WIMBLEDON REPORT : Dutch Twosome Has Better Than Mixed Successes

Some of the best tennis of the day Thursday wasn’t played anywhere near the big show courts.

In a mixed doubles match that featured two of the United States’ best doubles players, Rick Leach and Zina Garrison, and two of Wimbledon’s most-fatigued doubles players, Michiel Schapers and Brenda Schultz of the Netherlands, a crowd at Court 3 was nicely entertained.

Each team had won a set, and twice on Schapers’ serve, the Leach-Garrison team had reached a break point before falling short. So when Schapers hit a big overhead on a game point at Leach, and Leach volleyed it long to lose the game, it was understandable that Leach drop-kicked his racket toward the sideline. That point had meant a service break for 12-11 in the third and deciding set, and when Schultz swung Garrison wide with an unreturnable serve at 40-15 of the next game, the Dutch team had completed one of the more amazing two-day efforts in tennis history, 3-6, 6-3, 13-11.

The day before, they had won their second-round match in a final 29-27 set, which set a record for most games in a Wimbledon doubles match.

Jim Courier, asked about the five young Americans who are currently doing the best on the pro tour, remarked that each had a different personality that set him apart from the others.

“If you are a really religious person,” Courier said, “you can look at Michael (Chang) and say he’s my idol. If you like the show-biz side, you have Andre (Agassi). David (Wheaton) is kind of your all-American guy, wearing an American headband. And Pete (Sampras), he’s just real mellow and low-key, goes about his business kind of loosey goosey.”

And Courier himself?

“I’m your blue-collar kind of guy,” he said. “They love me in Pittsburgh.”

Will Agassi, the newly beloved one of the British, return to Wimbledon next June after spurning this tournament for so long before this year? When asked that question, he sounded almost insulted.

“Are you kidding?” he said. “I’m looking forward to coming back. I’m marking it on my calendar.”

Later, he added: “Some people in my group were trying to offer me words of consolation (after the loss to Wheaton), but I think there are none. However, if there is a consolation, it’s walking off the court and experiencing that kind of appreciation. That helps a lot.”

Even later, during Wheaton’s postmatch interview, a large commotion disrupted the session for a few seconds while Agassi experienced further appreciation, this time from hordes of squealing groupies as he drove off the premises.

Odds and Ends: When Guy Forget lost to Boris Becker here Thursday, he did so in a humiliating way. Not only did he double-fault at 7-8 of a fourth-set tiebreaker while down, two sets to one, but when he hit the double fault, the ball stuck in the net. . . . In the category of acute paranoia, Becker, when asked after his victory what he does in his thought processes to play big points as well as he does, replied: “I can’t tell you that because if I do, then everybody will know.” . . . The No. 1 dumb news conference question of the tournament was asked the other day of Spain’s Arantxa Sanchez Vicario, when a reporter queried from the back of the room: “Arantxa, are you a Catholic as a matter of interest?” . . . Runner-up in the dumb question category was the one asked of Tom Gullikson, Jennifer Capriati’s coach, after she upset Martina Navratilova: “Tom, was this a bigger thrill than your fourth-round upset here of John McEnroe in 1979?” To which Gullikson replied: “Yes, this was a bigger thrill because I didn’t beat McEnroe in ’79. That was my twin brother, Tim.”