superman1 said:
His records may have been better if he knew he was going to be constantly compared someone in the next generation. He would have amped it up. When he did amp it up, no one could stop him.
I hate to post another clip of Agassi on the losing end, but this is Sampras amping it up:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=RpOH1MYssQk
I don't think this is true. Everything about Sampras was all about pacing. Through his matches, his seasons and his career. I believe it may been a concession to his genetic endurance limiter, thalassemia minor, merely that he was a "sprinter" at heart or merely, despite the common belief, that he didn't train hard, he simply couldn't put much more than he did into it either physically or psychologically.
From the Tennis Mag article "The Lonely, Living Legend" appearing in the May 1992 issue, written by Sally Jenkins:
...In fact, the last three months of 1998 were among the most trying of Sampras' career. He was obsessed with holding on to the No. 1 spot-and not at all certain he could, chased as he was by the Aussie heartthrob Patrick Rafter and the little Chilean ponytail marcelo Rios.
Sampras won only four events, his lowest total in eight years, and he was forced to play seven tournaments in the season's final eight weeks in a desperatd effort to secure the top spot. Ordinarily a champion sleeper, he began to get restless. He lost his appetite, got snappish with people. When it was over, he had barely clung to the ranking.
Yet nobody seemed to understand the magnitude of what he'd done. Instead, it was said that he'd had a bad year because he only pocketed a single Slam compared to the two majors he took home in 1993, '94, '95 and '97.
"The [No. 1] record was huge to me," he says. "I was consumed with it, because I knew the importance of it. I mean, I know what it takes. You have to give up quite a bit in your life. Just about everything. Every aspect....
..."Those last few months, it was great that I did it. But it wasn't fun. I was miserable."
What Federer is doing is mindboggling not as to his talents, but that he gives absolutely no quarter, anywhere, in any match, to the point where he has created such dizzying expectations that accusations of "tanking" were bandied about when he lost to Murray earlier this year. The only thing I could liken it to was the crazy expectations Evert created for herself by a certain stage of her career, that if she happened to commit an unforced error off the ground, people noticed, asking what happened or what went wrong. What Fed is doing, ostensibly using Master's events as tune-ups and then winning almost all of them is unbelievable and unprecedented on the male side of the sport.
I don't think Sampras could do that at that rate. But given that big stage for one must win match, for my life, I'd be torn between the two as to who I'd pick.
