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Novotna, Sampras earned the right to
celebrate
Posted: Wed July 8,
1998
Sports Illustrated staff writer Jon Wertheim will answer your tennis questions weekly. Click here to send a question.
As much as anything, this year's Wimbledon was about just
desserts. This, in other words, was the rare tournament in
which the two players who were most worthy of winning
walked away with the biggest bowls. Only the most
misanthropic among us weren't
pulling for
Jana
Novotna to exorcise her Centre Court demons and win her first
Grand
Slam.
Entering the tournament, she seemed destined to have a
choke collar engraved on her tennis epitaph. But
Novotna, at age 29, won a personal battle with her nerves
that we all could appreciate.
Her tenacity was rivaled only by her tennis. In my mind the
most aesthetically pleasing player on either side of the
draw, Novotna thrashed seven players—including
Venus Williams
and defending champ
Martina
Hingis—by getting to the net and then executing masterful
volleys, many from angles that would have had
Pythagorus
scratching his head. After the match, Novotna spoke
movingly about the virtues of hard work and perseverance.
And one couldn't help wish that
the Williams sisters
and
Anna
Kournikova, et al., were tuning in from their poolside televisions
and taking
heed.
Before Wimbledon, not too many folks would have taken issue
when
Richard
Krajicek boldly assessed
Pete Sampras
the 10th best player on the ATP tour. It had been a year
since Sampras had won a Grand Slam and speculation was
that, at age 26, his motivation was in short supply. It's
hard to discuss Sampras without unleashing disdainful
clichés, but, particularly
when he plays at Wimbledon, "statistics mean
nothing," "he has the heart of a lion" and
"he simply refuses to
lose."
Sure, Sampras has a complete package of shots, including a
howitzer serve. But it's his mental game that distances him
from the legions of other talented players. Time and
again, Sampras won the clutch points at the clutch moments, which
deflated his opponents more than any 135 m.p.h. ace ever
could. Like
Michael
Jordan, Sampras not only wins, but he wins like a champion,
making the big plays when he has to. For this, more than
for his stash of Grand Slam trophies, I think
history will remember him as the greatest tennis player of
all
time.
Onward, to the
Mailbag.
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Jana Novotna may deserve even more prize money than men's champ Pete Sampras.
(Mike Hewitt)
| How do you feel about equal prize money for the men and
women at Grand
Slams?
—Jason Rainey, Carrollton,
Texas
Particularly now that the women's game has so many more
personalities and rivalries than the men's, if anything,
the women ought to get more
money. I don't buy the argument that
Martina Hingis
would be lucky to win a game off the No. 500-ranked male,
so, therefore, the superior players should make superior
money. Sport, distilled to its essence, is entertainment,
and I think most paying tennis fans are every bit as
entertained watching, say,
Jana
Novotna play
Venus Williams,
as they are watching Sampras thump
whomever.
Last
week you stated that the winner of Pete Sampras-John McEnroe
could lay claim to being the best of all time. I believe
that Bjorn Borg's accomplishments in winning the French and
then three weeks later winning Wimbledon are often
overlooked. Moreover, Borg pulled off this double five
consecutive years while neither McEnroe nor Sampras has
done it once. Given that, where does Borg stand amongst the
greats?
—Dave,
Philadelphia
I don't mean to give Borg the short shrift, but his success
came in an era with fewer surface specialists and fewer
bionic players, like
Mark
Philippoussis
or Goran
Ivanisevic, who could simply get hot and serve opponents off the
court. Also, the field of talented players didn't run
nearly as deep 20 years ago as it does now. I guarantee
that Borg never started his Wimbledon run with an opponent
as talented as
Dominik
Hrbaty, Sampras' first-round foe this year. That said, I can't
imagine that we'll see a player win both the French and
Wimbledon anytime
soon.
We hear about all the teenage women like Martina Hingis and
the Williams sisters, but are there any young male players
to look out
for?
—Richard Mitchell, Kansas
City
Sadly, not really. Don't look now but Mark Philippoussis,
anointed as the next big thing, will turn 22 this year.
