Pete Sampras is possibly on the verge of making history, and you don't care.

Don't feel bad. No one else does either.

You can make the argument Sampras is the greatest tennis player of all time. It's exactly the argument Boris Becker, for one, has made. But then you would have to find someone interested enough to debate the point.

What I can't understand is why people don't care. I didn't think we had any choice anymore. Doesn't Nike make these decisions for us? If we lived in a different time, the Sampras story -- actually the Sampras non-story -- might not be so strange.

But we don't live in a different time. We live in a time in which everyone is famous. Remember grade inflation? Now we have fame inflation. It might have started with Fabio, or maybe whenever it was models graduated to supermodels. What I'm saying is, lizards can now be famous.

Then there's Sampras, the last under-appreciated, under-hyped star in our celebrity age. He's the anti-Regis. OK, he's got a personality problem, but I don't remember Jack Nicklaus making the rounds on the comedy circuit (which probably cost him a shot at that Monday Night Football job). Sampras should be the biggest thing this side of the human genome, but you have to keep being reminded he's out there.

How can this be? He actually has a large Nike contract. He's got 12 Grand Slam titles and a 120-mph serve. He's got everything but a slot on the Survivor show.

What he doesn't have is buzz. Instead of buzz, he has critics. The sounds definitely are distinct.

"His personality is not going to win any awards," John McEnroe said the other day in USA Today. This was not exactly a revelation, but McEnroe was just warming up.

"This is a case where people would respond more if they did feel an intensity," McEnroe said. "It would be helpful to him, and to tennis, that you see he really wants it."

You don't win 12 Grand Slam titles without wanting it. You don't go 47-1 in matches over the past seven years at Wimbledon, counting his victory Monday, without wanting it. If he wins at Wimbledon, he moves past Roy Emerson and into sole possession of the record for Grand Slam singles titles.

It can't be true, but it is.

He's got more Grand Slams than McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg and Ivan Lendl, Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall. You name them, and he has beaten them, at least in the record books.

Look, I know the reasons he hasn't found a place in our hearts. I've got a list. So does McEnroe. I'm pretty sure Connors does, too. I just don't understand why any of the reasons are good enough.

Let us count the ways:

He's boring. You knew that. But he's Dennis Rodman compared with Borg.

Of course Borg was so boring he seemed almost mysterious. You thought sure nobody could be that famous and that vapid. Before anyone could find out for sure, Borg retired. There's nothing to stoke the legend like either retiring or dying young.

If charisma-free Sampras made one mistake in his career, it was that, growing up in the era of Connors and McEnroe, he actually believed it when everyone said fans preferred polite athletes who didn't thumb their noses, and other body parts, at authority. Andre Agassi, who wanted to be Connors, could have told him the truth.

Rivalries. Borg had McEnroe and Connors, the baddest of the bad boys. They were the anti-heroes and everyone else got to wear the white headband. Lendl, the Al Gore of tennis, got the same break.

Sampras, meanwhile, was stuck with the not-exactly-legendary Jim Courier and the mercurial (that's the generous description) Agassi, who too often left his game on the cutting-room floor.

Timing. Sampras emerged as a star just as the four players who dominated the game for nearly two decades -- Connors and McEnroe, Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert -- were wrapping up their careers.

The game was left in Sampras' hands. He had the game, but he didn't have the game. No soap opera. No scandal.

No blowups. No celebrity liaison. He had the game and Agassi had the image. In each case, it was a mismatch.

Tiger Woods. It doesn't need to be said Sampras is no Tiger, but that isn't really the point. The point is that Woods plays golf and that golf, even before Woods, had become the hot sport for many people, including those who watch Mercedes commercials. You can blame the Boomers for the nation's move from tennis to golf. When the Boomers were in their 30s, they played tennis.

Now that they're in their 50s, they would play only if tennis allowed golf carts.

Gender. Tennis is star-driven and personality-driven. And it doesn't hurt if you look like Anna Kournikova, who, according to one report, gets more hits on the Web than Michael Jordan. She might get more hits off the Web, too.

The biggest story at Wimbledon so far is Kournikova's new sports bra (the slogan for which has been banned from this column). Women's tennis has all the stories, from the Williams sisters to Mary Pierce to Monica Seles. And we haven't even gotten to the top two seeds -- Martina Hingis and Lindsay Davenport. The women have tennis and they have the stories, enough to fill Centre Court for a fortnight and more.

The arguments add up. And they don't. The story this time is Sampras can go where no one has gone before him. His story could go beyond Centre Court, and even beyond SportsCenter, all the way to the History Channel. But wherever Sampras takes us, it never seems to be quite far enough.