{"id":1156965,"date":"2026-08-19T05:42:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T05:42:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1156965\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T05:42:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T05:42:40","slug":"i-coached-roger-federer-and-pete-sampras-this-is-what-made-them-different","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1156965\/","title":{"rendered":"I coached Roger Federer and Pete Sampras. This is what made them different"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story is part of Peak,\u00a0The Athletic\u2019s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak\u2019s newsletter\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Paul Annacone coached Pete Sampras from 1995 to 2002 and Roger Federer from 2010 to 2013. He\u2019s a commentator on the Tennis Channel and a coach to American Taylor Fritz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pete Sampras and I were getting ready to play golf in California. This was right as Roger Federer was closing in on Pete\u2019s Grand Slam record of 14 men\u2019s singles titles. On the first tee, I asked Pete about it.<\/p>\n

What do you think?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll never forget his answer. He just said, I know what it took out of me to do all that. So I think it\u2019s awesome.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pete was totally at peace with it, and that\u2019s kind of Pete in a nutshell. He was always driven by his own perception of what he wanted to do. He expected a lot from himself, and no one was a tougher self-critic. So when Roger and Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic zoomed past him, he was like, That\u2019s just amazing; they\u2019re just too good.<\/p>\n

Everyone is motivated by different things in life. And in our sport, everything is magnified because you\u2019re out there all alone. There are guys in other sports who are icons, but Tom Brady had linemen and Michael Jordan had teammates. Tennis is more myopic and, in a way, narcissistic. You have to figure out why you\u2019re playing. You have to figure out what drives you.<\/p>\n

Pete was motivated from an early age to win as many Grand Slams as he could. He wanted the record, and nothing was going to jeopardize that. He was one of the few people who could put so much pressure and consequence on the result and still function optimally in terms of his performance.<\/p>\n

Pete knew his identity. After he won the U.S. Open in 2002, he never played again. It was amazing to walk away like that at 31. But Pete just said: I\u2019m done. I don\u2019t need to prove anything to myself anymore. I\u2019m good.<\/p>\n

Roger, of course, was very different. Roger loved the life. He still loves the life. He loved traveling the world with his family, and he loved meeting new people, and he loved practice, and he loved the dinners. He loved all the little accoutrements of being a professional tennis player.<\/p>\n

It might sound fun, but I can tell you it\u2019s exhausting. Roger loved it. I\u2019ve never known someone who was so well adjusted despite being in such an abnormal existence.<\/p>\n

It taught me something as a coach. Every player does it in a different way. They just need to know who they are.<\/p>\n

My favorite small habit a mental performance coach recommends <\/p>\n

Elise Devlin<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a story about Pete: A few months into coaching him, we were at dinner and discussing what he wanted to work on leading into the grass-court season because he hadn\u2019t played great on clay that year.<\/p>\n

He basically said: Talent is talent.<\/p>\n

When he played his best, he knew he wasn\u2019t going to lose. But Pete thought there was also a different kind of talent. He understood that if he just played average, he could still win 90 percent of the time if he kept his mind working \u2014 if he kept his confidence and stayed positive and didn\u2019t let his emotions affect his performance. He was unbelievably composed, and he always strived to play well, but he was so good at not playing great.<\/p>\n

No matter how he played, he was going to react great, and that\u2019s a more important trait. That\u2019s what the greats do so well.<\/p>\n

To me, tennis is a good metaphor for life. You have to find solutions. It\u2019s about finding positives, creating optimism, being true to the process that allows you to execute under pressure. It\u2019s the same mental reinforcement that gives you the drive and belief that, no matter what\u2019s going on, you\u2019re going to find a way to create that opportunity to shine.<\/p>\n

Pete was one of the few guys who could just suck it up, go out there and say, This is why I\u2019m here, this is all that matters, this is what I want to do, and then actually still do it.<\/p>\n

No matter the job, the kind of person you are can resonate.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a story about Roger: He lost to Djokovic in the semifinals of the U.S. Open two years in a row. It was 2010 and 2011, and in both matches he had match points.<\/p>\n

I remember talking to him that night about the heartbreak and how to get through it. But he was already thinking big picture. He talked about the matches he had won that he actually should have lost, and how it was magnified because it was the semifinals of a Grand Slam, but it was all part of the journey.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, the following year at Wimbledon, his back went out in the first week of the tournament. He really shouldn\u2019t have won, but there was a rain delay and he came off the court and he was so calm. The physio worked on him, and he said he would try to figure it out, and he went out there and found a way to win the match. He didn\u2019t practice the next day, but he went out and won the next match, too.<\/p>\n

Cut to the end of the tournament, and he was holding up the trophy.<\/p>\n

It was exactly what he told me the previous year. You have to be able to manage the highs and the lows, because you know they\u2019re going to come. I think Roger was the maestro at that.<\/p>\n

Listen to Roger\u2019s speech at Dartmouth in 2024<\/a>. His whole career, he won only 54 percent of his points. I love that because all that matters is the next point. If you\u2019re a salesperson, all that matters is the first sentence of your next pitch. That\u2019s the only way to progress, to give yourself what I like to call a relentless sense of optimism.<\/p>\n

That was Roger.<\/p>\n

When I was coaching Roger, I took him and Pete out to dinner in Beverly Hills. Pete was retired, and he was so curious about Roger. He wanted to know why he cared so much about playing in smaller tournaments.<\/p>\n

When Pete was an older player, he didn\u2019t really care about winning in Vienna again. But Roger, toward the end of his career, was still excited to go play in a place like Turkey because maybe he\u2019d never been there.<\/p>\n

Pete asked him, Why do you do that?\u00a0<\/p>\n

And Roger said, Because I love it.<\/p>\n

I still wish I had a tape recorder going that night.<\/p>\n

That was the two of them in a nutshell: Pete put more pressure on himself than anybody ever has, but he actually relished it to prove a point. Roger did everything out of joy and love.<\/p>\n

Like I said, everybody does it in a different way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story is part of Peak,\u00a0The Athletic\u2019s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1156966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4105],"tags":[131080,79,25711,1068,16,15],"class_list":["post-1156965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-peak","tag-sports","tag-sports-business","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117120581433104123","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1156965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1156966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1156965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1156965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1156965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}