Tennis Roundup : McEnroe Gets Becker Down, but Not Out

Boris Becker, angered by John McEnroe’s taunting, staved off four match points before finally winning a third-set tiebreaker, 10-8, Saturday to reach the final of the $315,000 Volvo International tennis tournament at Stratton Mountain, Vt., with a 3-6, 7-5, 7-6 victory.

Today, the Wimbledon champion will face Ivan Lendl, the world’s No. 1 player, in a rematch of July’s Wimbledon final.

The top-seeded Lendl advanced Saturday with a 6-4, 3-6, 6-2 victory over Jimmy Connors.

But it was the Becker-McEnroe match that the capacity crowd of 10,300 came to see. Becker and McEnroe have won the last four Wimbledon titles, McEnroe in 1983 and 1984 and Becker in 1985 and 1986.

This was the first tournament match between the two since Becker won his first Wimbledon title 13 months ago, and the 18-year-old West German lamented that McEnroe’s layoff since Jan. 15 had not changed his temperament.

“Six and a half months off and he’s still the same guy, which is too bad,” Becker said.

McEnroe asked Becker early in their match: “Who do you think you’re dealing with?” and later repeated several times, “Somebody should teach you a lesson.”

Becker said it didn’t intimidate him. “It just pumps me up, that he’s not trying to beat me with tennis but with un-tennis things,” Becker said. He added that while he acknowledges that McEnroe is a “genius” on court, “I never said he’s a great human being--I always say he’s a great tennis player.”

After both players held serve through the third set, McEnroe took a 6-3 lead in the tiebreaker to hold triple-match point. But he double-faulted, hit a volley long, and Becker powered an ace down the middle to even the match.

Becker moved to match point at 7-6, but McEnroe won the next two points to again hold match point.

Becker then hit a service winner to tie it at 8-8 and moved within a point of victory when McEnroe’s backhand service return sailed wide.

McEnroe, serving to the ad court, came to the net, but Becker hit a backhand down the line, and McEnroe’s backhand volley attempt dropped into the bottom of the net, ending the battle after 2 hours 31 minutes.

Becker leaped up, giving a thumb’s-up sign, while McEnroe’s bride of one week, actress Tatum O’Neal, wept.

Meanwhile, Lendl said he thought the 33-year-old Connors showed his age in their match.

“I felt he slowed down in the third set,” Lendl said. “He wouldn’t like to hear it, but he’s slowed down. But that’s normal when you’re (nearly) 34.”

At Montreal, top-seeded Pam Shriver and second-seeded Helena Sukova advanced to the final of the Player’s Challenge tournament.

In the semifinals, Shriver broke service twice in both the first and second sets to defeat South Africa’s Rosalyn Fairbank 6-1, 6-3.

Shriver had four unforced errors in her match, compared to 22 for Fairbank, who lost her advantage when she was broken for the first time in the second game of the first set.

Sukova, from Czechoslovakia, exchanged service breaks with Zina Garrison early in the third and deciding set of their semifinal but notched a second service break in the seventh game to beat the fourth-seeded player, 7-6, 3-6, 6-4.

Miloslav Mecir of Czechoslovakia and Andres Gomez of Ecuador reached the final of the $174,000 Austrian Grand Prix at Kitzbuehel. The second-seeded Gomez defeated Emilio Sanchez of Spain, 6-4, 6-3, while the sixth-seeded Mecir won by forfeit over Joakim Nystrom of Sweden, who had to withdraw because of a knee injury.