Italian Open Tennis Championships : Agassi Makes a Late Comeback at Rome

Ivan Lendl, Mats Wilander and Andre Agassi were each extended to three sets Wednesday before winning second-round matches in the Italian Open men’s tennis championships.

Lendl, seeded No. 1, overcame Milan Srejber of Czechoslovakia, 6-1, 5-7, 6-1; Wilander, seeded No. 2, downed Carl-Uwe Steeb of West Germany, 6-4, 4-6, 6-3, and Agassi, seeded No. 9, battled back to beat Jan Gunnarsson of Sweden, 3-6, 7-6, 6-3.

The 18-year-old Agassi made a dramatic comeback to win his 13th straight match.

Gunnarsson served for the match twice in the second set, at 5-4 and 6-5. But each time Agassi put on the pressure and broke serve.

The Swede led, 5-4, in the tiebreaker, but Agassi, pumping his fist and raising his arms to get the crowd behind him, ran off the next three points. He closed out the set with an inside-out forehand winner.

The Las Vegas native broke serve for a 4-3 lead in the final set, then held for 5-3 and broke again to end the match in 2 hours 12 minutes.

“I just started off with a lot of errors, and it took awhile to get into the match,” Agassi said. “I was always confident but I never thought I would win until after the second set was over.”

Agassi praised the fans who cheered his comeback.

“I felt like I was an Italian today,” he said.

Lendl, on the other hand, blasted the noisy center-court crowd that watched his match against Srejber.

“I found it very annoying; I didn’t enjoy it at all,” the world’s top-ranked player said. “They come to see good tennis but they do everything not to see good tennis.”

Other seeded players advancing to the third round of the $825,000 tournament included No. 4 Yannick Noah of France, No. 5 Kent Carlsson of Sweden, No. 6 Andres Gomez of Ecuador, No. 7 Anders Jarryd of Sweden and No. 14 Guillermo Perez-Roldan of Argentina.

Noah struggled in the first set before defeating West Germany’s Tore Meinecke, 7-6, 6-1, and Carlsson wore down Guillermo Vilas of Argentina, the 1980 Rome champion, 7-6, 6-1.

Gomez, a two-time Italian Open champion, edged Michiel Schapers of the Netherlands, 6-4, 7-6, while Jarryd blitzed Paolo Cane, Italy’s No. 1 player, 6-0, 6-0, and Perez-Roldan, winner of the Munich tournament last week, beat Marcelo Filippini of Uruguay, 7-5, 7-5.

No. 16 Aaron Krickstein was eliminated by Ronald Agenor of Haiti, and No. 15 Claudio Mezzadri of Switzerland retired in the second set of his match because of the flu.

France’s Thierry Tulasne, who ousted No. 3 Boris Becker Tuesday, advanced with a 6-2, 6-3 victory over Sergio Casal of Spain.