out a police report, and there is no hope of justice, and everyone will blame the victim.

what I can contribute are some high quality screenshots of agassi's mid-match beleaguered frustration at perfect pete who was currently in the process of mugging him

and here's agassi pulling sampras in at the net after losing in straight sets, 4-6 3-6 2-6

Hours later my eyes fly open. I'm in bed at the hotel. It was all a dream. For a splendid half second I believe I must have fallen asleep on that breezy hill where Philly and Nick were laughing about Pete's ruined dream. I dreamed that Pete, of all people, was beating me in the final of a slam. But no. It's real. It happened. I watch the room slowly grow lighter, and my mind and spirit grow palpably darker.

it is a brutal loss for agassi. not only has he once again been denied a slam - but it's happened at the hands of a direct peer, a compatriot, a nineteen year old american who has flown relatively under the radar until now but has snatched away from agassi the title that he felt should have rightfully been his. agassi had already become a frequent target for media storms, most memorably with the infamous 'image is everything' canon marketing campaign that had been widely used to mock him - but now, here was the proof anyone needed that this overhyped, cocky showman wasn't anywhere near as good as he'd been cracked up to be. it didn't help that sampras provided such an obvious contrast to agassi... quiet, more reserved, outwardly humble, less showy and less prone to drama and with a far more clean cut image... really had way more of a sweater boy aesthetic going for him y'know

tennis is a fundamentally conservative sport that is ill at ease with its own conservatism. the soul of the tennis fan secretly longs for a little glamour, a little excitement, something with a little more flair and thrill than the purist should strictly allow. when confronted with excessive emotion, when exposed to the true messiness of competitive fervour, the response of the fan is conflicted. on the one hand, the spectacle is exhilarating, to be celebrated, stimulating in the controversy it causes. but on the other, transgression is something to be repudiated and to be punished. the tennis fan averts their eyes but cannot look away, eager to capture every detail of how the gentleman's sport is being defiled by the newest freak show. the tennis fan begs for players to feel every emotion deeply - then jeers at them for losing their heads. the tennis fan hates sampras for being dull and lacklustre, for winning points as quickly as he can and refusing to provide much in the way of a show. the tennis fan hates agassi for being a loose cannon, for feeling so much and never quite living up to his potential as a result, for being so loud and vocal and obvious in his imperfections. sampras is a robot. agassi is a clown. sampras lacks personality. agassi lacks conviction. it is distasteful how hard agassi finds the life of a tennis player, but sampras finds it far too easy entirely. the fan loves to hate agassi, but sometimes they forget to think about sampras at all

the rivalry and their two respective careers develop from there. agassi has to go through a third slam final defeat, a horrendously painful five set affair against his old enemy jim courier at roland garros that leaves many doubting he will ever get over the line. but at last he secures his first major in 1992 at wimbledon of all places - the slam he had once upon a time had so little respect for he did not even bother to attend. sampras in all his precocity struggled for a while to adjust to a slam champion's life and took until 1993 to add to his own collection... beating agassi once again on the way to snatching agassi's wimbledon crown off him. there's a lot of stuff in those few years I'm going to skim over for the sake of brevity... like the final the two of them played where sampras was really ill right before the start and agassi agreed to a delay, only to be beaten by a revitalised sampras... that 1993 wimbledon match and sampras' nasty habit of catching agassi by surprise... or all their davis cup exploits (the main nation-based event in men's tennis, basically think like the world cup) where they both faltered and won as a team

