All Guts, No Glory

Pete Sampras bombs a 125-mph serve down the T of the stadium court at the Los Angeles Tennis Center at UCLA. Almost instantaneously, there’s a rifle shot of return fire, and the ball rockets back over the net and hurtles past him. As he straightens up, Sampras peers out from beneath weighty eyebrows with a quizzical look that’s clearly asking, “Where the hell did that come from?”

On the other side of the court, Cecil Mamiit twirls his racket like a B-movie Western gunslinger. Sampras returns to the baseline and cranks up another heater. This time, Mamiit scorches a forehand return at Sampras’ feet. Sampras does a little hop-step, and the ball clangs off the frame of his racket. As he watches the ball dribble off the court, Sampras shakes his head with thinly disguised frustration. Sure, this is just a practice match three days before the Mercedes-Benz Cup in July, the first event in a hard-court season that culminates in the U.S. Open finals next weekend. But Sampras is arguably the greatest player in the history of men’s tennis, while Mamiit is ... well, who exactly is Cecil Mamiit again?

According to the Assn. of Tennis Professionals, the man facing Sampras this July day is the 113rd-best player in the world, ranked ninth in the United States. He started when he was 6 on the public courts of Glassell Park, and with little fanfare or financial support, he has worked his way to the top of the junior ranks. Five years ago, playing for USC, he became the first freshman since John McEnroe to win the NCAA singles championship. Since turning pro in 1996, he has amassed more than half a million dollars in prize money. Pretty impressive, huh? So how come nobody but the most obsessive tennis fanatics could pick him out of a police lineup?

Mamiit is a member of the vast and largely faceless underclass of men’s tennis professionals who form the foundation of the pyramid that peaks in Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi. Superbly conditioned, prodigiously talented and, for the most part, sadly interchangeable in the eyes of the general public, Mamiit and others like him serve as first-round fodder and practice partners for the bigger names and more familiar faces favored by TV producers and advertising agencies. It’s not a bad life; far from it. Even Mamiit, at 113 in the world, stands to clear $100,000 this year. But the money hardly seems commensurate with the effort, skill and training he brings to the court.

It’s easy to dismiss athletes such as Mamiit as losers, because let’s face it: Losing early and often comes with the territory, and fans aren’t in the habit of cavorting in conga lines while chanting, “We’re Number 113!” Then again, consider how much the 113th-best baseball player earns. The 113th-best CEO. The 113th-best attorney. The 113th-best physicist in the world is probably a genius. And as Mamiit spars with Sampras, it’s clear that the 113th-best tennis player isn’t chopped liver.

Even though Mamiit is only 5 foot 8, he’s got a big-time forehand, a reliable two-handed backhand and world-class wheels. Light on his feet and solid off the ground, he has no trouble hanging with Sampras. Yes, Sampras serves harder; he serves harder than just about anybody who has ever played the game. And this is practice, not the finals at Wimbledon. But today, at least, it’s tough to tell the artist from the artisan.

“From a technical standpoint, there’s no real difference between [numbers] 50 and 150 in the world,” says Scott McCain, the United States Tennis Assn. touring coach who works with Mamiit and a few other young American pros. “The difference could be one good tournament. It could be six or seven wins over the course of the year. It could be a couple of points here and there. Against a guy like Pete, who’s got such a great serve, a two-point swing can mean a set. He can be four points better than you, and you lose the match 6-4, 6-4. Four points! That’s all it takes.”

The practice session ends. “Thanks, Cece,” Sampras says, casually toweling off like a heavyweight champion after going a few rounds in the gym. Mamiit packs up and slips unnoticed into the stands for a post-mortem with McCain. The sparse crowd applauds as Sampras strolls off the court. His personal coach carries his tennis bag to the locker room while the legend pauses to sign autographs.

Four points--that’s all there is between them. Four points and $41 million in prize money.

Mamiit sits down in his kitchen and attacks a small breakfast plate overflowing with a melange of eggs, steamed rice and Filipino sausages. “My mother made it for me before she left for work,” he says, smiling sheepishly. “I don’t think the sausages are very good for you. But I can’t resist them when I’m at home.” To be safe, he sucks down a fistful of vitamin and other dietary supplements.

