SPECTATOR SPORT
Pete's boring, winning ways
Simon Barnes
AND yet there are still people who tell me that Pete Sampras is boring. I find it an astonishing judgment. There are few people I have found more fascinating. 'Boring?' I say, slightly overemphasised incredulity in my voice. 'If you find excellence boring, what on earth are you doing watching sport?'
But in my heart I know that this attitude has something of snobbery about it. There are plenty of reasons for watching sport — pleasure in the melodrama of its set-pieces, delight in the flamboyant nature of some of its characters, involvement in the ever-run- ning soap opera — and all these things are legitimate enough. All the same, the idea of Sport is to win things, and Sampras last weekend won his seventh Wimbledon and his 13th major title, to become the most successful male tennis player in history.
Tennis is the most emotional of sports, and the most theatrical; it is a sport in which the participants give themselves away over and over again, and are vastly loved for it: John McEnroe screaming vengeance at the umpire, Boris Becker rolling all over the turf and howling at the heavens, Andre Agassi showboating outrageously.
And all the time Sampras has been doing the winning, and those who watch tennis for one fortnight a year saying, 'I hope it won't be him again. So dull.' And they're right and, then again, they're wrong. Turning to Sampras after Agassi is like going up to the next class — not in an aeroplane, but in school. You have thrilled to A Portrait of the Artist but now you find yourself out of your depth with Ulysses. Perhaps, Sampras being of Greek extrac- tion, we should say that you have thrilled to Tales from Homer; now you must grap- ple with ancient Greek grammar and the Odyssey itself. For Sampras is difficult to understand. A truly exceptional person must always be. Most people starting off on their journeys will say that they want to be the best ever, but, secretly, just about everyone already knows that he would happily settle for less.
A person who genuinely wants to succeed beyond the scope of mortals is exceptional; a person who actually does so is an excep- tion among the exceptional. And yet such people are often impenetrable: they excel beyond mere excellence while all the time seeming, in every aspect of life other than their chosen sphere, to be utterly humdrum.
There are just two things that Sampras does that give something away. The first is his famous slam-dunk shot — his one flam- boyance, a sudden relishing of his own power. The other is in his service action. As he looks up to sight his target, he invariably brandishes his racket, just once, in a ner- vous tic of pure menace.
But last Sunday he did something most uncharacteristic. It was like a fault in reali- ty. He started double-faulting: he served two successive double-faults to lose the first set, like an overawed teenager meeting the champion. For, in a sense, that is exactly what he was: he could not truly believe he had a right to be on court.
For being on that court and winning did not mean just that he was better than his opponent. It meant he was better than any- one else, ever. For just a moment he won- dered if he had the right to take that next step. But then the moment passed.
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