Sometimes it’s hard to get the words out
That’s when the pictures will have to do...


Recently, while trying to articulate the Sampras brilliance in a discussion with FSN and Dream Sporting, one of whom needs no convincing of the great man’s genius and one who refuses to acknowledge it in lieu of the bells and whistles of the sport, I wound up with something as astoundingly incoherent as this:

I cannot explain to you why Sampras is the greatest player the world has ever seen. I don’t have proof of it other than the record books and what’s in my head....[and it only gets worse, hence the censor].

Little wonder that while I’ve unfurled essay after essay on Roger Federer in the past couple years alone, I’ve never attempted to write about Sampras in close to a decade and a half. Simply because I don’t think the Pete phenomenon can be captured in words. So, for the sake of saving myself further embarrassment and with the welfare of my readers at heart, I have more or less resigned myself to the fact that my awe of the Sampras magic will have to remain upstairs. There’s also that recurring fantasy about knocking on Pete’s door and foisting my writing abilities on a biography he doesn’t want written, but let me not go into that, for reasons aforesaid.

The pain of depriving my weblog of more than a cursory mention of one of my greatest heroes of all time, however, has been somewhat alleviated by my chance discovery whilst attempting to clean my apartment this afternoon (a task put on indefinite hold since). When the signed picture of Mickey Mouse I’ve had since age 7 slipped out of an electric blue folder, it could only mean one thing -- my treasure trove of irreplaceable gems! I tore through high school certificates and holiday postcards alike to get to the clipping I knew was buried beneath all of it – an attempt to comprehend the sheer paucity of acceptance of the Sampras sublimity by a befuddled and helplessly word-deprived Nirmal Shekar prior to Wimbledon'01 in The Hindu, my most reliable source of tennis eloquence during the decade I spent being infatuated with the game’s greatest.

The second clip is from after Sampras’ defeat just two weeks hence, a very different scenario, albeit, one that inspired even more awe of a sporting hero that had so far stopped his contemporaries dead in their tracks. I remember, in the days following Pete’s loss to Roger, that article was almost an earworm in my head. I know, I know, earworms were meant for the Backstreet Boys back then, but I was dangerously apathetic to the boy band in the '90s, or after (uhmmm, maybe, if I’d taken my eyes off Pete for jus a little bit!)

I am not too happy about showcasing another writer on my weblog, but I need to have Pete on here, even if it means letting someone else do the talking. And Nirmal Shekar is one of the few people in the world I would entrust with matching my fascination for the king of Wimbledon (notice that he starts with an account of Sampras’ artful mastery over his opponents on the hallowed grass at Center Court and then goes off on an emotional and sentimental tangent, which in the case of Pete at least, is better suited to describe his game).

Note to The Hindu: I didn’t see any copyright protection notice, but if this is a violation, please address all correspondence to a certain Pete Sampras in Los Angeles, California, USA. I'd sure like to get his attention...