Sure, he's a talented, exciting, hard-hitting player. I'm
just not certain he's champion material. Germany's
Tommy
Haas, cursed with the tag of "the next
Boris
Becker," is already 20 and is barely in the top 50. Russian
Marat
Safin, who beat
Andre Agassi
in Paris, might be the best bet. He's only 18 and his
ranking, now 73, is steadily climbing. The good thing about
tennis—and sports in general, for that matter—is
that someone has to win. So time will obviously tell who
will fill the Sampras
vacuum.
Your comments concerning the Williams
sisters are like saying, "Morals are not required to be the
President of the United States." Their father may have
taught them tennis, but that's all. They are demonstrating
no class and poor sportsmanship. They either blame judges
or fake injury in matches where they face
competition.
Come on, Jon, race is not the issue; common sense and
personal class
are.
—Mike Cary, Lexington,
S.C.
Rightfully so,
Serena Williams
took a lot of grief for her questionable default against
Virginia
Ruano-Pascal and her subsequent failure to shake Ruano-Pascal's hand.
If for no other reason than she's 16, I'm inclined to give
Serena the benefit of the doubt and call it an honest, if
impolitic, mistake. She seemed genuinely contrite
afterwards and my guess is
that she's learning the first lesson of stardom: The strings
that are attached to fame and money are responsibility and
(hyper)scrutiny.
You're correct that this is not about race but rather
common sense and personal class. Common sense tells me that
if a 16-year-old, frazzled by the prospect of an injury,
neglects to shake her opponent's hand, it's not an affront
to Western
Civilization. And if her 18-year-old sister, playing in the Wimbledon
quarterfinal, goes ballistic for 20 seconds over a bad line
call, Armageddon hasn't quite arrived on Centre
Court.
Sure, the Williams sisters could use a little tutorial from
Dale Carnegie. But what teenager
couldn't?
I've seen
Anna
Kournikova stare down
Bud
Collins—perhaps the most esteemed tennis writer
ever—because he asked her a question that didn't meet
her standards for rigorous intellect.
Martina
Hingis can't play a match against a decent player without
chucking her racket a half-dozen times.
Even Monica Seles
and
Steffi Graf
were given to fits of pique in their younger years. Bottom
line: The Williams sisters are well on their way to doing
for tennis what
Tiger Woods
has done for golf. If, in the process, they make a faux pas
or two, it's a small price to
pay.
Why is Michael Chang having a disappointing year so far?
His brother, Carl, has been coaching Michael for a long
time, yet Michael still has not been able to win another
Slam. Should Michael change coaches before he
retires?
—Felix W. Yan, San
Francisco
Ever since squandering the chance to become No. 1 at last
year's U.S. Open, Michael Chang has disappeared like a
federally protected witness. In 1998 he's suffered a string
of bad losses and wasn't even seeded at Wimbledon, before
bowing to
Magnus
Gustafsson in the second round. Some of Chang's problems are strictly
physical. He might be the fastest player on Tour, but at 5'
8" and 150 pounds, he will lose his share of matches
by simply getting outhit. Hard to believe, but Chang is
already 26, so time is
running out on his quest to add a Grand Slam title to French
Open he won—get this—more than nine years ago. A
coaching change might well help but I don't see it coming.
The Chang clan is extraordinarily close-knit, and my guess
is that family loyalty
trumps
tennis.
Why do tennis players need such long breaks between every
second game? I would regard squash and badminton as much
more strenuous, yet breaks are very short after playing
many more points with longer rallies. Has it just become a
convenient advertising
break?
—Bill Sherlock-Lynn, Munich,
Germany
Certainly recreational players don't require 90 seconds to
decompress on every changeover. Even at the college level,
it's not uncommon for players to simply switch ends without
taking a break. In the pros, where players are chasing down
a lot more
balls and covering a lot more ground, a break every other game
is often a necessity. What's more, it gives TV networks
time to air three commercials—which, in the end, pays
for a chunk of prize money—so I doubt the WTA or the
ATP have any
objections.
Send a question to Jon Wertheim, and check back the beginning of each week to read more of his answers.
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