AUSTRALIAN OPEN : Stamina and Power Carry Edberg Into Quarterfinal Match

When you have the power, finesse and confidence Stefan Edberg possesses, you can beat even the biggest hitters and avoid beating yourself. The top seed needed every little touch--and overcame a little tightness in the throat--to beat American Jim Courier at the Australian Open.

The two-time champion reached the quarterfinals for the seventh consecutive year with a 4-6, 6-0, 6-4, 5-7, 6-2 victory today in a center court meeting that sometimes more resembled a shoot-out than a tennis match.

Both these guys are slammers, with Courier perhaps the hardest hitter in the game. But Edberg, last year’s runner-up here and champion at Wimbledon, had more to his game when it counted to oust the 16th-seeded Courier despite mammoth errors on the final points of Courier’s two winning sets.

“I think I’m a much better tennis player than I was a few years ago, and playing in a fifth set is a matter of experience,” Edberg said. “Today I was able to bring out that advantage in the fifth set. It is a matter of confidence.”

Edberg raised his five-set record to 18-10. Courier is 1-5, with the only victory a 7-6, 3-6, 2-6, 6-0, 7-5 win over Edberg in the final of the 1989 Swiss Indoors.

Breezing into the quarters for the sixth year in a row was defending champion Ivan Lendl.

The third seed took command with a string of seven games in a row at the end of the first set and the beginning of the second, losing just seven points in that span, and beat 13th-seeded American Aaron Krickstein 6-2, 6-2, 6-1, his third straight-set win in four rounds.

“He plays his best tennis in the Grand Slam events, so I expected him to be tough tonight, and he was,” Krickstein said. “He was on top of his game, and I wasn’t.”

Lendl said he was hitting the ball well, but when asked if he was playing as well as he would like, the perfectionist replied: “I am never as good as I would like to be.”

About the only impact Krickstein made all night was when a bullet first-game serve broke Lendl’s racket.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Lendl said, attributing the incident to a defective racket rather than to the power of Krickstein’s serve. Lendl, always the competitor, rarely acknowledges the prowess of his rivals.

Lendl cracked the racket over his knee, tossed it away, picked up another and won 10 of the next 11 games.