Mamiit is on the road at least 30 weeks a year, but when he’s in town he continues to live with his parents in the house where he grew up in a working-class section of Eagle Rock. He still sleeps in a modest upstairs bedroom where the most interesting accouterment is a racket-stringing machine--a piece of equipment rarely seen outside a pro shop. “Strings are so expensive,” he explains. “My father realized a long time ago we could save a lot of money if I strung my rackets myself.”

Mamiit’s parents, who were born in the Philippines, lavished attention on their only child, and their example sold him on the virtues of thrift and hard work. In his bedroom closet, boxes of tennis shoes from past and present sponsors are stacked like bricks from floor to ceiling. “My friends are amazed when they see this,” he says with a huge grin. He opens two other closets elsewhere in the house. Both are packed with still more shoe boxesNthe fruit of a lifetime of economizing. “There’s always a need for shoes,” he says without a trace of irony.

In a sports world increasingly filled with spoiled brats and prosperous thugs, Mamiit is the prototypical nice young man. He’s so polite he doesn’t bother to correct people who mispronounce his first name. (He prefers SEH-sull, though almost everybody says SEE-sull. Friends call him Cece, which rhymes with peace.) When he finishes eating, he dutifully rinses off his dishes, stuffs his tennis bag with extra clothes and dumps his gear in the back of a 1988 Toyota Supra--a hand-me-down from his folks.

Mamiit can afford to live larger than his frugal lifestyle. But he’s acutely aware of how quickly the revenue stream can dry up. At 25, he’s middle-aged by tennis standards. He’s already had serious shoulder and knee problems. Although he enjoys generous clothing and equipment contracts with his sponsors, K-Swiss and Wilson, he’s not likely to score any of the big-money deals commanded by Top 10 players.

“I’ve hung out with Boris Becker, and I’ve seen the glamour on the tour,” Mamiit says. “I’d like a BMW. I’m looking at houses. But I don’t have a college degree, and I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get finished with tennis. This is my job. My goal is to make money. But I’ve got to watch how much I spend until I’m confident that I’ve got enough to support a family, to go back to school, to pay for a mortgage. I’ve seen what my parents had to do to support me, all the sacrifices they made. I don’t want to go through that myself.”

In professional tennis, Mamiit has chosen a uniquely brutish means to financial independence. This is a sport with no guaranteed contracts, no teammates, no players’ union. It’s the ultimate just-win-baby existence. And because tournaments are structured on an elimination basis, only a handful of survivors--invariably the elite players--get significant face time on TV. So Mamiit and his peers toil in obscurity, emerging from the shadows only when they’re illuminated by the reflected light of stars such as Gustavo Kuerten and Patrick Rafter.

As a result, the vast majority of the money in tennis goes to the high-profile types at the top of the mountain, with precious little trickling down to the little people beneath them. Last year, Kuerten raked in $4.7 million in prize money, plus scads more in endorsements, bonuses and appearance money. This year, the No. 100 player in the world will be lucky to see $200,000. Against this, he’ll have to pay his own way to and from--and sometimes at--most tournaments. The thrifty Mamiit spends $30,000 a year, but it’s not uncommon for guys to run through $75,000 and more annually on plane tickets, food, coaches and agents.

Sure, there’s plenty of prize money available at full-fledged ATP tournaments. But most of the berths in these lucrative events are parceled out on the basis of player rankings, which are determined by points earned over the past 12 months. (Points are awarded for winning matches, with greater weight given to more important events, which, in classic Catch-22 fashion, are open mostly to players with higher rankings.) A handful of slots are reserved for players who receive highly coveted wild-card entries or who qualify by surviving grueling pre-tournament tournaments. Meanwhile, players who aren’t ranked high enough to make the ATP cut can earn points playing minor-league tournaments--Challengers, Futures and Satellites--offering minimal prize money and parsimonious hospitality.

