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Splendor In the Grass
A fifth Wimbledon championship was sweet for Pete, but the force
of the fortnight was Jana Novotna
by S.L. Price
Posted: Wed July 8, 1998
This time, she was the cool one. For five years she'd been the
symbol of cracking under pressure, the thousand-word picture of
self-destruction and loss, the easy answer to an impossible
assignment. Sum up Wimbledon? Wimbledon is Jana Novotna blowing
a huge lead in the 1993 final and shattering protocol by weeping
on a duchess. But this year they all got into the act—all the
big guns who ever snickered or questioned her toughness or
called her a choker. Steffi Graf cried after winning on Centre
Court for the first time in two years, then gagged against
Natasha Zvereva. No. 2 Lindsay Davenport sobbed after blowing
her best-ever shot at the final. Venus Williams screamed and
wept when a line judge crossed her and Novotna began to take her
apart. They all crumbled. They all cried.
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A fifth Wimbledon title was sweet for Pete, and Sampras now has the record for Grand Slam wins well within reach.
(Bob Martin)
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But not Novotna. Not this time. Not when she avenged her loss in
last year's Wimbledon final by demolishing the bewildered No. 1
Martina Hingis in a straight-set semifinal, not when she
polished off Nathalie Tauziat 6-4, 7-6 in a nerve-racking final
to end 12 years of Grand Slam frustration. Not even when that
same duchess of Kent took Novotna by both hands during the
trophy presentation and said, "I'm so proud of you." There was
just one moment, right after Novotna banged the winning forehand
past Tauziat and sank to her knees, saying, "Yes, yes," with the
crowd bellowing and her hands gathering over her trembling lips,
when Novotna came so close. But there were no tears from her
last Saturday. "There was no reason," Novotna, 29, said a day
later. "It was absolute happiness and joy."
Joy? Who'd have thought Novotna could stir feelings like that?
For decades Wimbledon has been the heartbreak Grand Slam, the
castle where Ken Rosewall, Ivan Lendl, Mats Wilander, Hana
Mandlikova, Monica Seles and 62 years' worth of British men have
broken their lances and gone home empty. But no one failed as
dramatically at the All England Tennis Club as Novotna did in
squandering that third-set, 4-1 lead over Graf, and her
pilgrimages since have been painful. Each year, on the day
before the tournament began, Novotna would stroll to Centre
Court with Mandlikova, her coach and companion of eight years,
and speak to the cruel grass: Hello. It is nice to be back.
Please be good to me.
And each year for four years, Novotna would play and lose her
matches under this indelible cloud, with every newspaper
praising her grass-court skill and replaying the Graf match, and
every fan pitying her and wondering when she would choke. Last
year she took the first set of the final against Hingis and
lost, and even though Novotna had played then with a strained
abdominal muscle and finished the year at No. 2, the clucking
continued. She was supposed to lose. The more she was asked, the
more she denied it. No, she told Mandlikova after the '93 final,
I didn't choke. Yes, she told anyone who asked, she'd gotten
over that loss right away. Until the instant she won on
Saturday, she even believed it. "I just feel so relieved, so
good," Novotna said. "Before I won, I really didn't feel any
pressure, I felt good about what I had achieved. But now that
I've finally done it, the weight is off. Even if I didn't know
about it, there was a weight on my shoulders."
The ever-expressive Novotna maintained her
focus and composure until the moment of victory
(Bob Martin)
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Now, Novotna said, she's ready to win more Slams. Wimbledon does
that. For those who pay it deep homage, the dark-green confines
have the power to recharge a career. Ask Pete Sampras. For
months, the 26-year-old defending Wimbledon champion had been
fending off ever-bolder questions about his motivation and
skills. Having failed to win a major championship since taking
last year's title, Sampras had ceded ground to a hungry field
led by No. 2 Marcelo Rios and had come to London hearing that
his peers no longer deemed him awesome. Richard Krajicek opened
the discussion by saying Sampras was playing like the 10th-best
player on the tour.
But once within the black iron gates, everything changed. Faced
with a draw that offered no foe seeded higher than No. 12 Tim
Henman, Sampras found his perfect tonic—and he guzzled it.
Never had Sampras, who prides himself on his inscrutable
reserve, appeared so in need of a win. He dropped just one set
en route to the final, and as he lifted his level of play, he
also raised his intensity—grunting on ground strokes, arguing
calls, clenching his fists and screaming. In a four-set
semifinal win over Henman, Sampras flung his racket into the
crowd and stared Henman down after a leaping overhead. For most
players that is typical behavior. For Sampras, it is dancing
naked in Piccadilly Circus.
"I feel like I've come through every challenge in my career—the
rivalry with Andre, playing Boris Becker and Stich and Edberg
and Courier and Chang. I didn't have a problem getting motivated
to play those guys because we had a history," Sampras said. "Now
it's a new crew, and I've had to get myself going again. But
when it comes to Wimbledon, I don't care who I'm playing. This
is what it's about."
Yet for all his renewed motivation, Sampras had never rolled
into a Grand Slam event final more frightened. Part of that
stemmed from the fact that there's no player—including
Krajicek, who beat Sampras en route to winning Wimbledon in
1996—whom Sampras fears more on grass than big-serving Croatian
spaceman Goran Ivanisevic. No matter that Sampras carried a 10-2
record in Slam finals or that Ivanisevic had sunk to 25th in the
rankings. Like a distant radio station abruptly coming in loud
and clear, Ivanisevic's game appeared out of thin air at
Wimbledon, as he beat Krajicek, Todd Martin, Jan Siemerink and
Andrei Medvedev and crowed about Croatia's success in the World
Cup. A win for both him and the team? "The whole country will be
drunk for the rest of the year," Ivanisevic said. "Including me."
Continued
Issue date: July 13, 1998
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