Remember, by the time Sampras was 22 he had won all the other Slam titles at least once, but he has never really come near the French, making just one semi-final five years ago. Last month at his 11th attempt he went out in the second round. He was dreadful, and he looked ... not young.
"Better retire, Pete,'' shouted some wise-ass in the crowd. Or in other words, why are you still doing this? Yet the answer was there. Indeed, the answer was oddly more evident there - where he has lost six times in either the first or the second round - than anywhere else.
The answer is simply this. It's hard to stop. If you are the greatest player the game has known, if you have won the most Slam titles, if all you have known since the age of seven is a vocabulary of focus and challenge, then it doesn't matter how rich or married or Practically Thirty you are.
Walking away from what might still be possible is tougher than anything Sampras has yet achieved. It is not that he cannot accept the dying of the light. He knows he will not be No1 again, and it seems now, at last, he has accepted that he will never win the French.
"I enjoyed the time I was on top," he said this week. "I guess I'd love to get back there, but the levels of energy needed to get back there, I'm not sure I have that anymore.
"It's not looking like I'll get back. I put all my energies into Paris, but you can't turn it on and off like a light switch. It's not about focusing on one tournament. I'm just trying to get myself a schedule that kind of feels right for me now."
That last phrase tells its own story. It says that he can't just stop and besides, he doesn't want to.
If that is okay by him, should it not be okay by us? There are two more facts to emphasise. First, he's not going to do a Goran Ivanisevic, flogging around challenger and qualifying tournaments when he has a ranking of 125.
Ivanisevic speaks of the "need to know I tried everything" in an effort to get back to the top. It may not be pretty for those who watch, yet it is what he wants.
Sometimes - frequently, even - emotions don't add up to a neat little package ready for public dissection. It doesn't make those emotions any less valid.
Sampras said: "You know, once it's over, it's over. You don't want to let go prematurely."
Yet he has let go of much in tennis, more than many of us see.
He has let go of the No 1 spot, and the dream of winning all four Slam tournaments.
He has let go of the schedule that makes such goals feasible.
He has won a single tournament in the last 12 months, on a Sunday evening in SW19 last July.
After last month at Roland Garros, it seemed impossible he could retain that one title, yet this week on the Queen's grass, old man Sampras immediately played like a hungry young gun.
Ask the other players if he can win Wimbledon again and they stare at you as if you are deranged.
Then they laugh, and shake their heads - and they don't mean no he can't.
At Wimbledon, everything is still possible. No player would refuse that crown. So why should he, merely because he has worn it seven times?
This is London in the month of June. Do not ask why Pete Sampras still plays. Just for a little while longer, ask why he should stop.
