WIMBLEDON REPORT : One Invention Edberg Could Do Without

It was a sad coincidence that tiebreakers played such a huge role in Stefan Edberg’s upset loss to Michael Stich in the men’s singles semifinals Friday.

The man credited with inventing the tiebreaker system, James Van Alen, died the other day in Newport, R.I. He was 88.

Edberg, poking fun at his match with Stich and how neither could break serve, said: “If it wasn’t for tiebreakers, we’d still be out there playing the second set.”

And then somebody told him about Van Alen’s death, and those in the room kind of grinned and felt bad about the connection.

“I’m not sure what to say,” Edberg said.

Stich, as in Stich: Being a relatively new name on the tennis tour, Stich was asked lots of questions about who he was. He also was asked how his name was pronounced.

“ Steech ,” he said.

Which brought much media conversation later, including one theory that you weren’t pronouncing it correctly unless you were spitting on yourself. Also, after somebody sneezed three times, Hubert Mizell of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times thanked the sneezer: “So that’s how you pronounce it,” Mizell said.

Volleys from Boris: When Boris Becker was asked about the fading breed of serve-and-volley players these days, he said: “Most young players train from the back (the baseline). They don’t learn the serve and volley, they don’t learn the chip, the slice.

“And they are never going to win this tournament.”

Odds and ends: The men’s doubles final today will match Javier Frana of Argentina and Leonardo Lavalle of Mexico against John Fitzgerald of Australia and Anders Jarryd of Sweden. . . . The women’s doubles will match Gigi Fernandez of Puerto Rico and Jana Novotna of Czechoslovakia against Larisa Savchenko and Natalia Zvereva of the Soviet Union. . . . The total attendance has been 336,114, and with two days to go, that’s 33,602 above last year, even though the first week was marred by rain. . . . Before the tournament, Pam Shriver was asked her pick for the men’s title. She said Michael Stich of Germany. The reporters around her laughed.