Smid, Mayotte Advance to Beat the Odds at Las Vegas

Tomas Smid of Czechoslovakia and Tim Mayotte advanced to the quarterfinals of the $312,000 Alan King tennis tournament Thursday at Las Vegas.

That’s more than five other seeded players, including Jimmy Connors, could do.

Besides Smid (No. 6) and Mayotte (No. 8), Eliot Teltscher (No. 5) is the only seeded player left.

Smid got off to a slow start but then won 10 of the final 13 games to eliminate David Pate, 6-4, 6-2. Mayotte struggled to a 2-6, 7-5, 7-6 victory over Australia’s John Fitzgerald, winning the last three points to take the tiebreaker, 8-6.

Also advancing was 18-year-old Boris Becker of West Germany, who upset Stefan Edberg of Sweden, 6-3, 6-7, 6-2. Johan Kriek needed just 49 minutes to defeat Vincent Van Patten, 6-3, 6-1, and Ken Flach took just 57 minutes to oust Vijay Amritraj of India, 6-4, 6-2.

It was Amritraj who surprised Connors Wednesday, the same day Teltscher, John Lloyd and Jimmy Arias made their way into the quarterfinals.

Regina Marsikova of Czechoslovakia, absent from the women’s tennis tour for almost four years, defeated Jenny Klitch, 6-2, 6-3, in a $150,000 Virginia Slims tournament at Houston to win a shot at No. 1-ranked Martina Navratilova.

In 1981, the 26-year-old Marsikova was involved in an auto accident in Czechoslovakia in which one person was killed. Her driver’s license and passport were taken away. She returned last week in the Tournament of Champions at Orlando, Fla.

About meeting Navratilova in the quarterfinals today, she said: “I’m so happy because I haven’t had a chance in four years to play such a good player.”

Top-seeded Mats Wilander of Sweden took 2 hours 4 minutes to beat Michael Westphal of West Germany, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, in the $315,000 West German Open at Hamburg and was joined in the quarterfinals by countrymen Jan Gunnarsson, Henrik Sundstrom and Joakim Nystrom.

Gunnarsson upset defending champion Juan Aguilera of Spain, 7-6, 5-7, 7-5, in a third-round match; Sundstrom defeated Andreas Maurer of West Germany, 7-5, 7-5, and Nystrom eliminated Jimmy Brown, 6-1, 6-4.