Strokes Of Genius

You heard it before you saw it. Just 10 minutes before match time, the sound cut through the air again and again, loud enough to be heard in every corner of the men's locker room: the whistle of gut, graphite and Kevlar, the hissing of pro tennis's most fearsome weapon. Pete Sampras's racket—built on a remote Caribbean island in a factory that no longer exists, kept in a Chicago storage room until called for, with a half-dollar-sized sweet spot and hyper-narrow strings ratcheted up to one of the highest tensions on the tour—was at work. There was no ball. Sampras hopped from foot to foot in the middle of the room, before a large mirror, pretending to hit backhands, one, two, three. Then forehands. Then the serve: once, twice, three times. Another Sunday in September, another U.S. Open final looming. Sampras watched himself. He liked what he saw.

Everyone in the room heard Sampras warming up, everyone stole a glance—security guards, attendants, hangers-on. Everyone except the 20-year-old Russian, standing and laughing 15 feet away, oblivious to Sampras. A year ago, when Marat Safin learned he would meet Sampras in the first round of the 1999 U.S. Open, "my mouth was like this," he said last Friday, dropping his jaw like a terrified character in a bad horror flick. "Big man: There is no chance to beat him. It was a crisis for me. I was already in Moscow mentally."

But now Safin stretched, grinned, took in one joke after another from his friends. He hadn't gotten the chance to lose to Sampras at last year's Open; Sampras pulled out with a herniated disk in his back, and Safin went on to lose in the second round. A year later, neither of them came into the tournament the same man. Sampras, who rolled to yet another Grand Slam final at Flushing Meadow after having set the men's record for major singles titles with his 13th, at the 2000 Wimbledon championships, was back in his old hardcourt form and seemed ready to win his fifth U.S. Open crown. He held an unequaled 13-2 record in Slam finals and hadn't lost one in five years. His racket hissed through the air.

Safin didn't hear it. Safin laughed. After earning a $2,000 fine for tanking at the Australian Open last January and moaning about retiring from tennis in March because he was so frustrated by his poor play, Safin overhauled his mind-set by deciding to never again go down without a fight. Wielding the game's best backhand and a monstrous serve, he galloped into the French Open quarterfinals and beat Sampras a month ago on a hard court in Toronto. Safin came off that match contemptuous of Sampras's baseline game and cured of his fear. "Now he's one more guy fighting to be on top, and I'm one of them also," Safin said before the U.S. Open semifinals. "I want to beat him. With all my respect, if I have to beat him, I will."

He did. In a performance so casual it was chilling, Safin announced himself as the game's next big thing by dismantling the best player ever 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. Never had Sampras been so overwhelmed in a match of such importance, but this loss wasn't simply a matter of running into a hot hand. Not since before Sampras broke through to win the 1990 U.S. Open have all his weapons looked so puny in comparison to those of the man across the net. Sampras's serve has long been the best on tour, yet Safin outaced him 12-8, consistently dropped in bombs at 130 mph and faced only two break points all match, those coming only after the issue was decided. Sampras is the tour's best athlete, yet the 6' 4" Safin covered the court like a tarp and committed only 12 unforced errors. "It reminded me of when I was 19 and steam-rolled over Andre," Sampras said, alluding to his win over Agassi in that '90 Open final. "I was steamrolled today."

Safin struggled early in New York, needing four sets to beat Thierry Guardiola in the first round, five to defeat Gianluca Pozzi in the second and five to overcome S�bastien Grosjean in the third. From then on, though, he harnessed his temper (he's broken about 40 racquets in anger this year) and disposed of Juan Carlos Ferrero and Nicolas Kiefer to reach the semifinals, somehow remaining loose and serious at the same time. He matured a decade in two weeks. Just as important, so did his game. There were moments—twice against Pozzi, Safin fired aces of 130-plus mph on his second serve—when it seemed tennis was taking a quantum leap before your eyes. "He's the future of the game," Sampras said.

"It seemed as though he was laughing at me," Todd Martin said after his straight-set loss to Safin in the semis. "Marat has so much game. He makes shots that, five or 10 years ago, people would laugh at and say he's just taking baseball swings. It's awesome to see the shots he can hit. Especially as a big guy: Stretching across his body, and not only flicking but hitting backhand angles—it's amazing. This guy's a way better player than Pete was 10 years ago. Pete was a relative unknown who played a stupendous tournament. This guy, among the few who know die sport, is not unknown."

Safin's breathtaking performance in the final was matched stroke for stroke by women's champion Venus Williams, who followed up on her breakthrough at Wimbledon two months ago by blitzing the field at Flushing Meadow while unleashing an even more aggressive style. Nothing in the women's game has prepared die viewer for the sight of Venus jumping forward to furiously pound a Flying V swing-volley. As Sampras's leaping overhead becomes more infrequent, no shot in tennis is more thrilling to see than hers.

"There's a talent level now that overrides the necessity to understand the game," Martin said. " Martina Hingis is maybe the best women's tennis player I've ever seen, but she's not going to win against some of these girls very often, because they just have so much game. And as the game evolves, we'll start to view 'so much game' as the better tennis player."

Like Safin, the Venus of a year ago was more promise than payoff. Her younger sister, Serena, then 17, won the 1999 U.S. Open while Venus, then 19, watched somberly. Venus lost interest in the game, and that as well as tendinitis in both wrists caused her to drop off the tour for six months. Like Safin, Venus was spotty in the early going of this year's Open but raised her game to whatever level she needed to win. There was important work at hand: not so much extending a winning streak that with this title would stand at 26 matches. No, with one major apiece, the two sisters were tied. Venus "wanted to get the second one before Serena," said their mother, Oracene.