100: Pete Sampras

Sports' Forgotten Heroes

Pete Sampras is not, necessarily, a name that most tennis fans think about when discussing the greatest to ever play. However, upon closer examination, especially when it comes to the greatest American men to ever play, not only should Sampras be considered, statistically speaking, he should be considered the best to ever play. Period. While Jimmy Connors won the most singles tournaments in the history of the game, Sampras’s 14 Grand Slam championships are a phenomenal number. At the time he won his 14th, no other male player in the history of the game had won that many. The problem Sampras has is that his reign as the man who had won more Grand Slam championships than anyone else in history was short-lived. While it took him 13 years to win them all, beginning with his improbable win over Andre Agassi in the championship match of the 1990 U.S. Open and ended with his win in the 2002 U.S. Open over Agassi once again, it didn’t take the amazing trio of Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal to surpass that number. Sampras played for such a short period of time, wasn’t a very fiery personality, he just went out there and won, and he never won the French Open. Those three facts are probably the biggest reason so few recognize the greatness of Sampras’s career. And that’s a shame, because Pete Sampras was as dominant a tennis player as anyone who has ever played the game. Many of his contemporaries, friends and rivals, talk so highly of Sampras and what they say can be read in a terrific new book, “Pete Sampras, Greatness Revisited.” The author of the book, Steve Flink, is on this episode of Sports’ Forgotten Heroes for a wonderful discussion about the all-time great.

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