let's pick up the narrative again in 1995. agassi had won his second slam at the back end of 1994, finally taking the us open title he so craved. and so, at the start of 1995, he made the enlightened choice of going - hey, you know how there's four slams on the tennis calendar? how about showing up to all four of them! yeah, not kidding, 1995 was the very first time agassi made the trip down to australia for the first slam of the year. which is a teensy bit unfortunate, because it turned out he was actually brilliant at that tournament. in 1995, he was the second seed at the tournament (sampras, of course, being the first) and scythed his way through the draw, making the final without dropping a set. sampras, by contrast, was progressing nowhere near as smoothly. his long time coach, tim gullikson, had been suffering from seizures for a few months and was flown home for tests after going through another seizure while practising with sampras. in his next match, sampras faced courier, fighting back from two sets to love down to level the match. then, in the fifth set, he broke down in tears during the changeover and struggled to contain his sobs while playing the next few games. courier asked whether sampras wanted to come back to finish the match the next day... something sampras interpreted as a sarcastic comment, which pissed him off enough to get him to regroup and focus once again. he went on to win the match. this is another part of the story that will not get the attention it deserves in this post, and there's a lot more to be said about how sampras describes the incident in his autobiography - his frustration with the narrative that he had finally shown how he was 'human' after all. it is this incident that is still what the tournament is perhaps remembered the most for. gullikson passed away the following year

and so sampras faced agassi in their second meeting in a slam final, fourth meeting in slams overall. agassi had gone through a major style rebrand since the last time they'd played, at last forgoing the hair he was so closely associated with (aka ditching the finicky hairpiece that had been distracting him in slam finals) and embracing the bald pirate aesthetic

perhaps a little more importantly, agassi won the match in four sets, claiming his first australian open title at the very first time of asking. I was going to check if I had any particularly insightful notes about the match - but mostly it's stuff like pointing out that the first set ends on an agassi double fault and the second one opens on a sampras double fault (#mygoats), plus enlightened commentary like this

we'll leave the sophisticated match analysis for another day

and here they are in their respective autobiographies about the conclusion of that tournament

"a tournament that I seemed destined to win" // "tennis has nothing to do with destiny"

and from there, it was game on. 1995 was basically the year of their rivalry. after the australian open final, they immediately faced off in both indian wells and miami. as sampras describes it, the increased exposure meant the general sports fans had more and more opinions about the pair of them and their rivalry: "we presented enough of a contrast to make people feel passionate about why they preferred one of us to the other". that season also featured an increased marketing push from nike to make this rivalry A Thing while the pair of them spent the year hashing out the number one ranking. we're talking joint marketing campaigns, interviews, all that shebang... once again, I won't be able to do this time period justice here - but at least in passing you do have to mention nike's famous "guerrilla tennis" ad campaign (see here), where they would play on makeshift courts set up in city streets. as sampras put it:

The campaign was brilliant, and it was an enormous success. And it worked because, instead of "Pete or Andre?" or "Pete vs. Andre" driving Nike's promotions, it became Pete and Andre. There was a welcome, counterintuitive feel-good message conveyed in them. The commercials helped further interest in the game and our rivalry. It also caught the true nature of our relationship. We had plenty of differences, but we were friends.

an important thing to remember, right - sampras was generally keen for the agassi rivalry to flourish because it helped him too. it helped combat the perception that he was boring, that he had a dull game too reliant on his serve (especially on the speedy grass of wimbledon, where he increasingly excelled at), that he had too little of a personality to capture the imagination of the masses. it also helped his relationship with nike, who he often didn't see eye-to-eye with - the agassi rivalry brought those guys on side because of how marketable they were as a unit. in his autobiography, sampras points out that players are only ever seen as good as the quality of their opposition, and agassi always had the potential to be sampras' ideal career rivalry. agassi becoming a more consistent, prominent rival was good news for the both of them... but, well, often it was sampras who got the most out of the whole thing

given we're in 1995, at this point I do need to throw in a top three anecdote from agassi's autobiography that just like... nails who both of them are As Guys and what the dynamic between them looked like

if my archrival said in his autobiography that I sounded more robotic than his parrot, I would do something that would get me on national news (more on that later)

so then... it looks like they'll meet in another slam final that year, at wimbledon. as agassi so nicely puts it,

In the semis I face Becker. I've beaten him the last eight times we've played. Pete has already moved on to the final and he's awaiting the winner of Agassi-Becker, which is to say he's awaiting me, because every slam final is beginning to feel like a standing date between me and Pete.