“I’m covering expenses, but that’s about it,” says 28-year-old Michael Joyce of Los Angeles, who rose to 64 in the world before rupturing a tendon in his wrist and free-falling in the rankings. He’s spent the past four years on the Challenger circuit clawing his way back up to 257. “My first match back was in Mobile, Alabama, in a Satellite tournament, which is like Class A baseball. I’m on a back court. It’s hot as hell. We’re calling our own lines. I’m playing a guy who’s ranked 900, and he’s cheating me. And it’s tough. Because the guys are really good even at this level.”

At UCLA in July, Joyce marched through the qualies--the qualifying rounds--to snag a spot in the Mercedes-Benz Cup. Then, like three of the other four qualifiers, he got waxed in the first round. This is the reality of life on the tour. Technically, there’s only one winner per week, and the sport is so deep that there are no gimmes. This is especially rough on the ego of players who have, in many cases, been winning tournaments since they were 10.

“Tennis can bring a full-grown adult to his knees more quickly than almost any sport I can think of,” says sports psychologist Jim Loehr, who’s worked with tennis champions Jim Courier and Monica Seles and dozens of elite athletes in other sports. “I have seen so many young players who dominated in the juniors and then literally came apart when they moved up to the pro tour. They couldn’t take the bludgeonings week after week. The ones who succeed find a way to take something positive out of the losses. It’s almost as if the repeated setbacks create an obsession to prove that they’re better than everybody else.”

Mamiit isn’t a Deion Sanders wannabe who struts around the locker room talking smack. But over the years, he’s had to develop a bedrock of faith in his own ability. Because of what he obliquely refers to as his “stature,” Mamiit has always been an underdog. Despite numerous triumphs in the juniors, for example, he wasn’t selected for the USTA’s prestigious junior national team. Mamiit is too modest to point out that he’s now ranked higher than any of the four players anointed in his place. But the snub still rankles; it’s a wound that won’t ever fully close.

“The USTA thought I was too short, that I didn’t have enough game, that I didn’t have enough potential,” Mamiit says. “The guys they picked were supposed to be the next stars, and they got all the perks. I used it for motivation. In a way, it’s good that I wasn’t chosen. I think I would have been sucked in. I probably would have gotten lazy. Instead, I started working harder. That’s where my work ethic comes from. I wanted to prove the USTA wrong.”

Even though Mamiit was playing tennis seven days a week, the competition in Southern California wasn’t tough enough. He spent his junior and senior years in high school in Florida boarding schools known as tennis academies and finished his junior career ranked third in the nation. Still, USC and UC Irvine were the only major colleges to offer him a full ride. Mamiit responded by winning his first 20 collegiate matches for USC and going 44-6 en route to winning the NCAA singles title in 1996.

Mamiit had been planning to return to USC the following year. But winning the NCAA title earned him a wild-card berth in the U.S. Open, where even first-round losers get $10,000. Five minutes before his match, after much agonizing, Mamiit reluctantly decided to take the money. Nervous about turning pro and overmatched by big-hitting Alberto Berasategui, he proceeded to get destroyed 6-1, 6-4, 6-0.

“I’d never been humiliated so bad before in my life,” he says. “It was a beating, a literal beating. Welcome to the pros. You could say it was the low point of my career. But at the same time, it showed me that I needed a lot of work. If I was going to take this job, I’d have to work from the bottom up. If I’d been satisfied with the way I played, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.”

In 1999, after two years of slogging through the quicksand of the Challenger circuit, he beat Agassi and Michael Chang en route to reaching the finals of an ATP event in San Jose and won a silver medal in the Pan American Games. But after vaulting to 72 in the world, a knee injury caused his ranking to plummet. Since hitting the comeback trail, his biggest win has been a hard-fought first-round victory over A-list American Todd Martin in the French Open earlier this summer.

