CAMELOT FANTASIES

i hear ya.


what about Edberg and Michael Stich? were they good on clay? did they win any clay events at all that you can recall from the top of your head?

i know becker once took Muster to 5 sets at Monte Carlo but he failed to win a single clay event during his tenure at ATP.

Edberg and Stich had similar results as Sampras but they both made RG final one time - Edberg in 1989 and Stich in 1996, the same year Pete made the semi at RG. Stich's path was easier than Sampras but he did beat Muster to his credit who was the defending champion.

Like Sampras, Edberg too won Rome while Stich won some typical clay tournaments like Stuttgart, Munich etc.

I think all of the above were more or less same on clay though I don't know if both Edberg and Stich made consecutive qtr finals at RG. Pete made 3 out of 4 times and the year after, he made the semi. Of course, by his standard, that's nothing. For these players, it was hard to adjust the surface all year long given that some of them played really fast especially all the indoors (USO was quite fast too and so was grass) on carpet, some of them played medium fast and then some of them played really slow like the clay. So they constantly had to adjust different surfaces all year long. It's much better nowadays. The Spanish players didn't like it at all as they kept on complaining about the fast surface and wanted to boycott Wimbledon one year. They even said grass was for cows. So they had to change everything anyway to fulfill the demands of these players. All the past champions were fine however and didn't complain about the slow surface, as in clay, all that much and were more or less fine with it.