Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 30, 1990 TAG: 9005300065
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: PARIS LENGTH: Medium
And so, the top two seeds, neither of them clay-court specialists, were ambushed Tuesday by teen-agers in the opening round of the French Open.
The mis-events of the day struck a double blow to traditional Grand Slam hierarchy: Never before had the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds been eliminated in the first round of a Grand Slam event.
The indignities dealt Edberg and Becker were especially punishing because if either had won this tournament, he could have supplanted the absent Ivan Lendl, who is off preparing for Wimbledon, as the world's top player.
Edberg made the wrong sort of history in his woeful performance against Sergi Bruguera, a wispy teen-ager from Barcelona, Spain.
Edberg faltered and fumbled to a 6-4, 6-2, 6-1 loss on center court and wrote himself into the French Open record book as the first top seed in tournament history to suffer defeat in a first-round match.
Becker's play Tuesday was just as fractured as Edberg's, and although he won the first set, he was thoroughly neutralized thereafter by the multitude of aces and lightning groundstrokes from 18-year-old Goran Ivanisevic of Yugoslavia, who won 5-7, 6-4, 7-5, 6-2.
Becker tends to develop feet of clay on this surface that most tests his shallow reserve of patience.
Becker has a disaffection for early rounds, and he felt his inability to raise the level of his game to equal Ivanisevic's fever pitch cost him the match.
"For him, every round is like a final," said Becker, who has yet to collect a title on clay. "But for me, it's impossible to play my best in the first round."
Although Becker was convinced the match would have had a different outcome had it happened later in the tournament, he didn't think Ivanisevic had merely been lucky.
"He had two aces every service game and by the fourth set nobody in this draw could stop him," said Becker, who had hoped the youngster's participation in Yugoslavia's victory at last week's World Team Cup competition would cause fatigue problems Tuesday.
Instead, the longer the three hour, three minute match went, the better Ivanisevic played.
"Today I concentrated for all four sets and I surprised myself," said Ivanisevic, who said instructions from his coach, Balazs Taroczy, included "no tanking, no racket-throwing."
"I came to the court without pressure," Ivanisevic said. "I saw that Bruguera beat Edberg and I said, `why can I not beat Becker?' "
In the match that set the precedent for the day's upsets, Edberg confessed to being handcuffed by his own insecurities.
"I didn't quite know what to do, and whatever I did, I didn't do it well," Edberg said. "There was only one stage where I was in control, and that was the beginning."
The impassive Swede appeared to be conducting business as usual and held a 4-3 edge on 19-year-old Bruguera in the first set.
But when he missed an easy volley on the first point of the next game, he succumbed to an attack of indecisiveness that lasted the rest of the match.
His serve was anemic, his backhand was erratic and every time he wandered toward the net to try and head off the pummelling he was absorbing at the baseline, Bruguera's breezy passing shots left him standing still.
Bruguera, ranked 46th, said a lengthy chat with his father and coach, Luis, following his 6-0, 6-3 loss to Edberg at Indian Wells, Calif., this winter set him in the proper stead for this rematch.
"After I know how a player plays, I can talk it over with my father and normally I win afterwards," said Bruguera, who used that strategy to dismiss Jimmy Connors from the Italian Open last year.
On Tuesday, Bruguera pressured Edberg by "staying inside the court" instead of lingering behind the baseline.
Bruguera also said he took pains to restore calm to his game, a trademark trait of the veteran he upset Tuesday, after screaming his way through several losses at the start of the year.
The women's side of the draw couldn't match the men's for drama; both the defending champion Arantxa Sanchez Vicario, seeded third, and Monica Seles, seeded second, advanced in straight sets.
Keywords:
TENNIS
by CNB