Grand Parent

It was two years ago, as his son climbed over chairs and people to reach him high in the stands at Wimbledon, that Sam Sampras showed the sports world that this father knew best.

Of course, nothing of the sort was crossing his mind. Proving things to people, showing the world this or that, could not be further from the intentions or personality of this quiet, shy man who handed Pete Sampras his first tennis racket in Potomac, Md., in 1976.

Pete was 5, and the racket mostly swatted balls against basement walls then. Never did Sam Sampras think, or even care, that 24 years later, he would share this moment in an international spotlight with that now-grown little boy, who had just established himself, by the nature of the 13th Grand Slam event title he had just won, as the greatest male player in the history of the game.

Nor, at that moment, was Sam Sampras even thinking about any sort of validation for how he and wife Georgia, as parents of a world-class tennis player, had raised their son and stayed out of his way as he grew up and grew successful. In the world of tennis, Sam Sampras is the antithesis of the pushy parent. When the bright lights turn on, Sam turns away.

“It was Pete who was playing, Pete who deserved the credit,� Sam Sampras says now.

That Sam would say anything in a public forum is noteworthy. Never before had he submitted to a lengthy interview on a topic about which he seems less than comfortable. Himself.

There was something about it being for Father’s Day that made it all right this time, just as there was something about Wimbledon in 2000 that made it all right for him to say yes to getting on a plane and flying to England in time for the historic match against Patrick Rafter. This wasn’t the first time that Pete had invited Sam to come see him play, but it was only the second Grand Slam final he had seen in person, and Pete had won 11 others.

The Sampras parental recalcitrance became legendary after Pete won his first Grand Slam event, the U.S. Open, in 1990. Stories later told of how Sam and Georgia had walked around a Long Beach mall while Pete was playing and finally, unable to stand it anymore, stopped at a bank of TVs and asked the salesman who was winning.

“I’m just too nervous,� Sam says. “That’s why we don’t go and watch much. It’s just too hard. Only if you are a parent can you really understand that. Watching is excruciating.�

But the quest for the magic 13th Grand Slam event title, topping Roy Emerson’s long-standing mark, was such tennis history that, this time, pain of parenting took a back seat to pride of parenting. Sam and Georgia flew to Wimbledon just in time for the final and agonized with the rest of the sports world as their son somehow turned things around from a set down and 1-4 in the second-set tiebreaker.

Eventually, he was at match point on his own serve.

Just before Pete Sampras stepped to the service line, and started the famous rocking motion that has unleashed several thousand aces in his 15-year career, TV analyst John McEnroe leaned to the microphone in the broadcast booth and set it up perfectly for the millions watching: “History, folks,� McEnroe said.

The serve that had battered Rafter all day kicked into him one more time, and when the return drifted wide, Sampras raised his arms high in joy and relief.

And soon, with uncharacteristic emotion, Pete Sampras scanned the crowd, found his parents and began his climb. The photographers, ready when he got there, captured the hugs and tears. It was the most public of private family moments, one for both the tennis history books and the Sampras family scrapbook.

For Sam Sampras, the thoughts and emotions ran wild.

“I knew he was coming to see me,� Sam says. “This was a match that was history.

“You gotta understand the parent. Nobody knows what you go through. I was thinking about what all those years meant, about all those trips to the Kramer Club [in Rolling Hills Estates] with the kids.

“Some parents feel they are the child. They get emotional. It’s like you see in Little League baseball. I always walk away. I don’t bother my kids.�

As much as that Wimbledon experience brought joy, it also brought pain to Sam Sampras, as only it could to a man who says he really has no hobbies, who retired seven years ago at age 58 as a mechanical engineer and project manager for the space shuttle program and who derives much of his joy from the comfort zone he has built around him in Palos Verdes, where he brought his family to live in 1978.

“Before all those TV cameras at Wimbledon, I could walk around here, I could go to my spa and work out, and nobody would know me,� he said. “That changed everything.

“Even after we left the stadium, and we walked around the village of Wimbledon, people kept coming up to us. They all knew me.�

One man’s well-wisher is another man’s intrusion, and for Sam Sampras, painfully shy, it has taken a while for things to get back to normal. That’s why, during the interview, he shed a tear at the memory of the immediate aftermath of Wimbledon, of people walking up to him in the village. And that’s why he drew a line at having a picture taken to go with this story.

