SWEET REVENGE : Victory Over Navratilova at U.S. Open Is a Step in Right Direction for Garrison

Once, in the middle of the night, Zina Garrison found herself playing out a familiar scene from the comic strip, “Cathy.”

The professional woman has a frenzied craving. For food.

Garrison’s sin is doughnuts. She never met a doughnut she didn’t eat.

This time, she caught the sweet fever around midnight. She drove through the Houston streets looking for golden-fried crullers.

“It was so late I got locked out of the house, so there I was, sitting on my car in the middle of the night, eating doughnuts,” Garrison said.

This is the woman who beat Martina Navratilova in the U.S. Open.

Maybe that’s why the crowd at the National Tennis Center felt a special something for Garrison when she hung on to beat the two-time defending champion in three tense sets, 6-4, 6-7, 7-5, Wednesday.

She’s so . . . so very normal.

She doesn’t have an entourage the size of a baseball team, taking care of her every need. She doesn’t have a domineering father throwing his weight around the tennis world. And she doesn’t have an ego the size of Manhattan.

What Garrison does have now is a spot in the final four at the U.S. Open. It could turn into a place in tennis history if she beats No. 5-seeded Gabriela Sabatini in today’s semifinals at Flushing Meadow.

But that’s getting ahead of the story. Simply reaching the semifinals was a difficult task. Garrison, 24, not only was playing a great champion--whom she had never beaten in 21 previous attempts--she was fighting herself.

For a set and five games, taking a 6-4, 5-0 lead, Garrison played the best tennis of her life. Then she proceeded to play the worst. It wasn’t just a collapse, it was a meltdown.

There were four match points in the second set. She double-faulted on one. Writers were ready to write Garrison off. So were the people in the crowd around her coach, Willis Thomas.

He felt the same way.

“My feeling was that she was going to lose the third set,” he said. “I didn’t give her a chance. She really showed me something by coming back.”

Garrison was able to look ahead by forgetting. Even as she took a 4-2 third-set lead, Garrison played as though it were 2-1.

“Believe it or not, I lost the score,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was.”

This time, by losing track, Garrison ended up winning. She reached match point No. 5 at 6-5 in the third, her advantage. Navratilova knocked a backhand volley for a winner.

Garrison won it on the sixth attempt. There they were: Six match points were lined up like all those doughnuts Garrison swallowed that night in Houston.

It was appropriate that Garrison made her big breakthrough at a venue in the United States. Soon she’ll travel to Seoul with Chris Evert and Pam Shriver for the Olympics. No longer will Garrison be thought of as a third wheel on a high-profile team.

As a child growing up in Houston, she watched the Olympics, taking a particular liking to track and basketball. And there’s another reason why Garrison is looking forward to representing the United States.

“I want to meet Danny Manning,” she said.

Garrison, who is black, realized she had the Olympic fever during the Winter Olympics while watching Debi Thomas in the figure skating competition.

“I always looked at Debi like Debi and I were the same,” Garrison said. “Being in a white sport and doing something we weren’t expected to do.

“When she lost, I cried, I have to be honest. She was a lot cooler than I would have been in her place. I’m an emotional person. In the last five years, I’ve improved 100% to where (she controls her emotions).”

Garrison seems genuine. She doesn’t give pat, programmed answers like many of her peers on the tour.

--On whether 19-year-old Steffi Graf can last as long as Navratilova and Evert, both of whom are in their 30s:

“She (Graf) is so hyped up, I don’t think she could make it until she was 30.”

--On the worth of heavy weight training:

“I’ll never get a husband if I’m all bulked up.”

--On her breakup with her former doubles partner, Lori McNeil:

“That was Lori’s decision.”

--On the tour, off the court:

“I don’t get involved with the jealousy because I understand it. All of us get jealous, but if you understand it, you don’t let yourself roll around in it.”

That’s the way the No. 12-ranked Garrison wants to keep it as she continues to climb up the ladder of women’s tennis. She’s not about to roll around in politics and jealousy. There’s just one role she wants--well, make that one sweet roll.

Men’s Matches: Andre Agassi beats Jimmy Connors, 6-2, 7-6, 6-1. Lisa Dillman’s story, Page 8.