Tennis / Thomas Bonk : California Contenders Won’t Make It Easy for Stanford to Repeat

Stanford will soon have to defend its National Collegiate Athletic Assn. men’s tennis championship, but the Cardinal is not even going to have an easy time getting past Pacific 10 Conference teams.

The top-ranked college team in the nation is UCLA and California is No. 2. Stanford is ranked No. 6, just ahead of No. 7 USC, and the road to the NCAA title in Athens, Ga., may very well have to lead through the Pac-10.

Glenn Bassett, coach at UCLA for 23 years, has maneuvered his Bruins into the No. 1 ranking while at the same time helping develop the games of two of the top singles players in the country, Brian Garrow and Buff Farrow.

Garrow is ranked No. 5 in the nation and Farrow No. 7. Jeff Tarango of Stanford is between them at No. 6. Only the initial consonant separates the Garrow and Farrow in names and Bassett said there is also little difference in their talents.

“It’s really strange to be so close in names and ability,” he said.

Garrow and Patrick Galbraith are the No. 1-ranked doubles team in the nation.

Twelve times the conference champion and seven times the NCAA champion, UCLA is 24-2 in dual meets this season, even though the Bruins have had to overcome some adversity, including the resignation from the team of junior Robert Bierens, Bassett’s No. 2 doubles player who possessed a big left-handed serve. Bassett said Bierens wanted to play higher in singles.

Dick Leach, USC’s coach, understood.

“No one will tell Coach Bassett how to run his team,” Leach said.

Bill Behrens, a powerful and promising UCLA freshman, is bothered by a sore right shoulder and didn’t play at the Ojai Valley tournament this weekend. Bassett said he would rather rest Behrens for the NCAA tournament. Garrow has tendinitis and didn’t play singles at Ojai, so Bassett can rest him, too.

At USC, Leach is trying to overcome a problem of his own. John Carras, a fifth-year senior, team captain and former No. 2 singles player, was dropped from the team because of academic problems.

Senior Greg Failla, ranked No. 23, and sophomore Byron Black moved up a notch, but the loss of Carras has greatly hurt the Trojans. “Without him, we are, unfortunately, just another team,” Leach said.

The best team in the country is across town, but even that may change by the time everyone gets to Athens, Leach said.

“Right now, the best is UCLA, but with Bierens, they were the prohibitive favorites,” he said. “Now, they’re going to have a dogfight.”

One of the strongest teams in the country is from California and is not a Pac-10 school. It is UC Irvine, where the Anteaters have been gobbling up opponents.

“Oh, my gosh, they can beat anyone,” Bassett said.

UC Irvine is ranked No. 4 in the nation, behind only UCLA, Cal and Louisiana State. That’s a fairly lofty position for Coach Greg Patton’s team, which has beaten USC twice this season.

Patton’s top singles player is senior Mark Kaplan, ranked No. 11, and junior Trevor Kronemann is No. 20.

The key to Irvine’s success is its depth in doubles. Kaplan and Richard Lubner are ranked No. 8 in the nation, and Mike Briggs and Kronemann are No. 17.

Now that Soviet tennis player Natalia Zvereva has decided to keep her rubles for herself, a countryman thinks it’s a pretty good idea.

Andrei Chesnokov, 23, won the $200,000 Swatch Open tournament and the $28,000 first prize last week. But for Soviet players, winning has meant money in the bank for the Soviet Tennis Federation. Chesnokov wants to join Zvereva in changing that.

“I want to keep this money, and I will tell the federation I will keep this money and try to change the situation for next time,” Chesnokov said.

The 18-year-old Zvereva, ranked eighth in the world and rising on the women’s circuit, recently said she wanted to collect her tournament checks directly. “I think Zvereva is quite right,” Chesnokov said. “I want to do the same thing as Zvereva, but when? I want to speak with some people about this situation.”

Chesnokov, who has won three tournaments, estimates he has been able to keep about $12,000 of the $500,000 in prize money he has collected in his career.

Zvereva is the first Soviet player to be represented by a Western sports marketing company. Her agent is Sara Fornaciari of ProServ, the Washington company that signed Zvereva.

Zvereva, gets $1,000 a week plus expenses from the Soviets, Fornaciari said. Zvereva said she has no plans to defect.

Mats Wilander has had an extremely rough time of late. But David Irvine reported in the London Guardian that Wilander is training with new zeal.

Wilander, who was eliminated in the semifinals of the Monte Carlo Grand Prix tournament by Alberto Mancini of Argentina, would begin each day with a two-mile run. Then he practiced for two hours, hitting an estimated 1,200 balls. After that, weight training for an hour and a half.

Lunch was a sandwich and a drink. After a half-hour break, he was back on court again, this time playing sets against Joakim Nystrom, for another two-hour session before adjourning to a local soccer stadium to do a series of runs ranging from 600 to 200 meters. A final spell of stretching and “and the rest of the day’s my own.”

With that regimen, Wilander is either going to make No. 1 again or come up with a new weight-loss system.

Wilander, 24, has had John-Anders Sjogan as his coach for years, but has added Joe Breedlove as his trainer. Breedlove is a fitness expert who once worked for Navratilova.

Tennis Notes

A bid is being made for the 1989 Davis Cup final to be held in Seattle’s Kingdome, where the event could have the biggest audience in tournament history. Brian Parrott, a spokesman for Louisiana Pacific Corp. of Portland, Ore., said a proposal was being sent to the U.S. Tennis Assn. this week, calling for the final to be held in the Kingdome Dec. 14-16. The U.S. team, led by John McEnroe and Andre Agassi, will play West Germany in the Davis Cup semifinals in Europe in July.