cute

of course agassi goes on to lose that match, after which becker makes some disparaging comments about agassi - prompting some fun drama that does also deserve more space than it will be provided here. the long and the short of it is that agassi vows vengeance and sets of on his "summer of revenge", going on a massive tear on the american hard courts. he defeats sampras in the final of canada, is unbeaten all summer going into the us open... at the us open, his hot streak continues - and he gets the great satisfaction of beating becker in the semis. revenge completed. 26 wins in a row

but of course, there's one more match to go. and it's the one that matters most of them all. it's also the one that agassi loses. "no matter how much you win, if you're not the last one to win, you're a loser. and in the end I always lose, because there is always pete. as always, pete." it's the brutality of tennis, the relentless inescapable cycle that so tormented agassi... there's always another tournament immediately on the horizon - and most weeks, defeat is waiting for you at the end of it. a lot of weeks, it was sampras who was waiting for agassi. after the glorious high of that entire summer, agassi had been brought back down to earth. he would struggle for years to recover

I've always had trouble shaking off hard losses, but this loss to Pete is different. This is the ultimate loss, the ueber-loss, the alpha-omega loss that eclipses all others. Previous losses to Pete, the loss to Courier, the loss to Gómez - they were flesh wounds compared to this, which feels like a spear through the heart. Every day this loss feels new. Every day I tell myself to stop thinking about it, and every day I can't. The only respite is fantasizing about retirement.

this began agassi's unravelling, the downward spiral that would consume the next two years of his life. eventually, he dropped out of the top hundred entirely. it was in 1997 that he infamously failed a drug test and managed to escape punishment plus cover the whole thing up (he had indeed taken crystal meth). he barely played tennis at all during that year. it would take him until 1998 to regroup and recommit to tennis, to decide that he wanted this enough to fight for it anew

in the mean time, let's bring in two encounters between sampras and agassi in fittingly liminal locations - one in a plane and the other in an airport. these brief moments of letting their guards down - of talking to each other as people - that are described in their respective autobiographies... both reckoning with the vast differences between the pair of them. first, there's late 1995, where agassi was already evidently struggling with the mental impact of the us open loss - as well as with the injuries that ruled him out of playing the davis cup. in a gesture sampras appreciated, agassi turned up anyway to support his team. here is sampras's account of a flight on agassi's private jet to los angeles:

I sensed on that flight that Andre was struggling. He quizzed me very closely on how I lived my life, and seemed dumbfounded to learn that I had moved to Tampa solely for my tennis game. I told him that I missed my family, and Southern California, but considered it a necessary trade-off. He admitted that he wouldn’t give up living in Vegas, or his lifestyle, in order to be the best player in the world. The contrast was clear and striking, although Andre made that point at a time when he was feeling a little disillusioned by the game. Through all of that, though, I always believed something that others, particularly people who didn’t know Andre very well, doubted. I always thought that Andre was a sincere guy. When we spent time together out of the limelight, he was always honest and frank—and I respected him for that. Davis Cup was always a good time when Andre was around. He was, at times, downright exuberant. He frequently let his guard down in Cup practices, screaming and yelling about any little thing, just for the fun of it. He seemed to get a kick out of stirring things up, creating drama, taking little things and making a big deal out of them. He was emotional, and he liked to whip up others’ emotions. At other times, we sat around in the locker room and talked about this or that, mostly about sports, and it was very comfortable. Andre was inquisitive. He liked to compare notes on players and he was eager to see how others perceived the same things he was thinking about. Andre had a great grasp of strategy; it was a great asset, given the type of game he played.

and then, two whole years later in 1997 - here's agassi about a meeting they had in the airport:

