They were introduced in the “read my lips” manner reminiscent of the civil servant who used to intone the casualty list from the Falklands conflict. John Mac — en — Roe and Pete Sam — pras. Very Royal Albert Hall it may have been, but somehow a meeting of two men who have won 21 grand-slam singles titles between them merited a jazzy lead-in, even if half the audience was high on champagne in the plush boxes and those in the cheaper enclosures were the beige cardigan brigade.

This was something to get worked up about, a match that would have lifted the roof from Madison Square Garden, in New York, had them hootin’ and hollerin’ in Las Vegas and caused a wild frenzy in any Asian capital you could care to mention. In good old London, they were Mac — en — Roe and Sam — pras, but what a sight to behold were these grandest of the slammers, toying with our memories with strokes, splendour and the odd splenetic outburst, mostly from you know who.

When the idea was first mooted a couple of decades back about an old boys’ knockabout league that has now become a multimillion-pound business, this was what the originators had in mind. McEnroe, two months short of his 50th birthday, his all-white outfit as ghostly pale as his skin, topped off with a grey mop, against Sampras, who is receding a touch, wears trainer socks, carries two huge sweatbands where once he used his right thumb to flick away the sweat, is unshaven and looking a touch like something from Pirates of the Caribbean. But my God, can they still play.

In their professional career, they met three times and Sampras won them all, the second of which was the four-set semi-final of the 1990 US Open, sandwiched between wins over Ivan Lendl and Andre Agassi that were to crown a shy, disbelieving 19-year-old as the youngest winner of his national championship, the first of his 14 grand-slam titles. It was six years from McEnroe winning the seventh and last of his, in his halcyon year of 1984 when he ruled the sport.

He has lorded it over the seniors tour longer than he dare be reminded but that is the essential McEnroe, never knowingly understated. What would this tour be without him, would Sampras have been tempted to return to the grindstone if the opposition was, and this is no detriment to their talents, Paul Haarhuis, Jacco Eltingh, Chris Wilkinson and Jeremy Bates? No, McEnroe has single-handedly saved this element of the game and it is against him, even at 49, that the best want to be at their best.

That he firmly believed he could beat Sampras made this occasion irresistible; that Sampras had lost to him in an event in America this year when he knew that he was hurt, heaped a little extra sweetener into the mix.

The score was rightly 6-3, 6-4 in favour of Sampras in the first match of their round-robin group of the BlackRock Masters, largely because he had 12 years in hand and can still serve out of a tree when the mood takes him. When Sampras actually made a tennis crowd laugh, McEnroe was pretty much a dead man stumbling.

Serving for the first set, Sampras thundered down an ace on the opening point. McEnroe stood, arms akimbo, staring at the spot where he felt the ball had landed. Kim Craven — though he most certainly did not live up to his surname — said he went along with the linesman’s call. From the opposite end of the court, Sampras suddenly shouted “I saw it.” He promptly raised a ball over his head, ambled forward, climbed the net, his arm still raised and placed the ball gently down on the centre service line.

You sensed that, against anyone else, McEnroe would have made a three-course meal of a rant. “I was really impressed with John,” Sampras said. “He’s been playing tennis almost every week since he retired from the Tour, he serve and volleyed and I found his serve hard to pick. This is a tough court to play on — I wish they had slowed it up a little.”

Today, Sampras may sneak down to the All England Club. “Can you get in without a suit and tie?” he asked. We think they will forgive him if he has left his in Beverly Hills.