1990s: A Golden Decade For German Tennis… And Pete Sampras

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In the fall of 1989, West Germany was on top of the tennis world. Steffi Graf had won the calendar year Grand Slam the year before and would have repeated this remarkable feat in 1989, if she’d been able to serve out the match in her Roland Garros final against Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario. The German Davis Cup team won back-to-back titles in 1988 and 1989. And Boris Becker was arguably the most popular man in the country. How popular you ask? He had an ice cream treat, a pretzel (the Bobele), and a species of sea snail (Bufonaria borisbeckeri) among other things named after him, tennis academies in the country taught kids to dive and tumble just as he did, and he was granted a private audience with the Pope.

And so, just two months before the Berlin Wall fell, the Tour elected to move its season-ending Masters tournament from its home of the past 13 years, New York City’s venerable Madison Square Garden, to Frankfurt. The rebranded ATP Tour World Championship, with a $2 million purse, was the richest in tennis history at the time. The move came as the ATP took over the organisation and administration of the men’s pro tour from the Men's Tennis Council.

“German tennis, with Boris, Steffi, Michael Stich and others was on top of the world in those days and the city of Frankfurt was very supportive of the move,” explained Zeljko Franulovic, who was the tournament director of the event in its incarnations in Frankfurt and Hannover and is now the tournament director for the Rolex Monte-Carlo Masters. “Tennis in Germany was booming before the event moved there and having the event there contributed to what was really a golden age of tennis in the country.” 

At the time, the ATP and the International Tennis Federation (ITF) were locked in a dispute over the ITF’s plan to follow the November 1990 ATP Tour World Championship, with a significantly more lucrative Grand Slam Cup, just a month later, also in Germany. The Grand Slam Cup persisted until 1990, when the two federations resolved the matter, agreeing to stage just one year-end championship.

When the first iteration of the event took place at Frankfurt’s Festhalle in November 1990, Germany had just reunified the prior month and there was a fresh face in the winners’ circle: 20-year-old Andre Agassi, who called it the best win of his career.

The following year, 1991, local heroes Becker and Michael Stich, then ranked No. 4 in the world, failed to make it out of the group stage. But the fans were treated to an All-American battle, with Pete Sampras, then 20, besting Jim Courier in four sets.

The next five years, 1992-1996, were a treat for German tennis fans, as Becker or Stich made the final every year, each time facing an American, with Becker hoisting the trophy twice and Stich once. Boris’ kryptonite was Pete Sampras, who beat him in the final of the tournament in 1994 and again in 1996. Sampras’, four-hour five- set win over Becker in ’96, the tournament’s first year in Hanover, was a classic but it also felt like the end of an era. Sampras reflected on the win in a raucously pro-Becker arena in an interview for ATPTour.com with British tennis great Tim Henman.

“To play Boris in Germany, in front of 16,000 fans, was very difficult,” said Sampras, who is now 49. “It was a tight match, we played a couple of (tie) breakers. I had (two) match points in the fourth and lost it. I missed an easy forehand volley and the crowd… I’ve never heard a crowd as loud as that one when I chunked that volley.”

Becker prevailed 13-11 in that epic tie-break, but cool, resilient Sampras won the match 6-4 in the fifth, clinching the victory on a rollicking 24-shot rally.

“We were both exhausted,” Sampras recalled. “It was a great embrace at the end; we gave each other a hug. It was one of the all-time great matches I’ve been a part of. The atmosphere was fantastic; we were both playing great at the same time. Everything was meant to be. I think it was one of the best ATP Final matches in history.”

Indeed it was, but it proved to be a tough act to follow for Boris, who had won the title three times, compiling a career 36-13 record at the event. Neither he nor any other German player qualified for the tournament in ’97, when Sampras repeated as champion, or in ’98, when Àlex Corretja beat Carlos Moyá in an all-Spanish final. No German man would win the tournament again until 2018, when Alexander Zverev captured the title in London.

As the ‘90s ground to a close, grunge fell out of fashion, feathered bangs were sadly no longer cool, and the ATP World Championships left Germany for Lisbon (then Sydney, Shanghai, Houston and back to Shanghai), where the tournament was renamed the Tennis Masters Cup. Franulovic says that the event was never meant to stay in any one country permanently. As the Germans say, alles hat ein ende, nur die wurst hat zwei. Like many good German proverbs, it involves sausages (everything has an end, a sausage has two) but it means that all good things come to an end.

Stich told Henman in a recent interview that having the tournament in Germany for a decade cemented the country’s prominent place in the sport.

“It showed how big German tennis was in world tennis at the time,” he said. “It was a logical move after being in New York for so many years to come to Germany and Boris and I certainly capitalised on the year-end championships being at home. It was something special, Boris and Steffi provided the momentum to rock the tennis world and it was a wonderful era to be a part of.”