ON THEIR COURT : U.S. Davis Cup Team to Keep Fast Company With Becker-Led West Germans

What all started as a simple revenge match five months ago in Florida is getting to be serious stuff for the United States Davis Cup tennis team. No more beating up on 98-pound weaklings from Paraguay. No more flogging of frail Frenchmen.

Nope, it’s the big leagues now, the heavy hitters from West Germany. Even though it is only a semifinal, it has the feel of Dempsey-Firpo, the smell of Yankees-Dodgers.

Indeed, it is quite a journey this U.S. team has taken--from Hugo Chapacu to Boris Becker.

Today, when Captain Tom Gorman leads his group of John McEnroe, Andre Agassi, Ken Flach and Robert Seguso through its first practice session at historic Olympia Halle in Munich, the week of hype and hope will be underway.

Friday, in front of a sold-out arena of 11,000 fans, many of whom paid $300 a ticket for the three-day session, McEnroe and Agassi will play singles against Becker and Carl-Uwe Steeb, and the first punches in this anticipated best-of-five donnybrook will be thrown.

Saturday, Flach and Seguso will play Becker and Eric Jelen in doubles, and Sunday, the reverse singles from Friday will be held. The order of the singles is determined in a draw Thursday.

ESPN will televise much of the action, starting with 2 1/2 hours Friday at 6 p.m., Pacific time, and continuing with 3 hours on Saturday, starting at 9 a.m., and 2 1/2 hours Sunday, starting at 1:30 p.m.

Clearly, the United States and Gorman face a tremendous challenge.

First, they are facing the team that won last year’s Davis Cup, and did so by beating a Mats Wilander-Stefan Edberg team on Sweden’s home court. Part of the charm and part of the controversy of Davis Cup tennis is that visiting teams win about as often as sports teams from Atlanta. So the Germans’ final-round win in Sweden was a shocker.

Next, the United States must play on the surface chosen by the home team. For this match, Nikki Pilic, West German team captain, went with a carpet-like surface called Pegulan. Gorman isn’t happy with the choice, saying that it is a surface almost never played on by the pros; that a Davis Cup surface should at least be something vaguely familiar to the players.

The reason for Pilic’s choice of that surface is the third reason this is such a tough challenge for the U.S. team. That reason is named Becker.

Becker just won his third Wimbledon title. His game has never been better, nor has his popularity rating in West Germany.

And his serve-and-volley game was made for fast surfaces, such as Wimbledon’s grass and the Olympia Halle’s Pegulan carpet. Pegulan reportedly is not as fast as grass, but it may be neck-and-neck with an ice rink. Becker’s 115-m.p.h. serves that looked like bullets at Wimbledon may slow all the way down to Gretzky slap shots in Munich.

For the U.S. team, the road to Munich started in February in Ft. Myers, Fla., where the Americans swept Paraguay in a match that slopped over into silliness in terms of revenge and patriotism.

The United States had been out of the main draw since 1987, mostly because of a stunning loss in Paraguay.

That match turned when Jimmy Arias lost a controversial five-set match to an unheralded and relatively unskilled player named Hugo Chapacu, amid drum-beating and rock-throwing. So when the Paraguayans got to Florida, they were treated like the Indians treated Custer.

Not only were they beaten, 5-0, winning only two sets, but the whole thing took on the air of some sort of nationalistic pep rally. Agassi, a bit too young to know any better, acted as if he were pushing the flag upright on Iwo Jima.

In April, France came to San Diego. This time, Gorman substituted veteran McEnroe for little known Michael Chang, who hadn’t quite reached his 17th birthday at the time of the Paraguay match and was deemed to be “too inexperienced” for quality competition.

That, of course, was before Chang won the French Open and prompted Gorman, who is sticking with McEnroe and Agassi for the West Germany match, to poke fun at himself for “probably being the only Davis Cup captain in history to leave a French Open champion off his team.”

Against the French--both Yannick Noah and Henri Leconte were slowed a bit by injuries--McEnroe and Agassi were spectacular, as were the ever-present Flach and Seguso, and the United States won again, 5-0.

Next weekend’s match brings to mind West Germany’s 3-2 win over the U.S. team in Hartford, Conn., in 1987. In that match, Becker beat McEnroe in a 6-hour 20-minute thriller and Jelen dealt the United States its death blow by upsetting Tim Mayotte.

Were the United States to win this weekend, the final would be played against the Sweden-Yugoslavia winner Dec. 15-17 in the 21,000-seat Coliseum at Charlotte, N.C.

Although the Germans are the apparent favorite, Gorman is talking positive and stressing that McEnroe is playing well and has a strong supporting cast.

“McEnroe is McEnroe,” Gorman said, “and Agassi and Flach and Seguso have never lost a Davis Cup match.”

And Agassi adds, “If we’re gonna win the Davis Cup, we’ve got to beat Becker and the Germans, and we’ve got to do it on whatever surface, even if it’s the Autobahn.”

Sven Busch of the German Press Agency DPA contributed to this story.