A Day of Great Escapes as McEnroe, Wilander Both Salvage Victories

John McEnroe and Mats Wilander may well be checking the newspaper this morning--just to make sure that they really have advanced to the semifinals of the $400,000 Volvo Grand Prix Masters Tournament.

Considering what happened on the Madison Square Garden floor Thursday, it’s a bit difficult to believe that McEnroe and Wilander both remain contenders for the championship.

The end very easily could have come in the quarterfinals, and Anders Jarryd and Johan Kriek might argue that it should have.

Consider these great escapes:

--Wilander trailed Kriek, 3-1 in the third and deciding set, but rallied to force a tiebreaker and win the match, 6-4, 3-6, 7-6.

--McEnroe, taking what he called the beating of his life for a set-and-a-half, battled back from a 2-6, 0-3 deficit to outlast Jarryd in three sets, 2-6, 6-4, 6-2.

Afterward, all four contestants looked around, shook their heads and wondered just what in the world had happened. The losers were left to ask what else they could have done, while the winners took a deep breath and thanked the fates.

For the record, which might sound a little broken:

Jarryd: “I was playing perfect tennis through 3-1 in the second set.”

McEnroe: “I was lucky I pulled that out.”

Kriek: “I played him perfect.”

Wilander: “I was lucky to win.”

The McEnroe-Jarryd match bordered on the surreal. The Swedes, for all their recent tennis successes, have yet to rid themselves of the Ghost of Borg, but for 1 1/2 sets against McEnroe, Jarryd looked every bit like the second coming of the Great One--minus the headband.

Jarryd broke the best serve in tennis three times in the first set, then served up a few missiles of his own. McEnroe took a 2-1 lead to open the match, but the next time he looked up, he was down, 3-0, in the second set after losing the first, 6-2.

Jarryd reeled off a streak of eight straight games and was a point away--on McEnroe’s serve--from making it nine.

“I don’t remember the last time I’ve been beaten so badly for a set-and-a-half,” McEnroe said. “Maybe in Memphis, when Ferdi Taygan had me, 6-0, 3-0, but that was five years ago.

“I’ve never seen him (Jarryd) play like that before.”

McEnroe, meanwhile, was far from peak efficiency. He seemed overwhelmed, at times, by Jarryd’s serve. His volleys kept winding up at the bottom of the net or out of bounds.

Even his racket fell apart.

While leaning into the ball for a serve during the second game of the second set, McEnroe had his black Dunlop snap in half. It was a clean decapitation, with the head flying up in the air and McEnroe left holding just a stump of the handle.

McEnroe looked around quizzically, wondering what had become of the ball and the rest of his racket. He found out abruptly, ducking to dodge the debris as it fell to the court.

“That’s the way things were going at that stage,” McEnroe said. “If it had landed on my head, I think I would have lost, 6-0.”

McEnroe pulled a new racket out of his bag, and maybe a few tricks, too. Jarryd was a point away from a 4-0 lead in the second set when McEnroe finally righted himself, forced deuce and salvaged the game with an ace and a service winner.

Jarryd’s streak of eight straight games was over. McEnroe had the break he needed and, from the brink of 0-4, McEnroe rallied to win 11 of the next 13 games.

“I was just hoping to get some sort of break to get into the match,” McEnroe said, “and I figured that if I did that, he would start choking a little. And that’s what happened.”

Jarryd couldn’t argue.

“I choked so badly,” he said. “I don’t know, I started to think that I had won the match, that he (McEnroe) is No. 1 and I can beat him. I got very tight.

“After I lost the second set, I said to myself, ‘Try to keep on going,’ but I couldn’t make it. It was too much.”

Wilander, seeded fourth in the Masters, seemed a cinch going into his match against Kriek. At last month’s Australian Open, Wilander easily beat him in the semifinals, 6-1, 6-0, 6-2.

But Kriek, whose tennis game and career has been one of maddening inconsistency, had everything working for him for one afternoon--a punishing forehand, a scrambling net game that produced sensational results, even a backcourt game that kept the baseline-loving Wilander at bay.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Kriek said. “Mentally, I played a very good game. He was lucky to get away.”

Wilander got away simply by making sure his patience didn’t. Like McEnroe, he waited for a break--and got one.

“It’s tough to keep hitting winners all the time, like he did at one stage,” Wilander said.

Down, 3-1, in the third set, Wilander broke Kriek’s serve and inched his way back. Struggling for every point, Wilander finally forced a tiebreaker, where, sure enough, the winners stopped for Kriek.

Wilander opened a 5-2 lead in the tiebreaker and then wrapped it up, first with a brutal forehand winner and then with a rare serve-and-volley that sent Kriek futilely diving to the court.