Walking up to the gate, who should I see but Pete. As always, Pete. He looks as if he's done nothing for the last month but practise, and when he wasn't practising, he was lying on a cot in a bare cell, thinking about beating me. He's rested, focused, wholly undistracted. I've always thought the differences between Pete and me were overblown by sportswriters. It seemed too convenient, too important for fans, and Nike, and the game, that Pete and I be polar opposites, the Yankees and Red Sox of tennis. The game's best server versus its best returner. The diffident Californian versus the brash Las Vegan. It all seemed like horseshit. Or, to use Pete's favorite word, nonsense. But at this moment, making small talk at the gate, the gap between us appears genuinely, frighteningly wide, like the gap between good and bad. I've often told Brad that tennis plays too big a part in Pete's life, and not a big enough part in mine, but Pete seems to have the proportions about right. Tennis is his job, and he does it with brio and dedication, while all my talk of maintaining a life outside tennis seems like just that - talk. Just a pretty way of rationalizing all my distractions. For the first time since I've known him - including the times he's beaten my brains out - I envy Pete's dullness. I wish I could emulate his spectacular lack of inspiration, and his peculiar lack of need for inspiration.

even these short excerpts should hopefully give you a sense of how differently they approached the process of writing their autobiographies, as always in itself very revealing. agassi is honest to a fault, forthcoming in his confessions even when he's not necessarily doing himself any favours - unsurprisingly, the crystal meth story caused quite a stir at a time, given he had successfully evaded a ban and had managed to cover the whole thing up. he does not spare sampras in his account, willing to compare him to a parrot or marvel at his lack of need for inspiration. it is a sincerity that does not necessarily feel malicious, but certainly is brutal. agassi's narrative is harsh, self-effacing, darkly comedic - he stresses how he really didn't take sampras seriously until sampras was beating his ass, talks up how sampras' commitment to tennis was clearly the far better approach than his own... and yet there is inevitably something pretty insulting in how baffled agassi is by sampras' simplicity, by the pure, unencumbered drive and discipline that made sampras such an excellent competitor. by how boring sampras could be

by contrast, sampras was far more reserved in his autobiography, providing a straightforward account of his career that really did mostly just focus on the tennis of it all - hardly a bad book, but one that lacks agassi's flair and skill for narrativisation. there is a rebellion of sorts in sampras' restraint... he's painfully aware of how he was perceived, rankles at it repeatedly in his autobiography, and you hardly need to read between the lines too much to get a sense of how much it really bothered him... but if there's one thing to understand about the guy, it's sampras' incredible stubbornness. if the people wanted a show, he was even less likely to provide him one. if they wanted drama and gossip from his autobiography, he would provide them with no such thing. and it's fair to say that sampras did not exactly appreciate agassi's approach

we'll circle back to sampras' reaction to the autobiography in a minute, but I wanted to bring in these quotes now... because sampras does capture something quite key to their rivalry in a way that is a touch more honest than he was willing to be in his autobiography. agassi hated tennis and always wavered in his commitment towards it, trying to fill his life with all sorts of other pleasures, travelling around with his entourage to make the tour life somehow bearable to him. it never came easily to him - and at several junctures, most notably after his long slide down the rankings set off by the 1995 us open sampras loss existential crisis, he had to make the conscious decision to try and give his all to the sport. sampras was always willing to make those sacrifices, whenever they were demanded of him. he was willing to move wherever he needed to, willing to eat and breathe and sleep tennis if that is what he needed to do to win. professional sports doesn't always reward the biggest personalities - in fact, as said sports become ever more demanding and the level rises further and further, if anything athletes cannot afford much of a life outside of their chosen domain. no time to grow up properly, to experience much of what the world has to offer, to figure out who they are outside of the sport... hey, no time even to start up too much drama where it isn't necessary - because are there many things more inefficient than media shit storms? in some ways, sampras represented the future of the sport. agassi, in all his impetuous talent, could in a sense be considered a relic of the past

