Feelings

by Pete Bodo

Mornin', everyone. Hope you all enjoyed Rosangel's posts from London; I was a little disappointed that Pete Sampras didn't manage to make a "triumphant" return to London, but as someone pointed out in the comments, he didn't exactly leave London in a litter way back in '02, so disillusion was not an issue.

Actually, some of the ironies that surfaced at the BlackRock Masters were delicious. The final, as you all know, was played by Cedric Pioline, the man who vanquished Pistol Pete, and Greg Rusedski, the Canadian-born southpaw who took advantage of British law to "defect" to England, his mother's homeland. This caused a minor uproar (you couldn't exactly call Rusedski a Canadian National Treasure at the time) in the vast, frozen tundra stretching north from Detroit to Hudson's Bay, and it provided a fair amount of amusement to Rusedski's fellow ATP pros and tour camp followers.

Sampras himself, in a fine display of his acid wit, remarked on how one minute Greg was a regular Canadian guy, snapping towels at his fellow pros in the locker room, and the next he was strolling around the grounds of Wimbledon, making reference to watching tennis on the "telly," and filling his car with "petrol." Then there was that Union Jack headband Rusedski started wrapping around his skull at the All-England Club, nicely leapfrogging all of those British journeymen laboring in the bogs of the Challengers and Wild Card Land to stake his claim as the great British hope.

Fair enough, it got the Brits through some lean years until the maturation of Tim Henman and the emergence of present-day prophet, Andy Murray.

Saturday's might have been a tougher loss for Sampras to swallow if it had come at the hands of Rusedski, given their history. In 2002, Rusedski was riding high on his bone-crunching power game, but Sampras put him out of the US Open in a grueling, five-set, fourth-round pairing. After the loss, Rusedski - rather astonishingly -  predicted that Sampras would lose in the next round to emerging star Tommy Haas, running through a laundry list of criticisms of the highly decorated Grand Slam champ ("he's a half-step slower") that begged the blunt question - if Sampras stinks so bad, how come he beat you?

Sampras got the last word, though. When he was informed of Rusedski's comments in his own post-match presser. Pete just shrugged and delivered one of his more memorable lines: Greg has issues with his issues.

What the hail, boys will be boys, right? - no great harm done either way, and if I've learned one thing in all the years I've covered tennis, it's that some of these "controversies" - especially those cherished ones that seem personal - are not taken nearly as personally (or seriously) by the principals as by the press and spectators. The main reasons players hate to become embroiled in them is because they take on a life of their own, and who wants to spend three weeks answering dozens of questions about another guy - especially if you think he's a tool, or resent his superiority?

Pioline, of course, had waited some time get a little payback from Sampas, who beat him in two Grand Slam finals (US Open of 1993 and Wimbledon, 1997) without losing a set in either. I suppose we could talk about all this later this week, when we have our book group meeting about A Champion's Mind, but Pete's analysis of that Wimbledon final was interesting:

I always liked that passage; it's a real gem in my my mind. In a subtle way, it underscores the degree to which even great champions are a lot like you and me. That is, they can be thrown for a loop by apprehensions of their own good fortune (or the opposite) and, well, get a little weirded out. It's just that they usually can't or won't find the words to communicate that.

This isn't business as usual; most post-match pressers and accounts of a match revolve around the usual bromides and predictable reactions - I told myself to make sure I get the first serve it. . . I got a little more confident after that second break. . . I knew if I won that third-set tiebreaker all my recent fitness training would come into play. . .

Tennis players are fairly opaque, especially when it comes to expressing how and what they are feeling. That may be because "feeling" is a badly overused word in the press-conference rooms: How you feeling? How were you feeling at the start of the fourth set? How does it feel to be a Wimbledon champ? Did  you feel you had a chance? Generally, the verb "feel" is used as a synonym for "think", and even when it isn't, it's treated as such. I always enjoy it when players find a vivid, original, evocative way to express their mental or emotional state at any point in a match - especially when it's a player, like Sampras, whose heart and mind weren't exactly an open book.

Hope you all had a good weekend. I've got some interesting stuff coming up in the next few days, when I'll be catching up with US Davis Cup captain Patrick McEnroe and Nick Bollettieri (I'm going to his eponymous academy during the middle of next week). So gather round the watercooler, I've got to check out for a little and write a post for ESPN. Man, have any of you checked out the level of discourse at that site?  It's funny in an apalling kind of way.