WIMBLEDON TENNIS CHAMPIONSHIPS : Down a Match Point, Lendl Prevails : He Has 21 Double Faults, 24 Aces in Win Over Woodforde

Afterward you heard the loser’s happy refrain: “The guy’s No. 1 and I had match point on him.”

The happy losers--they’re different all the time--never make match point. The guy’s still No. 1.

Ivan Lendl, the No. 1 guy, always wins these five-set matches. He has won his last eight here, since 1981.

He never wins Wimbledon, which he regards as something more than a minor failure, but when battles with top-20 players--top 54 in this case--become a matter of nerve, he does tend to emerge from Wimbledon’s growing dusk with his racket held high. He did so Monday, to begin Week 2 of this tournament, in a remarkable fourth-round match that stretched 4 hours 46 minutes and 68 games, not a dull one among them.

Still, Lendl will have to beat better than Mark Woodforde, which he did, 7-5, 6-7, 6-7, 7-5, 10-8, to become more than the top-ranked player of the ‘80s. He needs to win Wimbledon, the only Grand Slam tournament that has escaped him, to become a truly great player. He needs to win on a surface he considers only slightly more friendly than, say, solar.

But if he can’t win on grass, and lots of players here are winning more easily than he--defending champion Pat Cash has played 58 fewer games through this same round of 16--he cannot be faulted for his resolve.

Like Jimmy Connors, who finished Week 1 with a semi-heroic match, Lendl means to survive this tournament, using whatever is at hand, in this case his nerve.

Of course, he goes into the night as the mechanical man, as always. When he failed to report immediately to a postmatch press conference, the rain beginning to fall on Wimbledon, it was quickly suggested that he was simply being oiled.

Perhaps his robotic discipline does account for his extraordinary presence on Court 1. But he surely was human enough to feel the pressure, down 6-7 in the final set, serving at 30-40, a 22-year-old Australian with nothing to lose poised for the tournament’s biggest upset.

Woodforde is wide with a return on the match point, and Lendl lives to serve again. It is advantage Lendl and then deuce--Woodforde not exactly dissolving--and then it is advantage Lendl after a nifty volley.

And then Lendl, who had already served 20 double faults at that point and who might have been tempted to take something off his serve, cranks back and aces Woodforde. Match point disappears.

Each player continues to hold his serve throughout the fifth set until Lendl breaks Woodforde to go ahead, 9-8--there is no tiebreaker in the final set at Wimbledon. And then Lendl briskly puts it away, winning 13 of the last 14 points--until another double fault--Woodforde suddenly helpless in the fusillade.

So what was Lendl thinking at match point?

“To get my first serve in . . . “

OK, he has a lot of discipline.

Actually he was somewhat aware of the moment, at least how weak his grip on the tournament was becoming. After he came through, however narrowly, he was asked if, should he finally win this, he will feel he deserved it, his five-set matches and all.

“If I win it, you can say I’m lucky, too,” said Lendl, who will play the winner of the Tim Mayotte-Henri Leconte match in the quarterfinals. “At match point, anything can happen. The judge can say foot fault, the serve could be a let and dribble over.”

Oh! There is room for failure in that brain of his, although it seems to be more a failure of circumstance than his ability.

Lendl doesn’t often allow matters to fall to circumstance. He is an acknowledged control freak. When he couldn’t win the U.S. Open, he had a replica of the court built in his back yard in Greenwich, Conn.

Then he won it three times.

He has been far more frustrated at Wimbledon and is believed to have considered installing his own grass court on the property.

“But there is not room in my yard,” he says.

That’s that, then.

“Of course, I do have other properties.”

He really has considered it.

“But the upkeep,” he says.

He pays only $3.50 an hour, he says, and only to sportswriters.

Without his own Wimbledon practice court, he is left to make practice time during the tournament, which he has done with an astonishing 190 games. This bespeaks unnecessary labor for a man of his talents, but Lendl says he doesn’t mind the work, that grass-court play is not nearly so physically demanding as the other surfaces, where rallies run longer.

“Mentally it’s draining,” he agrees.

Still, there is not much decision-making in his game. He serves as hard as he can, no matter what seems to be working. It would seem that his serve wasn’t. There were those 21 double faults. But Lendl said there was nothing for him to do but boom them.

“I was missing a lot of first serves,” he agreed. “But I still had to go for it on the second serve because the guy was returning it so well. I know I make a lot of double faults, but I made some points, too.”

You also have to consider the effect of the ones that stayed in. Consider 24 aces.

“He was serving bombs at me,” Woodforde said. “For anyone to serve like that, it’s incredible. I was pretty tired at the end, but the guy just keeps hitting harder, whamming this return at me.”

That is why, for the moment, Lendl remains the No. 1 guy, and Woodforde becomes the man who had match point on him.

You suspect that although Woodforde remains happy with his achievement, Lendl is not yet savoring his.