The U.S. Open Final, 1990—A Rivalry Begins

Twenty-five years ago Pete Sampras, age nineteen, and Andre Agassi, age twenty, met in the final of the U.S. Open tennis championships at Flushing Meadows in Queens, New York—the site of the 1964–65 World’s Fair. Both future champions were at the start of illustrious careers. Between them they would win twenty-two grand slam singles titles.

Sampras would set a record for men at fourteen (since broken by Switzerland’s Roger Federer, who has won seventeen), while Agassi would achieve a rare Golden Grand Slam, winning the Australian, French, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open titles, plus an Olympic gold medal.

But all of this was still in the future when the two Americans took to the hard court that early September afternoon. Sampras won the match in a straight-set blowout. His fine-tuned power game left the “glitz kid from Las Vegas” a virtual “bystander at his own defeat.” Ironically, Agassi thought before the match that he would win. Afterwards. he felt as if he had been the victim of an “old-fashioned street mugging.”

Still, what loomed larger than the match itself was the extraordinary rivalry just beginning between these two gifted players—the best of their generation. They would compete against each other in a total of thirty-four matches on the pro tour, Sampras winning twenty of them.

Of their five grand slam finals, Agassi won only the Australian title in 1995. Their styles of play were as different as their personalities; Sampras was socially the more reserved of the two, but his game was the more aggressive. In 2002, in the last match of his professional career, he would dominate his flamboyant rival yet again—serving thirty-five aces—for his fifth U.S. Open trophy. Agassi would extend his career for four more grueling years before age and exhaustion precipitated his retirement in 2006.

—James Barber, Historian, National Portrait Gallery