Masters Tennis Tournament : Leconte Loses but Gives Becker a Scare

NEW YORK — Henri Leconte has been called tennis’ most dangerous player. As evidence, observe the way in which he has been hurting himself for years.

Possibly the most charismatic and enigmatic player in the men’s game, Leconte has yet to find a way to harness his prodigious energies and interests. He loves to play tennis but hates to practice. He is easily distracted on the court and off.

Often, his skill brings him to the brink of victory, but his ambivalence pulls him back.

These qualities may be a handicap for him as a professional tennis player, but they help Leconte as a professional lover of life. And Leconte, the very French-man, loves life whether he is winning or losing.

It’s a helpful attitude, because Leconte has been eliminated in the $500,000 Nabisco Masters tennis tournament by virtue of his 0-6, 6-1, 6-1 loss to Boris Becker Friday night before a crowd estimated at 8,000 in Madison Square Garden.

It was Leconte’s second loss in this round-robin tournament. And even if he beats Joakim Nystrom today, he is out.

This tournament will miss his impish air, which has been welcome in a field of otherwise stodgy players.

Still, he has left his mark here. Leconte lost his way, prolonging the dramatics and the anguish, as well as extending his time in the spotlight.

To the astonishment of all watching, Leconte blew out Becker in the first set. He virtually demolished the tournament’s second-seeded player and its most powerful server. And he did it with ease.

“I don’t think I can say anything about the first set,” Becker said. “There should be no comment.”

Let this statistic speak for him: Becker won only four points off his serve in the entire first set.

“He is a very difficult player because he jumps on your mistakes,” Becker said. “On every important point, he would hit a winner or a let cord or an ace. It was very difficult to get into the match.”

Leconte’s opponents face an alarming preparatory dilemma--will they face the smooth and aggressive shot maker or the goofy and lethargic mistake maker?

Becker got the former in the first set, the latter in the second and a streaky mixture in the third.

“The way I played in the first set was the best tennis that I was playing for a long time,” Leconte said. “Boris was playing well, too. He just made too many mistakes, because I was playing well. The first two games in the second set, I was a little bit tight. After I lost a few games, I felt a bit down.”

The second set was a matter of Leconte missing chances, or missing the lines he had been hitting in the first. But even when Leconte is not playing consistently at his best, he’s entertaining.

Case in point came in the third game of the second set. With Leconte serving at 0-15, and looking a little peaked, he suddenly burst forth with magnificent tennis.

Leconte and Becker each scrambled from side to side, making incredible gets, neither moving more than 10 feet from the net. It was an amazing display of footwork and reflexes.

However, it was not a level of tennis that Leconte was able to sustain.

“I was thinking that I could come back, even if I lost the second set,” Leconte said. “The big point was the second game (in the third set), it was 40-15 on my serve. I was tight.”

Becker worked his way back into the game with a forehand passing shot, and Leconte hit three straight shots into the net to give Becker the service break, establishing his hold on the third set and the match.

It was a sort of story-of-his-life match for Leconte--so full of promise at the start only to fade to a what-could-have-been.

“He’s so dangerous, he’s scary,” Ivan Lendl said of Leconte at last summer’s U.S. Open. “When I’m thinking about him, I’m thinking about him as a mad Frenchman, in a nice way, because he’s like a madman out on the court. You can hit a first serve to his forehand as hard as you can--and you may never see the ball. You can’t question the call because that’s how fast it comes back.

“He’s really nice, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying he’s nasty or anything. I’m just saying he plays like a madman. He can make great shots and he can make terrible shots.”

Leconte could have used a good showing here as a means to raise his No. 6 ranking and spruce up his image. He could alter slightly his on-court comportment to give a more somber, less capricious air.

But Leconte won’t. He’s happy the way he is. Tennis likes him that way.

In other matches Friday night, Ivan Lendl beat Stefan Edberg, 6-3, 6-4, and Andres Gomez defeated Yannick Noah, 7-6. 7-6. Noah became sick to his stomach during the match--the result, he said, of eating a bad cheeseburger.