13 Another sort of endearing thing about Sampras is the way he always sweats through his baby-blue shorts in an embarrassing way that suggests incontinence and lets the world see just where his athletic supporter’s straps are (i.e., after a while the whole upper part of the shorts is sweated through except for a drier area that’s the exact shape and size of a jock). This even TV’s crude pictures can capture, and I think I like it so much because it humanizes Sampras and lets me identify with him in a way that the sheer preternatural beauty of his game does not. For me, similar humanizing foibles in transcendent players included McEnroe’s irrational fits of pique, Lendl’s and Navratilova’s habit of every once in a while getting so nervous and choking so badly on a point that they looked almost spastic and the ball would actually hit the ground before it reached the net, and Connors’s compulsive on-court touching and adjustment of his testes within his jock, as if he needed to know just where they were at all times.