Sampras’ Good Game Is Good for the Game

Sports, like Hollywood, needs heroes. Stars. That’s why they put numbers on the backs of players. It’s all very well to talk of team exploits, but it’s individuals who sell tickets.

Tennis needs them more than most. It especially needs American heroes. The game foundered periodically here with the flood of skilled but alien Australian players. Of late, the superior practitioners of the game seem to come from Europe.

Tennis has always needed the Big Bill Tildens, Jack Kramers, Arthur Ashes, Donald Budges. Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe filled the bill for a time, but they came into focus as something of anti-heroes, skilled players but a long way from the Frank Merriwell traditions of another generation. Kind of embarrassments, really.

McEnroe and Connors are all but gone, and the game has weathered the Scandinavian onslaught (Stefan Edberg appears to be the last of the great Svenskas).

The lists are filled with journeymen, quarterfinalists at best, players who might rise to an occasional challenge but who are inconsistent, incomplete, lacking true star status. That’s why the game was really ready to throw its racket in the air, leap the net, and send up a volley of cheers when Pete Sampras became the first American in seven years to win our Open, in fact, the first American to reach the final in six years.

Pete Sampras is tall, dark, handsome, as American as a malt shop. A hero right out of Central Casting. He plays the American big game, serve and volley. A home run hitter. A bomb-thrower. Dempsey. Joe Louis. A take-no-prisoners game. He doesn’t have to chip and dive for his points, hug the baseline and wait for the breaks. Sampras is a terminator.

American tennis is overjoyed. At last, a guy on a white horse. A guy whose idol was Rod Laver, not Charlie Manson. You can root for Pete Sampras. No ugly American here. You don’t have to hold your breath for fear he will insult the Queen, make a gesture at the royal box, ask the Pope for a light.

Like all power hitters, he tends to over-rely on his big weapon. Baseball sluggers either hit a home run or strike out. They rarely bother with the small skills, hitting behind the runner, working the count, moving the man over, bunting. Power quarterbacks go for the long one, they don’t work the ball downfield one first down at a time. Mike Tyson isn’t looking to win the decision.

Sampras, too, is like a railroad gun. When he’s on target, havoc. When he’s not, oops!

He served 13 aces against a moderately skilled international player, Amos Mansdorf, at the Volvo/Los Angeles tournament at UCLA the other night, but had to rally from a 1-4 deficit in the second set to pull out the match. His games sometimes tend to look like Bugs Bunny cartoons with the wily rabbits turning his own big game back in on him.

He threw 100 aces at the field in the U.S. Open last September, 24 of them at Andre Agassi in the final. It was like arguing with King Kong.

But what happens when the ball comes back? What happens when the KO artist throws his Sunday punch and the other guy doesn’t even blink? Or gets up at the count of two and charges?

“Fastball pitchers say there are some nights they don’t have that fine line,” Sampras is advised. “Are there some nights the serve is off? What happens then?”

“The ball comes back,” Sampras admits. “You’re startled. You go to Plan B.”

Does he have a Plan B? Sampras thinks so. He doesn’t plan to revert to baseline tennis. “I get a lot of easy points, but I play aggressive tennis. I keep the pressure on.”

It’s a risk game. It is an axiom of pugilism that great punchers have their biggest problems with jab-and-run artists, clinchers who neutralize onslaughts--boxing’s version of baseline tennis. Home run hitters can’t handle junk pitches as a rule and quarterbacks hate safeties who play zones.

Pete Sampras faces a foe in the Volvo final today whose game is hardly as nuclear as his. Brad Gilbert may think it’s raining tennis balls by the second set, but if he can contain the fallout and get the ball back in play, Sampras may need to play his aces as usual.

Bill Tilden had more than a big serve. So did Don Budge, Rod Laver, Bjorn Borg. But none of them won the U.S. Open singles championship at the age of 19 years 28 days.

A cannonball serve is no more a guarantee of immortality than a 350-yard drive in golf or the 100-m.p.h. fastball in baseball. You have to be able to chip and putt. You have to have a curve, a change and control.

And you need passing shots, lobs, drop volleys and second serves in tennis. The game should take up a collection to ensure that Pete Sampras gets them. If he doesn’t make it, the whole game goes back to the baseline. To say nothing of back to the Borises and Ivans and guys who speak English in the singsong smorgasbord of Stockholm.