Hit Hard, Sampras Hits Back

For the first time in several years, Pete Sampras invited the man who taught him to play tennis, Dr. Peter Fischer, to attend the U.S. Open as his guest. Fischer felt grateful for this gesture of friendship. He politely declined, though, because the 55-year-old pediatrician’s presence was required by another court Friday . . . a Los Angeles court of law, where he was to answer charges that he sexually abused four teenage boys.

The two Petes have known each other since the tennis prodigy was 7. No matter what caused their serious falling-out after the 1989 Open here, there was a time when Sampras was dependent on Fischer’s help.

“And now Pete needs me,” says Sampras, who has volunteered to be a character witness at Fischer’s trial. “I told him I’ll always be there for him.”

Sometimes, even for one of its brightest stars, the world can be a scary place.

Pete Sampras prefers keeping it at arm’s length. He enjoys cable TV and room service. Acquaintances think of him as a couch potato. The other night, his girlfriend, actress Kimberly Williams, scored quite a triumph, persuading him to attend her debut-week performance in the Tony-winning hit Broadway play, “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” at the Helen Hayes theater on 44th Street. Friends are charmed by the effort Williams has made to expose the athlete to the arts.

Winning Wimbledon isn’t everything. Not when death claims your coach, Tim Gullikson, or your friend, Vitas Gerulaitis, in the relative prime of their lives. Not when the mentor who insisted on a one-hand backhand and made you the champion you are today, the man Sampras calls “a second father to me,” Fischer, is facing a maximum 16-year stretch in prison.

Such distractions would make a lesser athlete wilt, or even quit. Somehow, Pete Sampras simply seems to get stronger.

John McEnroe’s observations come from the viewpoint of a former greatest player in the world. All he can do is rave, saying of Sampras as the year’s last Grand Slam tournament reaches its midway point, “He’s the best he’s ever looked in his career, in my opinion, right now.”

Justin Gimelstob, who played at UCLA--where Pete’s sister, Stella, coaches tennis--and is among the sport’s up-and-comers, recently joked he would like to see a match between Sampras and God.

More seriously, he says of Sampras, “Right now, he’s so far ahead of everybody. He’s like watching Picasso paint. At the top of his game, he’s like Michael Jordan. Who can rival him?”

Andre Agassi, who for a time was Sampras’ top rival, sounds equally saucy yet sincere when he says, “Son of a [gun] has won how many Grand Slams? Sometimes I get a little [ticked] at him. He hasn’t even had easy draws. I mean, he’s grinded through to win Grand Slams. He’s dominated to win Grand Slams. He deserves all the credit he gets.”

Should he win this U.S. Open, it will be the 11th championship of a Grand Slam tournament for Sampras, leaving him one short of Roy Emerson’s record.

He was 19 when he won it the first time, making him the youngest men’s Open champion ever. He served 100 aces. In 118 service games, he was broken twice.

And somewhere in far-off California, in an electronics store in a Long Beach shopping mall, Sam and Georgia Sampras approached a man standing in front of 50 televisions showing the same football game and asked if he had heard how the tennis tournament came out.

“The Sampras kid killed Agassi,” said the man, to the delight of two parents who were too superstitious to watch.

They didn’t see Picasso paint that day. Soterios Sampras sat in his car afterward, waiting impatiently for confirmation of his son’s success, as a radio station gave the football scores, then the baseball scores, then the horse racing results, then broke for a commercial before reporting the tennis news from New York.

Pete was good then. Today, he’s better.

This summer at Wimbledon, when their match was over, Boris Becker confided to Sampras at the net that he was about to retire. Later that day, Becker gave him the ultimate praise. He called Sampras “the best player in tennis--ever.”

If there was a flaw in Pete’s game, it was in the perception of others that everything came too easily to him. At times, they needed evidence to the contrary, as when Sampras broke into tears on a court in Australia, or when he was so ill during a match at last year’s U.S. Open that he couldn’t help but vomit right there on the court.

Tennis is no snap for Sampras. Life, either.

He is concerned over what will become of Fischer, for instance. They were inseparable through the 1989 Open here, then split after a disagreement over how hard Sampras was working, then reconciled with the understanding that Fischer would not attend his matches. That’s why the invitation to this year’s Open meant so much to Fischer, coming at the low point of his life.

Sampras is more at ease with less serious subjects. Five rapid-fire questions were put to him here after one match, all having to do with Pete’s having worn black sneakers rather than white.

“We’re just talking shoes here, you know,” Sampras eventually said. “We’re not talking body piercing or anything.”

He is a Teflon tennis player, nothing ugly ever sticking to him.

Even when he failed to appear for the new Arthur Ashe Stadium’s opening ceremony--even though Sampras was on the premises, preparing for a no-brainer qualifying match--no one groused much. Becker had flown in from Europe for it. Don Budge attended in a wheelchair. But more people protested Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s boycott of the ceremony and Agassi’s no-show. Sampras’ absence was scarcely noted.

At times, life can be hard.

Pete Sampras would rather simply play hard. If he does, perhaps the rest of the world will go away.

* MORALE BOOSTER

Jana Novotna, 28, beat Mirjana Lucic, 15, to lift some of the elder spirits at the U.S. Open. C17

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