that is not to say, of course, that agassi was not massively successful in his own right. and somehow he did what felt ever so implausible - he successfully completed his comeback, making it all the way back to the top of the sport when he had been so summarily written off. in 1998, he made an unprecedented jump from 110 to 6 in the rankings - and in 1999, he came from two sets to love down to win the roland garros title, completing his career slam by winning all four majors. this is one achievement that sampras could not match, having never progressed past the semifinals of the slow clay of roland garros that has tripped up many an american. (oddly enough, that's actually the slam all three of sampras' american peers had won, but courier was a natural surface specialist and chang was a grinder so it just kinda happened that way.) agassi reached the wimbledon final only to lose to sampras once again, then won the us open. and eventually he managed to snap sampras' record streak of six consecutive year end number ones (a rare record that has actually remained intact), capping off his most successful season to date

let's skip ahead once again, and talk a little more about what was possibly the most revered match the pair of them ever played. once again, it was the us open to host their showdown,taking place in the quarterfinals at what was now very much in the twilight stages of their careers. this time let's get some of sampras' thinking about that particular match and how it fit within the narrative of their rivalry:

It was fitting that Andre was the last man standing when it came to my rivalries. Andre was toughest during that great summer of 1995, and then again near the very end of our careers, culminating with the night-session quarterfinal at the 2001 Open—a match that was the crowning moment of our rivalry and, to me, our toughest and greatest battle. Volumes have been written about my rivalry with Andre, and from every perspective. In my heart of hearts, I know he was the guy who brought out the best in me. He had ups and downs, which accounts for why we didn’t have more confrontations, especially in big finals. But Andre was still the gold standard among my rivals. Nobody else popped up as frequently, over as long a period of time, to test and push me to the max. For most of our careers, we really couldn’t have been more different—in personality, game, even the clothing we wore. Our lifestyles were radically different. Andre always seemed bent on asserting his individuality and independence, while I tried to submerge my individuality and accepted the loss of some personal freedoms. Andre was Joe Frazier to my Muhammad Ali, although the personalities were kind of flipped around because Andre was the showman and I was the craftsman. Wherever you lived, we were your neighbors: I was the nice, quiet kid next door on one side, and Andre was the rebellious teenager on the other. Yet as Jekyll and Hyde as we were, and as much as people liked to emphasize the very real differences between us, there were powerful, deep similarities between us, too. The Gift we both had shaped our actions and lives, posing challenges as well as offering opportunities. First-generation Americans (Andre’s father, Mike, was from Iran), we were both champions but outsiders who crashed a sport dominated for most of its history by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. That never bothered me, because the American Dream fulfilled its promise to my family, a few times over. Because we had both been prodigies, we grew up in the public eye, under scrutiny. It was easy to stereotype us—Andre was the brash, flamboyant showman, I was the reticent, old-school, boring guy. Who was hurt more by the stereotyping? Who knows? What I am sure about, though, is that we were tough, albeit in different ways and with different goals. When we reached the top, we cast frequent, nervous glances across the divide between us. Andre and I always made it our business as individuals to know what the other guy was doing.

as I am aware this post is already far too long, I won't dissect this passage too much. in any case, sampras addresses the sense of absence caused by agassi's inconsistencies elsewhere in his autobiography too... agassi made sampras better, always, agassi pushed sampras to new heights, agassi provided sampras with a legitimacy and also excitement the public would not have otherwise afforded him. but agassi wasn't always there. and the rivalry was ultimately far less kind to him

"in my heart of hearts, I know he was the guy who brought out the best in me" // "he says I bring out the best in him, but I think he's brought out the worst in me"

that entire section is one of the stronger parts of sampras' autobiography, which I'm also resisting the temptation to include in full. I will, however, include just a little more of how sampras describes how the pair of them match up:

