Masters Tennis Tournament : In Round-Robin Play, Becker Is One Winner on Night of Few Losers

The people who have brought us the Nabisco Masters tennis gala are also bringing us the new and perhaps improved season-ending tournament, which opened Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden.

The format has been modified, trimming the field from 16 to 8 players and switching from sudden-death to round-robin play in which each player is guaranteed at least three matches.

This is not the way tournaments usually are organized. Normally, if a player has a bad night, it’s tough luck and he’s packing for the next stop. Not so here. And perhaps the change has not been made for fairness’ sake as much as for commercial gain.

This format is a way for the tournament organizers to hedge their bets. If their top-drawing player should lose in the first round, it no longer has the effect of deflating interest and decreasing attendance.

A round-robin tournament also makes television happy because it knows that at least one top player will play every night.

On the other hand, what meaning do these early matches have? Wednesday night’s losers were hardly forlorn. It’s difficult for players to get upset about losing when they know they will be back. Easy to lose, until you consider that winning a match is worth $10,000. In the absence of American players, none of whom qualified, West Germany’s Boris Becker is providing the sex appeal here.

In fact, a quick review of recent results shows that Becker has been the force in tennis for the last two months, having won the last four tournaments he has entered. On current form, it appears likely he will meet Ivan Lendl in the final next Monday.

Wednesday, Becker, 19 and a formidable foe at 6 foot 2 inches and 185 pounds, had little trouble beating Joakim Nystrom, 6-1, 6-3.

“I’m getting older and I’m getting stronger, too,” he said. Becker is still hitting his pile-driver forehands and has added new dimensions to his backhand. It is the shot he believes he has improved the most.

“I used to play only slice,” he said. “The slice is still there, obviously, but I wasn’t so sure about hitting it hard on important points.”

Nystrom handled Becker’s shots, especially his serve, as best he could in view of their velocity. The Swede still is working his way back from a knee injury that kept him off the tour for 11 weeks.

In the night’s first match, Mats Wilander of Sweden beat Henri Leconte of France, 6-1, 7-5, before a crowd of about 7,000, although it was announced that 14,027 tickets had been sold.

Leconte is one of a quartet of Frenchmen on the tour known collectively as The Four Musketeers. However, with his clowning antics and carefree attitude, Leconte is closer in style to the Three Stooges.

On the tour, he is at once feared and adored. If Leconte is playing well, if his game is flowing, he is a superb shot-maker. If, he is distracted or disinterested, however, he is far less threatening.

“Henri is the kind of player who, if he is hot, is very difficult to beat,” Becker said. “The problem for him, (is) it is hard for him to get hot.”

Leconte, the blithe spirit, is never as happy as when he is in front of a microphone.

In Wednesday night’s interviews, Leconte got the affair moving by asking, “Questions for me?” When no one responded, Leconte said, “No questions in English, we move on to French.”

Once tournament media officials regained control of the microphone, Leconte was asked about his lack of success against Wilander, dating back to the junior level.

“No, I have a pretty good record against Mats, now it is 5-4 or 5-3. Anyway, I have beaten him three times,” Leconte said, choosing either to ignore or to forget Wilander’s 7-2 record against him.

Both players have returned to the tour after lengthy absences--one grew sick of the grind, and for the other the grind made him sick.

Wilander took eight weeks off after the U.S. Open in September. “I was fed up with tennis, especially the travel around it and the practice time,” he said. Wilander also wanted to spend more time with his fiancee, whom he will marry Jan. 3.

Leconte enjoyed the travel, if not the practice, but found himself growing more and more fatigued last March. A blood test told him what his body already knew--slow down. Leconte was out of tennis for seven weeks with mononucleosis and hepatitis.

In the third match Wednesday night, Stefan Edberg of Sweden beat Andres Gomez of Ecuador, 6-2, 6-3.