Sampras To Play World Team Tennis
By Richard Pagliaro / Tennis Week
Pete Sampras wants to get busy and will seek to satisfy his tennis urge by taking on the World. The 14-time Grand Slam champion will return to competitive tennis when he makes his World TeamTennis debut this summer, the WTT announced on March 1, 2006.
The 34-year-old Sampras has not played a professional match since he defeated archrival Andre Agassi to capture the 2002 U.S. Open championship, snap a two-year title drought and claim his fifth U.S. Open crown. He is scheduled to play an exhibition match at River Oaks Country Club on April 6th.
Sampras is expected to play about six matches during the July 6-26th WTT regular season.
"This is more about just getting myself a little busier and focused on something I used to be good at," Sampras told Associated Press tennis writer Howard Fendrich in an interview today. "It's time this year to do a little more. Last year, I was kind of floating along."
Since his retirement, Sampras has occupied much of his time raising his family at his Los Angeles home, playing golf and taking the occasional trip to Vegas to play poker. Sampras and wife Bridgette Wilson-Sampras have two sons: three-year-old Christian Charles Sampras and seven-month-old Ryan Nikolaos Sampras.
Taking time to decompress from the demands of devoting much of his adult life to the professional tour, Sampras spoke like a man who has come to grips with his decision to call it quits from tennis...
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