Mamiit’s goal now is to crack the top 60. A few wins at the Mercedes-Benz Cup would help. But if he can’t score enough points at UCLA, he’ll try Montreal. Or Cincinnati. Or Indianapolis. Or Washington, D.C. If he isn’t given a wild card into the U.S. Open, he’ll play the qualies and hope for the best. Then it’s on to Brazil, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo. “In tennis,” he says, “you always have a next week. It’s not a sport where, if you lose in the playoffs, you’re done. I don’t dwell on losing. I say, ‘Okay, I lost. What do I have to do to win next week?’ There’s always another tournament.”

On opening night of the mercedes-benz cup, while fans stream into the stadium, a boisterous clique of middle-aged Filipino men lingers around an empty practice court. Guys like this can be found on every weekend on public courts all over the country--hackers with self-taught strokes who play noisy, good-natured doubles. This particular group’s claim to fame is that it once included the young Cecil Mamiit. “We played four against one, and he was the one,” one of them says, and they all cackle.

Tonight the crew’s centerpiece is a small man with a merry smile that materializes without warning and animates an otherwise impassive face. His K-Swiss ensemble identifies him as Mamiit’s father, Cesar. When Cecil got the tennis bug, Cesar, who works for a firm that delivers legal documents, took a second job to support the exorbitant cost of tennis instruction. His wife, Felisa, a nurse, switched to the night shift so somebody would always be available to ferry Cecil to and from the courts. “We made a lot of sacrifices,” Cesar says, “but it was worth it. When he was a junior, I said I’d be happy if he was just ranked in Southern California. Now look at him.”

Cesar beams with pride as his son emerges from the locker room. Next to his father, Mamiit looks like a giant. He has a buffed upper body, deeply sculpted calf muscles and a bouncing step that suggests barely restrained energy. Inside the packed stadium, Sampras and Agassi are about to play doubles with some Hollywood celebs. But the Filipino contingent is here to see Mamiit, who will play Magnus Norman after the exhibition. As the celebrity match begins, Mamiit walks onto the empty grandstand court with James Blake. While they warm up, numerous Filipino fans file into the bleachers.

Mamiit is ranked 113 in the world. Blake is 119. Yet when they rally, pounding balls with percussive, metronomic, mesmerizing regularity, it’s hard to imagine anyone hitting cleaner or harder than they do. “They make it look so easy,” Cesar Mamiit murmurs, speaking not as a parent but as a duffer envious of this effortless excellence. Cross-court, down the line, chip, charge, volley, lob, overhead--the players move so gracefully that their rallies appear to be choreographed. Yeah, and all it took was hundreds of lessons, thousands of matches and millions of practice balls.

By the time the celebrity match ends, it’s cold and late, and only a few hundred die-hards stick around for Norman and Mamiit. Norman, ranked 21 in the world and seeded seventh in the tournament, is the overwhelming favorite. The first set is tight, but Mamiit comes up short on the big points, and Norman wins 6-4. After that, there’s a general exodus from the stadium, and Mamiit implodes. He goes for too many spectacular shots and makes too many unforced errors. McCain looks on in agony. “God gave Cecil a great pair of legs. He’s got to learn to use them,” he says. “He should be running balls down and making his opponent hit winners instead of giving points away.”

Norman takes the second set 6-2. Mamiit is bitterly disappointed, not so much because he lost but because he played so erratically. Still, he climbs into the stands to visit with dozens of his supporters--virtually the only spectators left in the stadium. Ever gracious, he forces himself to smile while he exchanges hugs, kisses, handshakes and high-fives with friends and family, signs autographs and poses for photographs. As Norman leaves the court, he sees the throng of well-wishers surrounding Mamiit. A perplexed expression crosses his face, as if to say, “Hey, I thought I won this match.” By now, it’s nearly midnight, and tournament officials are eager to close up for the night. A woman wearing a headset asks Mamiit, “Cecil, do you think you could start getting these people out of here?”

“Can I take them this way?” he asks, pointing toward the court. “Whatever you want. Cecil, you’re the man.”

Like the Pied Piper, Mamiit leads a swirling cluster of fans down the steps. The loss to Magnus Norman suddenly seems far away. And for a few minutes, at least, Cecil Mamiit is No. 1.