Gilbert Gives U.S. Lead; Agassi-Becker Is Halted

Bureaucracy stepped on art and history Friday night. A couple of people who make rules and who probably weren’t within nine time zones of the packed Olympia Halle here, and a couple of others who chose the predictable over the creative, intruded on one of the finer moments in tennis, not to mention sports.

In brief, what happened was that the Davis Cup singles match between Boris Becker of West Germany and Andre Agassi of the United States was halted for the night after the fourth set.

The rules of Davis Cup tennis read that any play starting after midnight can be postponed until the next day by mutual agreement of both team captains. And Nikki Pilic of West Germany and Tom Gorman of the United States mutually agreed.

So, with Becker winning the fourth set just minutes before midnight, and a crescendo of excitement for the estimated crowd of 12,300 building for a fifth set of likely unprecedented drama, Pilic and Gorman packed up their teams and turned in for the night. The crowd, not familiar with Davis Cup rules, stood around, stunned to silence by the announcement. It was a little like getting to Christmas and having the guy on the evening news announce that the rest of December was being postponed until June.

Seldom has there been a tennis match like this, in a setting like this.

The U.S. team had taken a 1-0 lead earlier in the evening when Brad Gilbert outlasted Carl-Uwe Steeb, 6-2, 2-6, 2-6, 6-4, 6-4. The match lasted 2 hours 52 minutes, but it seemed as if it was at least 5 hours. Gilbert and Steeb, playing on a medium-to-fast carpet surface, acted as if it was slow red clay. They came near the net only when they were changing sides.

Gilbert gave new meaning to the phrase winning ugly and pretty much admitted to that later when he said: “In the fourth and fifth sets, if I go back and look at the tapes, I’m sure I’ll see it as a less-than-stellar performance . . . and in the second and third sets that I lost, I was not a happy camper.”

In his last two service games, when he was up a service break in the set and merely needed to serve it out to win, he got aggressive, coming in behind first serves.

“At the end, when I started to come in,” Gilbert said, “I felt if I were going to lose this, I was going to lose it this way. The other way, I was going to lose it like a wimp.”

So the stage was set for the second match, and there were no wimps allowed in this one. Becker is as solid as Bo Jackson and hits tennis balls like Bo hits baseballs and cornerbacks. Agassi, newly conditioned and bulked up, and ever the sharpshooter from the baseline, coils his racket at a tennis ball like a striking cobra. Bo and the cobra, both swinging from the heels. And both on their games like never before--indeed, Becker looked better than in his straight-set victory over Stefan Edberg in the Wimbledon final.

For tennis fans, it was made in heaven; same for any fan of great moments in sports.

And then they stopped it.

No news conferences were allowed afterward, so exact details of the whys and hows were tough to come by. It appeared that Gorman would have the best reason to opt for stopping the match, since Agassi had dropped the third and fourth sets and appeared to need a change in momentum. Plus, Agassi has the reputation for being a fast starter with somewhat suspect endurance, so logic was on Gorman’s side.

But word filtered back that Pilic, also, had opted to stop, and that greatly angered Becker, who had his man on the ropes and was planted and set to throw some roundhouse rights. Agassi scampered off the court, Becker walked sullenly.

There could be an argument made that both Pilic and Gorman should have had a sense of the moment. But sports history shows that coaches seldom have a sense for it; that winning for them remains both everything and the only thing.

So they invoked strategy where sentiment might have played a role, logic or emotion should have been considered. And so Becker and Agassi will start cold today, at about 5 a.m., PDT, and what began as Rembrandt or Picasso will probably end as a paint-by-numbers.

The interruption Friday night could also impact today’s scheduled doubles match between Becker and teammate Eric Jelen and the U.S. veteran team of Ken Flach and Robert Seguso. If Becker and Agassi play more than 30 games in the final set--a longshot, but not impossible, since there are no tiebreakers in Davis Cup fifth sets--then Becker has the option of postponing the doubles until Sunday and pushing the finish of the entire program back to Monday.

All this raises questions about the common sense of Davis Cup officials who demand five sets and no tiebreakers in the fifth, who schedule programs to start in the late afternoon, and who then end up making 12,300 paying customers angry. But sports history also shows that those who run the games usually are those who played them well enough to totally understand them.

There was no question that Becker and Agassi understood what they were doing. They were participating in a toe-to-toe prizefight, with neither even considering backing off. This was the best of the best, No. 2 against No. 6, playing at their best.

Agassi won the first set, 7-6, after taking a 6-1 lead in the tiebreaker and needing to scramble to hold off Becker at 6-4. For his final point, he cranked a big serve and followed it to the net for a sharp volley. No faint-of-heart player, this young man.

Agassi won the second set, 7-6, after taking a 5-2 lead in the tiebreaker and needing to scramble to hold off Becker at 6-5. For his final point, he cranked a big serve and followed it into the net for a sharp volley.

Leading up to those two tiebreakers were dozens of passing shots, aces--Becker had 23 in the four sets--high-kicking second serves, sharp volleys and sharp exchanges from the baseline in which the only object appeared to be who could hit the ball harder. In the first match of the night, the Gilbert-Steeb patty-cake party, most of the points were lost. In Becker-Agassi, most were won. Every time at bat, Becker and Agassi swung for the fences.

And in the third set it got better.

Once, Becker lunged to make a backhand winning volley and the heretofore polite West German crowd came apart. Later, Becker and Agassi stood, nearly face to face, each inside his own service line, exchanging volleys like two guys passing a hot potato, until Becker finally angled a forehand away. Again, the crowd went wild.

Becker went up, 4-1, then 5-2. And with Becker serving for the set at 5-3, his 115-m.p.h. gun in hand, Agassi should have been dead. Incredibly, he broke, then held serve for 5-5. And then he broke Becker again for 6-5.

This was a three-time Wimbledon champion, one of the world’s best servers, at the top of his game, on a fast surface, in front of the home crowd. And Agassi broke him twice. Even in Agassi’s hometown of Las Vegas, nobody would have taken bets on that happening.

So what happened next? With Agassi serving for the match, Becker broke him back and forced the third tiebreaker.

In this tiebreaker, Becker really turned it up a notch, getting three points on huge serves that Agassi barely touched, then winning it at 7-4 with a booming overhead. With a flare for the dramatic, Becker followed through on the overhead and pointed to the spot, putting his own public period on the exclamation point.

Even when Becker won the fourth set at 6-3, Agassi was hitting hard and moving well. Both appeared to still be in that zone that great tennis players go to while playing great tennis.

And then they stopped it. What a pity.