Here's my latest Deep Tennis Q & A column from over at No Mas. Click over there if you're also interested in a piece about how Roland Garros got its name, which my friend Dave wrote. I’ve always thought it was funny that the place, and the tournament, is a real person's first and last names. It would be like the U.S. Open being played at "Steve Tignor." Cool idea, huh? Anyway, here's my post, about a relatively unsung classic match.
“Steve, what’s the most important match that no one knows about?”
Well, tennis fans do know about this match, but it’s always been somewhat overlooked because it happened in a Grand Slam quarterfinal, rather than a final. The 1990 U.S. Open five-setter between Pete Sampras and Ivan Lendl was a changing of the guard in the purest sense: on that afternoon, the era of one champion ended and another’s began. The two players were the best of the 80s and 90s, respectively, but their reigns didn’t overlap. Sampras’ rise was born from the demise of Lendl, right in front of our eyes in Louis Armstrong Stadium.
I only vaguely remember how the points went, but I know I’ve never been as shocked by a result. Even Guillermo Cañas beating Roger Federer twice in two weeks seemed more reasonable than Lendl losing a fifth set at the U.S. Open to this kid Sampras. For one thing, Lendl hadn’t lost before the final at the Open since 1981; his eight straight finals in Flushing is one of the sport’s most remarkable achievements. By 1990, he was the terminator of New York—it was his house. Second, that day Lendl lost the first two sets to Sampras, then came back to win the next two. Not only did Lendl never lose before the final of the Open, he couldn’t possibly lose a fifth set to a teenager after coming back from two sets down (Of course he had lost in five to 17-year-old Michael Chang the year before in Paris, but that seemed like a freak occurrence, an act of God never to be granted again.)
A third reason for my disbelief was that a college-tennis teammate of mine had competed against Sampras in high school in Southern California. Sampras played, briefly, for a rival school of his in Palos Verdes. Apparently there was a reward for anyone on my friend’s team who could peg the golden boy with a ball—the idea of beating him was too far-fetched, I guess. My friend knew Sampras was good (and resented him for it), but the idea that this local guy, who had never been a No. 1 U.S. junior or any kind of sure-shot pro, was going to be the person to end Lendl’s streak? Well, that was just ridiculous.
But we sat in a dorm room and watched it happen. My main memory is that, at the time, Sampras’ serve was simply shocking. It’s hard to remember after watching it for so many years just what an advance—in technique, in power, in accuracy, in smoothness—the Sampras serve represented. The serves he hit at the Open that year were unlike any I’d seen before. He started with the loosest, most easygoing motion you could imagine, and then the ball just exploded right into the corner of the service box. Lendl was nowhere near any of them; these weren’t just aces, they were blatant aces.
(Aside: After Sampras won the Open, I tried to have our tennis coach teach me how he generated so much power with so little effort. It came from how he laid his wrist back in the middle of his swing, our coach said. I tried it, and I got a lot more power on the ball, but I couldn't keep it anywhere near the service box.)
In Vince Spadea’s memoir from last year, he describes being in the front row at this match.
Pete was going for his shots with the fearlessness of a bear in the wild. He was 19 and throwing serves at Lendl like he was flinging rocks from a slingshot, not caring where they landed. In the fifth set, his serve started to click again, and he went up two breaks and finished off Lendl with two aces.
That was the other thing. Most big upsets in tennis happen at the wire, with the anxious, hyperventilating underdog holding off his nerves just long enough to edge out the favorite. Not Sampras. Like Spadea says, here was a 19-year-old nobody going up against Ivan Lendl, and not only did he win the fifth set, he won it going away—6-2—and fired two aces as an exclamation point. It was obvious: This was something new in tennis.
The big story of the 1990 Open until that day had been the comeback run of John McEnroe. U.S. fans were praying to see him reach the final so he could face the upstart Andre Agassi, who was trying for his first major title. But Sampras quickly and brutally dashed those hopes (as he would the hopes of so many opponents for years to come). He beat Johnny Mac with relative ease in the semifinals and blew a neon-clad Agassi off the court in the first of their three Open finals (all won by Pete). In the course of four days, Sampras had dethroned Lendl, stolen away the glorious final act of McEnroe’s career, and passed Agassi in the race to be the game’s Next Big Thing. As the skinny Palos Verdes kid hoisted the trophy—the friggin’ U.S. Open trophy—my friend and I stood in front of the TV (we were somehow too shocked to take this sitting down) and shook our heads in silence. Our looks were easy to translate: “WTF!”
That was it for Lendl. The efficient and often dull excellence that he’d maintained through the 80s would be repeated by Sampras in the 90s. The American would reach eight U.S. Open finals of his own (winning five) and eventually break Lendl’s seemingly unbreakable record for most weeks spent at No. 1, with 270. Watching him do the impossible in the 1990 Open quarters, we should have known what was coming. Pete Sampras had ice in his veins right from the start.