McEnroe’s Woes Continue With a Defeat by Gilbert

John McEnroe lost a tennis match Wednesday night. That this fact will not set the tennis world atwitter indicates what kind of ugly time McEnroe is having with the sport he only used to love.

And the fact that brash Brad Gilbert of Piedmont, Calif., who is ranked 15th in the world, beat the No. 2 player, 5-7, 6-4, 6-1, indicates the potential trapped inside the volatile young Gilbert. Some of his talent exploded Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden and splashed all over the Nabisco Masters tournament. It was like a bracing blast of ice water that woke up the 9,798 fans.

What is clear is that McEnroe and Gilbert are not each other’s fans. This was shown last September, when they met in the quarterfinals of a tournament in Los Angeles. McEnroe won, 4-6, 6-0, 6-3, and a feud was born. McEnroe called the 24-year-old Gilbert a showboat and said: “I don’t need that guy to tell me how good he is. He needs to prove it.”

The sparring continued here. McEnroe was frustrated by a combination of the excruciating, public inspection of his personal life and the very public deterioration of his tennis life. McEnroe made more unforced errors in his match against Gilbert than he has in any other match in his career--45. He double-faulted four times. He got in just half of his first serves. He was passed in his own territory, the net, with such precision and regularity that, in the end, he just stayed back and slugged it out.

“I’m very ashamed of the way I played tonight,” McEnroe said. “I’m not moving well. I’m making too many mistakes. I’m out of condition--that’s the bottom line. If I continue to play like this, I’ll stop playing tournament tennis. I have no business being on the court.”

That remark echoes what McEnroe reportedly said to Gilbert during one of their many heated verbal exchanges. Gilbert was pressed several times by the media to repeat McEnroe’s comments. He refused, saying most of it was unprintable.

He did, however, say: “One of the things he said was that I didn’t belong on the same court as him. The last time I played him (in Los Angeles) he got on me as well. I seem to bring out the worst in him.”

McEnroe helped. He fought with the crowd, which was ardently pro-Gilbert. It was a bitter reception from McEnroe’s hometown fans. After one verbal battle with a fan, McEnroe received a warning for a “visible obscenity.”

McEnroe fought with the line judges, he fought with Gilbert and he fought with himself.

“Everything is just taking too much out of me,” McEnroe said. He was raised in Long Island, but the fans in the Garden were merciless in their jeering of him. “Things are getting to me,” he said. “I think I had dreamed or hoped that anytime I come back here, it will be different. It never is. It hurts. Unfortunately, the fans I had in New York, I guess didn’t come to this match.”

Gilbert won over a new set of fans. In the past, Gilbert has admitted that when he got ahead of a top-ranked player, he would become scared and lose. He had nothing to lose Wednesday. Having been in bed with the flu for two days, he just decided to see what he could do.

He knew that McEnroe nearly always serves wide to the forehand court. Gilbert got that scouting tip from his brother Barry, a San Francisco pizza parlor owner, who took a red-eye flight to New York just to repeat this information early Wednesday morning.

Something worked. Gilbert looked like a young Jimmy Connors with his aggressive return of serve.

He broke McEnroe’s serve in the seventh game of the second set, and that seemed to sap McEnroe of his energy. Gilbert also broke McEnroe three times in the final set. McEnroe could only shake his head in wonder.

In other matches, top-seeded Ivan Lendl defeated 16th-seeded Tomas Smid, 6-1, 6-0; eighth-seeded Anders Jarryd beat ninth-seeded Joakim Nystrom, 0-6, 6-1, 6-4, and 10th-seeded Tim Mayotte beat seventh-seeded Yannick Noah, 6-4, 6-4.

Masters Notes

The absence of Jimmy Connors has raised more than a few eyebrows. It was announced Tuesday that Connors, seeded sixth, had withdrawn because he was ill with the flu. That proved to be a boon to Andres Gomez. The Ecuadorian took Connors’ place against Henri Leconte Tuesday night and won. Good for Gomez, bad for Connors, who was fine last week in a tournament at Atlanta. Connors is miffed at the scheduling of the Masters. He has stated that he is unhappy with the January date, and when asked if he was angry enough not to compete here, he said, “We’ll see.” Of course, a boycott by Connors would only hurt him, and it would not change anything. The tournament is already scheduled to be held in early December this year and will mark the end of the tennis year. The Australian Open will be moved to the second week of January and will be the first major tournament of the 1987 season. . . . Boris Becker struggled in the first set of his win Tuesday night over Paul Annacone. At the end of the set, Becker went to the sideline, yanked off his shoes, reached into his bag and took out another pair. When he was asked why he made the change, Becker replied: “I don’t know. My shoes were suddenly too big for me.” Becker, who said he wears size 10 1/2, said the shoes were placed in his bag by mistake. . . . Yannick Noah was eliminated Wednesday night but doesn’t have to go far to get home. The Frenchman now lives in New York City with his wife, and the couple have opened a restaurant (a French restaurant, of course) called Guignol, the French word for clown. Noah likes to clown with the media and invited reporters to dine at his restaurant. “Do you serve there?” Noah was asked. “If I keep playing like this, maybe one day I will,” he said. Noah made news on the fashion front, again. He has pulled his braided hair back into a pony tail, not unlike the Paul Revere hair style of old. By now, Noah is used to fielding questions on matters of style, and even showed of the beads on the ends of his braids. “Do you like them?” he asked.