Life far away from the public eye comes with the Sampras family genes. Sam was born and raised in Chicago, and his father was a cook who ran a restaurant. His mother was a housewife. One of Sam’s goals, even as he went off to engineering school at Iowa State and later Missouri, was to run a restaurant.

So foreign to this family was the concept of fame and public persona that Sam’s father, who died five years ago at 96, didn’t really know his grandson was a great player until he saw him on TV one day and asked a friend how good he really was. The friend answered that he was pretty good. Matter of fact, he was No. 1 in the world.

Sam married Georgia, who had been born and raised in Greece. They met in Washington, D.C. They were poor, and when they started married life in Chicago, the dream of running a restaurant remained. That came to pass in McLean, Va., where Sam joined other family members in the restaurant business for seven years.

But Sam’s engineering education brought them better chances and sent them to Washington, where the job paid better and the family began. First there was Gus, then Stella, Pete and Marion.

Stella shared young Pete’s passion for the game, spent a year on the pro tour and has been UCLA’s tennis coach for the last six years. This year, her Bruins were ranked No. 4 in the country.

“I can remember my dad taking us down to the local high school tennis courts when we were little and lived in Maryland,� Stella says. “Pete and I loved it, Gus didn’t care for it all that much and Marion was too young.

“For a while, I beat Pete. I think I beat him longer than he is willing to admit. You know how competitive he is. He says I stopped beating him when he was 11. I think it was more like when he was 13. We still argue about that.�

Pete was 7 in 1978, when Sam Sampras moved the family to Southern California. Sam says he did so because the space industry was booming here, meaning good jobs, and California’s climate and lifestyle were, well, California.

Sam kept the family interest in tennis alive by first joining the Peninsula Club, and soon, the Jack Kramer Club, the latter a hotbed of tennis that has produced, among other stars of the game, Tracy Austin and Lindsay Davenport.

By the time he was 14 or 15, Stella was no longer beating Pete. Matter of fact, almost nobody around Southern California was. His coach then, Pete Fischer, would take him around to some of the better Division I college teams, including programs such as Long Beach State, and try to get some competition for this skinny kid with the huge serve. Frequently, Sampras would beat the college players. Even more frequently, they would refuse to play him.

In the background was Sam Sampras.

“Pete and Stella had great coaches,� he says. “They were doing well. I wanted to stay out of it. My only problem was that I had four kids and the tennis lessons were expensive. I wanted to be fair and do things for all four kids.�

For a while, Sam was against Pete pursuing tennis.

“I guess I preferred he be a doctor,� he says.

But soon, so many people were telling Sam that his son was so good that there was no turning back.

“Those days at the Kramer Club, that was quite some place,� Sam says. “It was right in the middle of the tennis boom, and Pete and Stella were right there.... The parents were all over the place. That stuff kind of turned me off.

“I was always kind of modest, kind of pessimistic. People would tell me how good Pete was, how he was the best player. I’d always say, well, we’ll see tomorrow.�

Tomorrow eventually brought six years of being ranked No. 1 in the world. It brought seven Wimbledon titles, four U.S. Opens and two Australian Opens. It brought fame and fortune to a family, and especially to a father, who remains uncomfortable with the invasion of privacy that comes with it. Sometimes, it is all overwhelming to a man who likes the simple life, who went to the doctor six years ago for kidney stones and found out he needed double-bypass surgery.

It’s not that life isn’t good for Sam Sampras. All his children live in the Los Angeles area, Pete in Beverly Hills, Stella in Santa Monica and Gus and Marion nearby in Palos Verdes. Gus runs tennis tournaments in Scottsdale and Manhattan Beach and Marion Hodges is a school teacher. Gus has one child and Marion has one on the way.

Eight days from now, Pete Sampras will be in England as Wimbledon begins. It will be his 14th, and there has never been anybody like him on the grass there. From 1993 through his historic moment in 2000, Sampras lost one match, a 1996 quarterfinal to Richard Krajicek. His record in that string was 53-1.

He is 31 now, just two months from 32, and as his career fades a bit, and as he acquires some of the perspective that comes with the age, he cares more about such things as Father’s Day. He not only liked the idea of a story on his dad for Father’s Day, but talked Sam into sitting for an interview.

Pete Sampras echoes Stella’s gratitude about their father giving them independence, giving them the space to grow and the freedom to spread their wings. And he said that his trip into the stands in 2000 at Wimbledon said everything needed to be said about his feelings for his parents.

He also said he didn’t need to be quoted in this story, that it was not his day.

It was his father’s day.