US OPEN

September 11, 1998

Sandon Stolle

Q. What does it mean to you, first one? You look a little jacked up?

SANDON STOLLE: Oh, yeah. I think tonight is going to be a long night, even tomorrow night probably. It's a great feeling to finally win your first Slam, even if it's in doubles or anything. I think it's just unreal, it's a great feeling.

SANDON STOLLE: No. I'll just probably -- he'll probably give me just as much of a hard time. I'm sure he was watching the monitors. He had things to do today.

SANDON STOLLE: He was probably doing clinics somewhere in one of the hospitalities around here somewhere.

SANDON STOLLE: That's right.

SANDON STOLLE: Yeah. Are you going to say anything or just sit there?

CYRIL SUK: I'm going to sit here.

SANDON STOLLE: I think, obviously, we said after the match, obviously tennis is a game of inches. That was a big point. I don't know if it was fate or what, but we got through that point. We were down a couple match points. We played those two points pretty well. Knowles -- I crossed and he missed a reflex volley wide by maybe an inch and a half. There again, it was close. Yeah, I think that was the biggest point, the one where Nestor hit the net. Like you said, he never hit the net before ever, so we got a lucky break.

SANDON STOLLE: I think that was huge for us. Obviously, they were disappointed. They thought they were obviously right in the match. They thought they had it won. We got a bit lucky, but we also hung in. We tried to make them play a lot more balls at that stage. It worked out for us. We took that into the third.

SANDON STOLLE: Yeah. I mean, I think it's more exciting to win the Slam, to be truthful. We were a long way out of the team standings. But now we have a shot. We have three more tournaments to play together for the year, and hopefully we'll do well in those, you know, make the team standings in the end.

SANDON STOLLE: Just the Super 9's in Europe.

CYRIL SUK: The first tournament we played together two years ago in Cincinnati, we made the finals. Actually, it was to Knowles and Nestor, as I remember. Since then, we decided to play together because we match fine. I thought we were efficient at that time already.

CYRIL SUK: He had a vacation, because he had a stress fracture in his shoulder for like six months, so we couldn't play. But he came back in January. He's doing fine.

SANDON STOLLE: Myself, you know, I felt after having -- like I said, I played basically with my father in an event. Cyril played it, as well, out on Long Island. It was a pretty relaxing week of tennis. Also, it was pretty intense the same way. But it was a different intensity. I think we both -- I came in feeling -- I ended up winning that out there, and came in really relaxed and confident at the same time. So I think we brought that into the early rounds that we played. We just hung in every match. All the teams we beat this Slam, we lost to, we had losing records against. I think we just proved to ourselves that we can beat those teams, you know. Even if we're not playing great, if you hang in there, and it just happened to be our week. That's what is so great about our sport. In tennis in general right now, anyone can have one of those weeks, and anyone -- it's the same in singles.

SANDON STOLLE: I think so. I mean, the last few times we played them, you know, we lost to them. We got through that match. I think we were also down in the quarterfinals against Damm-Grabb. We lost to them a few weeks ago. We hung in that match, as well. It was just an unbelievable couple weeks. Can't explain it more than that.

SANDON STOLLE: No.

CYRIL SUK: I think to some degree, yeah, because if you play singles, and you are losing yourself, you just can be mad at yourself. But if you play doubles, you have your partner there, so obviously you're not always playing a hundred percent. So sometimes one guy is playing a little bit worse or the other one. So then you have the guy who is like, you're trying, you see the guy isn't doing that well, so the mental part is that you're there with your guy and you're trying to help him out. If you show him that you're mad at him, he's going to play even worse. I think this is the mental toughness of the doubles game.

CYRIL SUK: Yeah, he did get mad at me the other game. I hit three double-faults in a row, you know. So we came back to the changeover. He told me like, "You know what, if do you this again, I'll kill you." I was sort of cheered up for the next game.

SANDON STOLLE: I think we get a replica. This one stays here. I was looking at the names on here. Some pretty good doubles teams come through. It's going to be a nice little trophy for the mantelpiece, I guess.

SANDON STOLLE: It's the Huggybear. It's an exhibition tournament.

SANDON STOLLE: We beat -- it's basically a format of -- one format of pro, ex-pro, which are pros on tour now and ex-pros that played but are a bit younger, say under 35, that still play pretty well. Then there's another division, which is the pro-am. That's a pro and an amateur. My dad in that event is considered an amateur because he's 60 and he's not one of the younger guys, but he still hits the ball really well. In the amateur division, you have teams like Rosewall and Grabb, Omedo and Leach. There's some other older guys, like Rochey has played it, Newcombe. It's a great event. Teddy Forstman runs it for his charity, the Huggybears. He's done so the last ten years.

SANDON STOLLE: What happens is you go through the tournament. Say you go through the pro-am tournament. Dad and I went through that. We got to the final. We won the final of that. Then you play the pro/expro division in the final of the thing. You get points. Every match we played, we had to give points away in the pro-am division. When we got to the final, we ended up getting a few points.

SANDON STOLLE: We beat John deJager and Manuel deOca, who I think is a pro here in New York or something like that. John was a semifinalist here in the doubles, as well.

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