TENNIS MEN’S TOURNAMENT AT INDIAN WELLS : McEnroe Delivers a Victory in Three Sets

For distance, for accuracy, for sheer elan, there’s absolutely no one in the world who can touch John McEnroe in the racket-throwing department.

Like Al Oerter hurling a discus or Nolan Ryan firing a baseball, McEnroe is an artist.

Racket launcher? Racket scientist? One, two, three, four times, McEnroe’s racket was airborne on a windblown Tuesday during his first-round victory over Wally Masur in the Newsweek Champions Cup.

Actually, littering the court with rackets had much less to do with McEnroe’s victory than his apparent age-old ability to hit just the right shot when it’s needed the most. If McEnroe’s hairline is receding, his flair clearly is not.

McEnroe saved two set points of Masur’s and went on to win the first set, survived a sandblasting in the second set, then scored two key service breaks late in the third set to post a 7-6 (7-5), 2-6, 7-5, victory, his first in the Coachella Valley since 1979, but that was also the last time he played here.

That means that while there have surely been a lot of racket-throwing incidents in the years since, none of them were McEnroe productions. McEnroe’s four racket tosses turned out to be, well, free throws, since the chair umpire does not issue a warning unless a thrown racket is broken. McEnroe obviously threw his rackets with care. In fact, the racket-throwing stuff is sort of overrated anyway, he said.

“I don’t know why people make a big deal out of my throwing a racket,” McEnroe said. “Ken Rosewall threw his racket 50 times a match when he played. You know, flip it over his shoulder, flip it down . . . and he’s the ultimate gentlemen in a way.

“Now I’m not pretending to say that I’m as much a gentlemen as Ken Rosewall, (but) I think this racket thing is ridiculous,” he said. “It’s something that I’m probably doing so that I hope not to get into stupid things which I might regret saying.”

Besides, McEnroe said, he never actually throws his racket anywhere he shouldn’t.

“You flick your racket over to where the next point is,” he said. “I don’t flick it the other way. I flick it to where I’m walking anyway. So it’s no big deal.”

Neither was Stefan Edberg’s opening match against Martin Jaite. Edberg, seeded first, scored a 6-3, 6-2 victory in 74 minutes over Jaite, a clay-court specialist who probably should have played better on a court blown over with sand by high winds at Hyatt Grand Champions.

McEnroe succeeded in making a swift transition to outdoor cement court from indoor carpet, where he beat his brother, Patrick, in the final of the Volvo/Chicago tournament.

And how important was that?

“Well, it was very important that I didn’t lose to my brother,” McEnroe said.

It was also important, possibly even surprising, that the final was one of the best officiated matches McEnroe said he had even seen.

McEnroe was asked about the officials now.

“Back to normal,” he said wryly. “They weren’t able to build on that momentum they had started.”

Tennis Notes

The U.S. Davis Cup team of Rick Leach and Jim Pugh, seeded third, was upset in its first match, 1-6, 7-6 (7-4), 6-1, by Henri Leconte and Guy Forget.