The world no. 1 survived a
matchpoint in the second set before scraping
home 3-6, 7-6, 6-2 against Swedish outsider
Jan Apell and then admitted: "I was
lucky to come through.
"I was completely outplayed in the first
set and it was in his hands to win the match.
"He had no nerves, came out swinging and
kicked my butt for a while - he could and
should have won."
But Apell, ranked 127 in the world, crumbled
when serving at 5-2 in the second-set
tiebreak, having blown his chance at
match-point in the 12th game.
COMEBACK
Apell, who knocked out British here
Jeremy Bates in the quarter-final, stormed
into a 2-0 lead at the start of the final set
before Sampras hit top gear and knocked off
six successive games to take the match.
The left-handed Swede's great run has come to
late to earn a place in the singles draw at
Wimbledon and he will shun the qualifying
event in favour of chasing ranking points in
Manchester next week.
Sampras added: "If I were him, I would
try and qualify for the big W. Wimbledon is
the biggest of them all."
Apell said: "Of course I'm disappointed
after being match-point up against the No. 1
player in the world. It was too much for me
in the final set."
Play was halted for 43 minutes by a bomb
scare but then American Todd Martin swept
away South African Christo van Rensburg 6-1,
6-4 in the second semi-final to set up a
repeat of this year's Australian Open final.
Article
and photo supplied by Georgia Christoforou
June 12, 1994 - "It's
the echo of the ball, the way it sounds in
the stadium," Pete Sampras said
yesterday. He had just come off court at
Queen's Club after his Stella Artois
semi-final, but already he was looking to
Wimbledon and trying to explain what it is
that he loves about the place.
There is more to it than just
the fact that he won there last year. And for
a moment, it was like listening to Mike Tyson
talking about boxing history. A practitioner
of the harsher modern arts reflecting with
affection and sensitivity on the predecessors
and the traditions he continues to revere.
"In my mind it's the
granddaddy of them all," Sampras
observed, when asked what a year spent as
Wimbledon champion had meant to him.
"It's like the Masters in golf."
Well, he is an American, and
still quite young. But there was a special
note in his voice when he spoke of watching
the 17-year-old Boris Becker win his first
title when he himself was a mere 13.
"There's a lot of history when you just
walk into the place," he continued.
"The Lavers and the Rosewalls, in their
day they played three of their Grand Slam
tournaments on grass. Wimbledon is the only
one left."
For all his youth and his
stooped, shambling, bow-legged gait, you do
not have to look very far to see the poetry
in Pete Sampras's soul. Anyone who says it is
not there in his tennis ought to go out and
buy a pair of spectacles. Sampras plays
tennis like Laver, his idol, did, with the
maximum of application and the minimum of
fuss. He may not command the grace-notes that
decorated the repertoire of a McEnroe, but
the clean lines and sudden ferocity of his
game express their own kind of beauty.
Against Jan Apell in
yesterday's semi-final, the world No 1
started so badly against the world No 127
that he found himself at 3-6, 5-6 and
advantage Apell, and serving to save the
match. An Apell error and two whistling clean
aces kept him alive, but a few minutes later
he was looking at the wrong end of 2-5 in the
tie-break. "At that point, I don't like
my chances," he said later. "I'd
been a bit tentative. I came out there today
as not the most intense-looking player in the
world, and the bottom line is that I was very
lucky to come through. I was completely
outplayed in the first set, and I got
tentative on the volleys in the tie breaker.
Basically it was in his hands to win. So I
just told myself to go for it."
Sampras was not surprised by
the seriousness of Apell's challenge. "I
knew he'd beaten Goran, who's a great
serve-and- volley player, so I was prepared
for him to play well. He came out with no
nerves, which is the right approach for the
No 127 when he's playing the world No 1.
"Basically, he was
kicking my butt. I hung in there, which is
what you have to do on grass. I was a little
sluggish at the beginning of the match, but
in the end I came up with the big shots at
the right time."
Apell's finest moment came at
2-2 in the tie-break, when he commanded the
net and volleyed Sampras's drives until he
found the angle to put one away. Two unforced
errors by the American on his own service
took the underdog to 5-2, with two service
points for the match. "At that
point," Sampras said, "he probably
should have won." But five points in a
row did the job, including a magical
disguised forehand across the server's body.
In the third set, Sampras's
run of 13 points out of 14 between the fourth
and seventh games tore the guts out of the
Swede, who conceded his final service game
and the match to a running forehand pass that
must have put the Wimbledon champion in a
good mood for today's final, and for the
bigger challenge to come.