Tears did not follow Jim Courier out of the All-England Club Thursday, not his tears, not the world’s, for Courier is one of those people who makes almost any place happier just by leaving it.
Courier is one corner of the fine ’90s’ diamond of American tennis–Courier, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras and Michael Chang–and the first of them to be ranked No. 1.
Maybe he is the first one to grow up, too, not necessarily a good thing in an athlete.
“When you were winning Grand Slams, you used to be a real mean s.o.b.,” someone said. “What happened to you?”
Courier smiled, a tight, smug smile, but the young lady interpreter blushed and objected to a characterization that could so easily be reduced to initials.
“That’s OK,” Courier said. “I take pride in him calling me a mean s.o.b.”
You cling to what there is. And for Courier, there has been less and less lately.
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He has fallen from the best in the world three years ago to the second 10, from Grand Slam challenger to low seed. Agassi and Sampras are far ahead of him now, and even Chang has been in a Grand Slam final more recently than Courier has. It would seem as if Courier, 24, is now sliding down his career instead of climbing it.
He would put it differently.
“I’ve changed,” he said. “I’m a couple of years older and certainly more mature in many ways. And I hope to continue changing throughout my life for the better.
“Whether if affects my tennis positively or negatively is neither here nor there. Tennis is not the only thing that I’m here for.”
More to the point, it certainly is the only thing the rest of us are here for. If Courier isn’t whacking a tennis ball, he won’t be drawing much of a crowd.
Athletes who want to grow up and be real human beings should be encouraged. I mean, who isn’t rooting for Darryl Strawberry to finally pull it off? But they should not be charging admission for it.
“Hopefully I can grow as a person,” Courier said.
Person growing, like organic gardening, is a private business. It is not a spectator sport.
Sampras has not been cursed by such growth. He continues to be an empty tennis machine, his interests no wider than his vision.
Even Agassi, for all his foo-raw and goofiness, with a much more public and complicated life than Courier, has found a way to fix his focus on tennis.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the recent past it is to focus between those lines,” Agassi said. “What happens on the outside is important to a lot of people, but not me.”
There is no coincidence that as Agassi found this balance, his ranking went up and as Courier lost it, his went down.
“I’m not saying that my way is the way,” Courier said. “To be a champion, you really do have to be self-contained and very driven at what you do.
“That’s not necessarily bad if your life is tennis and that’s what you’ve dedicated yourself to, to not have other interests. Everybody has their own way and if Pete just wants to play tennis, he does it pretty well. That’s fine.”
Courier seems fated never to win the bigger prizes in tennis, either Wimbledon or the U.S. Open, though he has been in the finals of both. His game–a grinding, joyless game, a game without any real variety, a plugger’s game–is not enough by itself. Never was.
What it always needed is single-minded attention to it, a bit of that s.o.b.
“Hopefully, my game will come back strong,” Courier said. “I’d like to be able to play at that level without being, as you say, an s.o.b. That would be a real treat wouldn’t it?”
Courier didn’t have to ask. He knows the answer.