Andre had to think a little more about the nuances of the game than I did. Against top guys, he needed to set things up for himself in order to play his most effective game. At his best, Andre was the consummate puppet master, jerking his opponents all over the court. Thankfully for me, he was also a little bit at the mercy of what his opponents could do. My game, by contrast, was much more about what I was going to do, and whether or not the other guy could stop it. The big question for me on every surface but clay was, Okay, what do I do to break the guy? That was because I always felt confident that I could hold my serve. Andre didn’t have that luxury—at least not to the same extent that I did. [...] The overarching theme, in my eyes, was that if I could make it a test of athleticism and movement, things would break my way. I had the fast-twitch-muscle advantage. By contrast, Andre had amazing eye-hand coordination; he was unrivaled as a ball striker. The idea was always the same: avoid becoming the puppet on the end of Andre’s string. Avoid getting into those rallies in which I found myself trying to get the ball to Andre’s backhand, while he’s cracking forehands and jerking me around the court.

sampras does go into more detail about how the actual tactics between them played out, but in a brave act of restraint I shall not discuss any of that. it does, however, tap into one of the central tensions of tennis - namely the curse of the counterpuncher. sampras acted, agassi reacted. in a way, it always felt like the match was on sampras' racquet, win or lose. sampras had the weapons. agassi had the wits. sampras could blast his way past agassi, if he could just summon up all his discipline to execute to perfection. agassi had to try to cling onto his nerves while going all he could to trip sampras up. the curse of the counterpuncher - the helplessness of being beholden to another player's whims... especially brutal when facing someone with sampras' painfully excellent weapons. and sampras had one more great weapon at his disposal: his mentality, that unflappable presence that graced him one of the most ridiculously good tiebreak records you'll ever find. from the moment sampras snatched that us open title away from him way back in 1990, agassi was always going to have to look over his shoulder, eternally wary of the threat posed by sampras. because perfect pete at his very best might have just been a little too much for andre the prodigy to handle

the 2001 us open quarterfinal has gone down as one of the very finest matches in that tournament's history. agassi had come into the tournament the number two seed - sampras, suffering from a slump in form, had been seeded only tenth. it played out over four sets, all of them tiebreaks, with not a single break of serve. the home crowd was riveted for the entire contest and enthusiastically celebrating both of their heroes for the spectacle they provided. you already know who won

so then, both of them slowly but surely reaching the end of their careers, their slam counts tailing off as injuries and frailty scupper them... sampras' decline was earlier and sharper, finding himself struggling after securing his fourth consecutive wimbledon title in 2000. agassi was generally ranked higher during that time and had won the australian open title in both 2000 and 2001. after wimbledon, sampras went for two full years without winning a slam, and retirement looked increasingly imminent. but in the end, they managed to put on one last show - and where else but in the same place where they had contested their first slam final in 1990.

At 4 P.M. on a calm and bright Sunday afternoon in early September, I looked across the net and saw the same person who had been there twelve years earlier, almost to the day, when I played my first Grand Slam final: Andre Agassi. The Andre I saw in 2002 was someone very different from the kid I had seen in 1990, and it went well beyond the fact that the multicolored mullet had become a shiny bald head, and that lime green costume was now a fairly plain, conservative shorts-and-shirt tennis kit. I saw a seasoned, confident, multiple Grand Slam champion who was in full command of his game—a game that could hurt me. This was no stranger. This was my career rival. This was the yin to my yang. Over time and through rivalry, though, our identities blurred a little and parts of our personalities had jumped from one to the other, like sparks sometimes do across two wires. We had a lot of shared history now. The sharp edges had been worn down and the contrasts muted. We were elder statesmen, celebrated champions, co-guests of honor at the Big Moment one more time. In many ways we were just a couple of nearly worn-out tennis players looking for one last shot at glory.

