TENNIS ROUNDUP : Agassi Rises to Occasion, Beats Grabb for Title

Top-seeded Andre Agassi beat Jim Grabb, 6-1, 6-4, for the title in the Sovran Bank Tennis Classic, in Washington, D.C., Sunday.

Agassi, who took more than a month off after the French Open, didn’t lose a set throughout the tournament, and beat the sixth-seeded Grabb in 63 minutes.

Agassi won the first set in 20 minutes, never losing his serve and facing only one break point. He kept Grabb pinned behind the baseline with powerful ground strokes from start to finish to win $70,000.

“Every match, I rose to the occasion,” said Agassi, who began practicing only four days before the tournament. “I did what I needed to do. I could have played better if I’d been pushed farther, but it’s tough to bear down and beat everybody handily.”

Agassi, who did not play at Wimbledon again this year, has made the finals in four of his past five tournaments. He lost to Stefan Edberg in the finals at Indian Wells in March, beat Edberg in Key Biscayne, Fla., and lost to Andres Gomez in the French Open final.

Agassi won five matches this week and beat Michael Chang, 6-3, 6-1, in Saturday’s semifinal.

The 6-foot-4 Grabb never had a chance to get his serve-and-volley game going. Agassi hit 22 winners to one for Grabb.

“I wanted to keep him out of his game, keep my first serve in and keep him behind the baseline,” Agassi said.

Goran Ivanisevic of Yugoslavia won a fourth-set tiebreaker to beat Argentina’s Guillermo Perez-Roldan, 6-7 (7-2), 6-1, 6-4, 7-6 (7-5), to win an ATP tournament at Stuttgart, West Germany.

The 18-year-old Yugoslav, in his first appearance since reaching the semifinals at Wimbledon, won $135,000 and his first title.

The 10th-seeded left-hander broke service in the fifth game of the match to take the early lead. But Perez-Roldan fought back with hard-hitting ground strokes that kept Ivanisevic deep behind the baseline.

Ivanisevic responded by changing the pace and following his serve to the net, volleying Perez-Roldan’s topspin backhand into the corners.

The two, facing each other for the first time, traded breaks in the early games of the fourth set. Ivanisevic survived two set points on his serve in the 12th game to force a tiebreaker.

“I tried to force it to a fifth set,” said Perez-Roldan, who has reached three Grand Prix finals this year.

“At the end it could have gone either way, but that’s the way it is in tennis.”

Top-seeded Arantxa Sanchez Vicario rallied from a 2-5 deficit in the third set to beat Jo Durie, 7-6 (7-2), 4-6, 7-5, in the finals of a Virginia Slims tournament at Newport, R.I.

Durie, trying to win her first singles title since 1983, served twice for the match in the final set but could not put away the world’s seventh-ranked player.

After tying the third set at 5-5, Sanchez Vicario held her serve and broke Durie for the third consecutive time, closing with a lunging drop volley on match point.