La Quinta Tennis Tournament : After Beating Connors, Nystrom Plays Noah in Final

Today’s singles final in the Pilot Pen tennis tournament is going to be like the dueling scene in an Errol Flynn movie. Yannick Noah, a Frenchman, and Joakim Nystrom, a Swede, will slap each other across the face with a glove, play the best of five sets of high-level tennis, smile and shake hands.

They will be sincere smiles. These two men are throwbacks to a time when tennis was a sport for gentlemen. The action on court will likely be exciting and spectacular; that’s the tennis, not the yelling. Don’t worry about bringing earplugs for the kids. These are not complainers or even big talkers.

The only time Noah and Nystrom are likely to speak is when they’re congratulating an opponent on a nice shot.

But don’t get it wrong, they aren’t Boy Scouts, either. Noah beat his friend and Davis Cup teammate Thierry Tulasne, 6-2, 6-7, 7-5, Saturday, but at least, he had the decency to feel bad about it. Nystrom advanced to the final by beating charm school dropout Jimmy Connors, 6-4, 6-2.

Nystrom and Noah have met only once. That was in the quarterfinals of the 1985 Stockholm Open, and Nystrom won in straight sets.

Nystrom has not lost a set in this tournament. Connors, who is trying to find his form after a layoff because of a back injury, has not won a tournament since October 1984.

Nystrom utilized his patient style to eliminate Connors in 1 hour 24 minutes, much to the chagrin of the 9,124 fans who had hoped for a longer look at Connors, the No. 2-seeded player who is ranked No. 4 in the world.

Nystrom said his strategy Saturday was to stay back and wait for Connors to make a mistake. Short wait. Nystrom broke Connors’ serve in the second, sixth and 10th games of the first set. That thrashing put Connors in a hole from which he never escaped.

“He just made a lot of mistakes,” Nystrom said. “Especially on his forehand. I played well in the first two games, then he came back and hit the ball harder. But after that, especially in the second set, he made a lot of mistakes.”

Connors was unable to shift into his usual aggressive game. Nystrom’s second serve was vulnerable, but Connors said he wasn’t sure where the ball was bouncing.

“The ball was kind of taking off on me today,” Connors said. “I considered doing a lot of things, but it’s difficult to come into the net when the ball is landing three or four feet from the base line. I couldn’t do anything with it.

“In the second set, I was trying to get to the net. I was trying to hit the ball short so he would come in, but he wouldn’t do that. Then I thought I’d hit the ball deep to make him hit short to me, so I could come in. That didn’t happen.”

Connors said earlier in the week that the unseasonably high temperatures had bothered him. It wasn’t much of a factor Saturday as cloud cover and a light breeze brought relief from five days of searing heat.

Questions regarding the energy-sapping conditions were directed with obvious frequency to Connors, who is considered by some to be elderly at age 33. As is often the case for Connors these days, he was 10 years older than his opponent.

Connors displayed his irritation with that line of questioning in the postmatch press conference when a gray-haired reporter commented: “At your age, I’m surprised you can bend your knees like that to get to balls.”

Connors shot back: “At your age, I’m surprised you can see that so well.”

Even 13 hectic years on the tour have not worn down Connors’ combative nature. Lest anyone forget, he reminded the world of his regard for authority at a tournament in Florida last week. There, in a semifinal match against Ivan Lendl, Connors was defaulted when he refused to continue play. He had argued that a ball hit by Lendl had been out.

Both Connors and Lendl had complained about the officiating, and Lendl said the umpire “lost control of the match.”

Here, Connors has not backed off his stance in the least, reiterating that he only did what he thought was right.

Connors was fined $5,000 and could be fined as much as $20,000 and suspended for one year by the Men’s International Professional Tennis Council. The council announced this week that it was investigating the case and would rule on the matter at a future date.

Nystrom said he heard about the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme before his doubles match Friday night. Nystrom and partner Mats Wilander lost that quarterfinal match.

“Of course, we were all a little bit shocked when we heard the news,” Nystrom said. “Especially to happen in Stockholm.”

Nystrom played his match Saturday with a black armband tied to his left arm.

Noah played a lively match with Tulasne. The two have been practice partners for 10 years. It is reasonable to assume that Tulasne would have great insight to the peculiarities of Noah’s game. But that’s just it, Noah’s daring, athletic game is peculiar.

“It’s very hard to play him because he’s playing strange,” Tulasne said. ‘He’s coming in (to net) on high balls, on things you just can’t tell.”

Tennis Notes Today’s final is scheduled for noon and is sold out. . . . Guy Forget and Peter Fleming defeated Mike DePalmer and Gary Donnelly in the doubles semifinals, 6-4, 7-6. Today, they’ll meet Yannick Noah and Sherwood Stewart, who defeated Boris Becker and Slobodan Zivojinovic, 6-2, 6-1.