as always, pete

agassi was the favourite in that match. but that's the funny thing about tennis - all this stuff in between, all these matches, talk of form and confidence and all of it, you'll find it has a nasty tendency to not matter at all. because you already know how this story goes. tennis, in particular on the men's side, writes its narratives in advance and then begs us to act surprised when everything unfolds as expected. every once in a blue moon, you will have something different - an australian open 1995, where everything had been disturbed just enough to throw up a different outcome. but otherwise, there is no amount of form or confidence in the world that can change the inevitable. it doesn't matter that agassi was supposed to be the prodigy who would claim his glorious first slam in 1990. it doesn't matter that agassi had been on a 26 match winning streak in 1995 and had bested sampras just a few weeks before. it doesn't matter that agassi was facing a washed up version of sampras in 2002 who had lost touch with his 'gift' and had been staring down the barrel of retirement for the better part of two years. when they faced each other on that stage, at the most important tournament of them all to agassi, they both reverted to type. agassi got a slow start, felt the match slip away from him, as sampras blasted through him - and only two sets in managed to mount any sort of resistance. of course, it was not enough

it turned out to be sampras' last professional match. he announced his retirement a year later. the last time sampras ever played, and it was denying agassi on one final occasion

one more thing before I wrap up this post - a coda of sorts, because the story just wouldn't be complete without it. because there's one more rather infamous story from agassi's autobiography. here's agassi talking about the lead up to that us open 2002 final, lying in bed the night before that match and remembering a moment from a few years prior:

Sipping Gil’s magic water before bed, I tell myself that this time will be different. Pete hasn’t won a slam in more than two years. He’s nearing the end. I’m just starting over. I climb under the covers and remember a time in Palm Springs, several years ago. Brad and I were eating at an Italian restaurant, Mama Gina’s, and we saw Pete eating with friends on the other side of the dining room. He stopped by and said hello on his way out. Good luck tomorrow. You too. Then we watched him through the restaurant window, waiting for his car. We said nothing, each of us thinking of the difference he’d made in our lives. As Pete drove away I asked Brad how much he thought Pete tipped the valet. Brad hooted. Five bucks, tops. No way, I said. The guy’s got millions. He’s earned forty mil in prize money alone. He’s got to be good for at least a ten spot. Bet? Bet. We ate fast and rushed outside. Listen, I told the valet, give us the absolute truth: How much did Mr. Sampras tip you? The kid looked at his feet. He didn’t want to tell. He was weighing, wondering if he was on a hidden-camera show. We told the kid we had a bet riding on this, so we absolutely were insisting he tell us. Finally he whispered: You really want to know? Shoot. He gave me a dollar. Brad put a hand on his heart. But that’s not all, the kid said. He gave me a dollar—and he told me to be sure to give it to whichever kid actually brought his car around. We could not be more different, Pete and I, and as I fall asleep the night before perhaps our final final, I vow that the world will see our differences tomorrow.

and just to quickly add this, about the end of that final:

Now he's serving for the match, and when Pete serves for a match, he's a coldblooded killer. Everything happens very fast. Ace. Blur. Backhand volley, no way to reach it. Applause. Handshake at the net. Pete gives me a friendly smile, a pat on the back, but the expression on his face is unmistakable. I've seen it before. Here's a buck, kid. Bring my car around.

this is probably the most infamous part of the autobiography, excluding anything related to crystal meth. I buried the lede somewhat when I was talking about sampras' reaction to the autobiography - more than comparing him to a parrot or calling him uninspired, this was the bit that really got traction. it's just such a brutal story in an understated way... this is the kind of impression that sticks with you, the slander that stands the test of time. perfect pete the multi millionaire is a bad tipper

which brings us at last to indian wells 2010. an exhibition event the pair of them participated in at one of the most prestigious tournaments in the united states (second only to the us open), done for a good cause to raise money for charity. it was a doubles match they participated in, both partnering up with top players who were reasonably prominent at the time - all in order to put on a show for the crowd. for a good cause. over seven years after the conclusion of their rivalry, more than enough time for any old wounds to heal. what followed is quite possibly the only worthwhile moment indian wells has ever provided us... I hereby present to you a clip of two guys who are definitely over it, engaging in some entirely friendly banter, for a good cause, as a playful continuation of their respectful rivalry, which is fine because they're over it, so it's all fine and it's for a good cause. here you go:

