TENNIS AUSTRALIAN OPEN : Former Champions Take On Challenges

Ivan Lendl, Stefan Edberg and Mats Wilander, each former Australian Open champions, stepped onto the sizzling courts today (Wednesday) hoping to move closer to another title.

Opposing them were three young players--Andrei Cherkasov, David Wheaton and Boris Becker--hungry for their first Australian championships.

The three quarterfinal matches offered a view of some of the dominant players of the 1980s and perhaps the key players of the 1990s, the past clashing with the future in the first Grand Slam tournament of the decade.

Lendl, the defending champion and No. 1-ranked player, is the oldest in the group at 29 and faced the youngest, Cherkasov, a 19-year-old Soviet baseliner born on July 4.

Cherkasov, playing in his first Grand Prix quarterfinal last year, gave Lendl a tough time before losing 6-4, 6-4 on clay in Hamburg.

“It was a very good match for me,” Cherkasov. “I think it was the best in my career.”

Edberg, the 1985 and 1987 Australian champion now ranked No. 3, took on a stranger in Wheaton, a 20-year-old with a powerful serve-and-volley game.

Edberg, the only quarterfinalist not to drop a set in his first four matches, tuned up for the meeting with a five-set doubles match in the 140-degree courtside heat Tuesday.

Wheaton, from Lake Minnetonka, Minn., made it to the quarters by beating No. 5 Aaron Krickstein, 7-6, 6-4, 6-3.

Wheaton may have been a little lucky to get so far--with Krickstein slowed by a pulled groin and third-round opponent Mark Woodforde retiring in the second set with a sprained ankle--but is widely regarded as one of the top young players.

The 25-year-old Wilander, winner of the Australian in 1983, 1984 and 1988, has been struggling the past year. He faced the toughest of the young players, the 22-year-old, second-ranked Becker, winner of three Wimbledon titles and the U.S. Open last year.

Becker won six of their previous eight matches, losing only on the clay at the French Open. In their last meeting, in the Davis Cup final in December, Becker trounced Wilander, 6-2, 6-0, 6-2.

The fourth quarterfinal match pitted 12th-ranked Yannick Noah of France against Mikael Pernfors, the Swedish-born former NCAA champion at Georgia who benefited from the default of John McEnroe.

Noah, who beat Lendl en route to winning a tuneup event in Sydney, won both his previous matches with Pernfors in close matches, once on clay in 1985 and another on hard courts in 1986.

The heat at this $3 million tournament Tuesday turned the stadium into the world’s largest sauna and tested the fortitude of the top players.

If there were an award for durability, it would go to the winners of the longest doubles match in Australian Open history--South Africans Pieter Aldrich and Danie Visser, who outlasted Americans Scott Davis and Robert Van’t Hof in a five-hour, 29-minute match.

Aldrich and Visser’s winning score was 4-6, 6-4, 7-6 (7-4), 4-6, 23-21.

The match, which began in the hottest part of the day and ended in the balmy evening, was 19 minutes longer than a five-set, 84-game marathon won two years ago by Andrew Castle and Roberto Saad against Glenn Michibata and Grant Connell.

“It helped a lot that the sun went down later in the match,” Visser said. “We started feeling cramps because we were losing a lot of liquid. When the sun went down we stopped sweating so much.”

In earlier women’s quarterfinal matches, top-seed Steffi Graf defeated Patty Fendick, 6-3, 7-5; No. 6 seed Mary Joe Fernandez beat Zina Garrison, 1-6, 6-2, 8-6; West Germany’s Claudia Porwik beat Angelica Gavaldon, 6-4, 6-3, and No. 4 seed Helena Sukova of Czechoslovakia defeated Bulgaria’s Katerina Maleeva, 6-4, 6-3.