French Open Tennis Championships : Navratilova, Graf to Meet in Final

A pumped-up Martina Navratilova and an admittedly lucky Steffi Graf made it to the women’s championship match of the French Open on Thursday, setting up a battle between the world’s top two players.

Navratilova, the No. 1-seeded player who is seeking her first tournament victory of the year, beat defending champion Chris Evert, 6-2, 6-2, in one of the most lopsided editions of their 72-match rivalry.

“I was very nervous. I wanted to win it very badly,” Navratilova said after an hour’s work at Stade Roland Garros.

Graf, the No. 2-seeded player, undefeated this year, won her 38th consecutive match, edging seventh-seeded Gabriela Sabatini of Argentina, 6-4, 4-6, 7-5.

Sabatini was serving for the match at 5-4 of the final set before Graf turned on the form that has won six straight tournaments, and the 17-year-old West German became the youngest women’s finalist in the clay-court tournament’s history.

“I think I was a little bit lucky to win that match,” Graf said. “I didn’t play very well technically.”

Saturday’s championship match, worth $180,000 to the winner, will be Navratilova’s 24th Grand Slam final. It will be the first for Graf, whose last loss came against Navratilova in the final of the Virginia Slims Championships in New York last Nov. 23.

Navratilova holds a 5-2 career edge over Graf.

Today, the men’s championship match-up will be determined, with No. 1-seeded Ivan Lendl of Czechoslovakia playing No. 5 Miloslav Mecir of Czechoslovakia, and No. 2 Boris Becker of West Germany meeting No. 4 Mats Wilander of Sweden.

Lendl is the defending men’s champion, while Wilander won the French Open in 1982 and ’85.

Navratilova struggled in the early matches here, going through a tiebreaker and the loss of a set in the first two rounds.

“That won’t happen again, I promise,” Navratilova said at the time. She has been true to her word, never more so than against Evert.

Navratilova blazed to a 2-0 lead and was ahead, 5-1, in less than 20 minutes, breaking Evert for the third time on a double-fault.

Trying for her third French Open title in a row and eighth overall, Evert could not hold her serve until the sixth game of the second set. Her normally precise ground strokes abandoned her, and she fell behind, 4-0, with errors on three successive final points. Navratilova then held for 5-0.

Evert saved two match points on her serve in the sixth game and then broke to make it 5-2. But Navratilova broke right back and won the match when Evert’s final backhand went wide.

“I played a solid match,” Navratilova said. “I could have served better, but the rest of my game was good.”

Evert has won at least one Grand Slam title every year since 1973. Clay is her best surface and elimination in Paris places her title streak in jeopardy.

Worse things could happen, Evert said.

“I’ve had bigger letdowns,” she said. “Perhaps Martina had more to prove in this match and this tournament than I did. She was really pumped up.”

Sabatini, the youngest French Open women’s semifinalist at 15 when she lost to Evert in 1985, was so pumped up against Graf that she led 2-0 without losing a point. Graf was in such a daze against her 17-year-old opponent that one of her fans screamed, “Wake up, Steffi!”