youtube

now, honestly I would just recommend you watch this four minute video, because I think it's quite tricky to quite get across in words how the vibes gradually get more rancid. it's the little details that often get left out when this historic event is recounted that really make it - agassi's "you always have to go get serious, huh pete" is a personal favourite of mine. but to give a summary of the main points... sampras imitates agassi's famous pigeon-toed walk (the result of being born with spondylolisthesis, a back condition where one of your vertebra slips forward). then, agassi mockingly and repeatedly alludes to sampras being a poor tipper. which sampras follows up by straight up attempting to murder agassi

well, not quite, but he does use that lovely powerful serve of his to hit right at agassi - rather than diagonally across the court, where your service really should be going. also the serve is supposed to go like, into the box that's just on the other side of the net. whereas sampras' serve was travelling at a trajectory that took it oddly close to agassi's head

what's delightful to me about this clip is how they're both trying to play it off as a joke, even though you can tell that they're both visibly losing their tempers. look at the faces of two men just having a laff

shout out to the commentator for saying the rivalry between the retired players seemed to be stronger than the one between the current players. which - well, yes, that is true! this is what a proper rivalry looks like

they both got plenty of criticism for this episode - and agassi ended up both publicly saying he'd been out of line and messaged sampras to ask if he could apologise in person. and they did move on from the controversy, playing another exhibition the following year with no incident. here's what agassi said then:

isn't this great. isn't every word of this just great. like man he just gets it. isn't this great

still, beyond just being a fun bit of drama, it is a revealing moment between the pair of them. sampras is right that they both usually tried to avoid too much controversy, inclined to keep things civil and resist too much mudslinging in the press. sampras, after all, just wasn't really the type - and agassi had other things to worry about, never in a real position of strength in that rivalry. and yet, sometimes the mask slips just a little. the two of them often didn't understand each other, didn't really know each other at all, but they managed to get under each other's skin nevertheless. sampras was everything agassi couldn't be - and the reverse was true too. agassi couldn't find it in himself to copy sampras' pure dedication towards the sport, whereas sampras could never match agassi's flair and charisma. at times, there's a whiff of contempt in how they judge each other, cataloguing the other's shortcomings and incapable of imagining what it must be like to walk in the other's shoes. agassi could not dedicate himself completely towards tennis. sampras was uninspired. agassi was flighty. sampras was simple. a touch of envy, a little more contempt, and a whole lot of bafflement

for all that he won eight grand slams, in many ways agassi's story is one of failure. this is how much of his autobiography is framed - around hating tennis, around needing to be brilliant at it, over having to cope with loss after loss after loss. so much of tennis is about trying to find ways to process failure. it's all about failing... in matches, where even the winning player typically wins a little more than 50% of all points played and generally will lose quite a few games in the process. in tournaments, where all but one player will emerge from each event the loser. and even if that one has been won, the next tournament and potential loss is generally right around the corner. agassi hated that life, and yet he still took a couple years longer than sampras to walk away from it. and for agassi, the inevitability of that ultimate, final, inevitable loss was tied ever so closely to the existence of pete sampras. once more with feeling: "no matter how much you win, if you're not the last one to win, you're a loser. and in the end I always lose, because there is always pete. as always, pete." it's a bittersweet narrative - for all of agassi's success, for all that everything did turn out well for him in the end... it's always there, inescapably so, that lingering sense of inevitability. that helplessness. maybe the hand of destiny, after all. agassi was never able to overturn that narrative, no triumphant changing of the script or final triumph or any of it... and that'll hurt, and it'll always be a little bit sad. but he learned to live with it - and eventually found his own happy ending. there's something to that, isn't there?

#anon let me tell you. my entire life I have waited for someone to say the words 'agassi/sampras please tell us more' to me #if one person reads this and Gets It afterwards then honestly my work with this blog is done #i always have a million more things to say about them like this was a proper exercise in restraint #all this motorcycling bullshit was really a psyop for this specific agenda. now just get me talking about my belgians #//#batsplat responds

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