WIMBLEDON : Look, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane! No, It’s New Champion Stich : Tennis: The ‘other German’ is too good on this day as he dominates Becker, 6-4, 7-6 (7-4), 6-4, after beating Edberg in semifinal.

Boris Becker lost the men’s singles final to somebody who hits serves faster than a speeding bullet. Sunday at Wimbledon, Michael Stich was a tennis superman.

Stich’s 6-4, 7-6 (7-4), 6-4 victory over three-time Wimbledon champion Becker completed one of the more incredible semifinal-final victories in the men’s competition. The term blitzkrieg best describes it, and its application here has nothing to do with the fact that both Becker and Stich are German.

Not only did Stich take out the No. 1 player in the world in the Wimbledon final, but he also beat Stefan Edberg, defending champion--and, at the time, the No. 1 player in the world--in the semifinals Friday. And he did it without losing a set.

Stich didn’t exactly come out of nowhere, but was ranked 795th in 1987 and didn’t even start taking tennis seriously until 1988, after he finished school in Germany and two years after he stopped playing competitive soccer for a club team.

In 1988, he met a man named Mark Lewis at a tennis club in Munich, signed on to play in a national German tennis league and started working with Lewis, now his coach, on a plan to get him on the tennis tour on a regular basis and learn the ropes for a few years.

Obviously, part of the plan wasn’t to win Wimbledon in 1991.

“When I started this year,” Stich said, “I never even thought about winning at Wimbledon.”

Stich thought more about winning at places such as Memphis, which he did in 1990, and at Adelaide, Sydney and Memphis again--all places where he reached the final this year before losing. At Adelaide, Australia, he was beaten by somebody named Nicklas Kulti, which is not exactly your normal prelude to a Wimbledon title.

But Stich kept sneaking up in the rankings and started to become a somewhat recognizable name for people who follow the sport. He played a Davis Cup match for Germany. And then, when he got all the way to the French Open semifinals, on a clay surface that is not especially suited to his big-serving game, people in tennis started to take notice.

As Wimbledon began, he was ranked No. 7 in the world and seeded No. 6 in the tournament. But that meant very little to the London bookmakers, who had him at 66-1 going in.

Did he make a bet on himself?

“No, I missed on that,” he said.

Because he won $445,008 for winning, it was hard to feel too sorry for him. He didn’t miss much else all day.

“I had the feeling I could touch every ball I wanted to that was going into the court,” Stich said.

While firing away with serves recorded on the radar gun to be consistently in the 120-m.p.h. range--his maximum was 126 and his average first serve was 112--he cranked up 15 aces and 51 service winners.

He broke Becker’s serve four times, including the first game of the match, a time when he needed the confidence of knowing that he could do that, Stich said.

He broke Becker’s serve the fourth and final time at 5-4 of the third set, with a forehand cross-court return of service off a Becker serve clocked at 115 m.p.h. that left Becker frozen in his tracks, a picture of tired resolution.

“The match point, when I won the match,” Stich said, “that was an incredible feeling. It’s tough still to realize what happened, but I think it is coming.”

Becker, who lost in the final for the second consecutive year and who struggled from the very beginning against Stich, said he realized what happened well before the end.

“It hit me already during the match,” he said. “I knew that, if he was not going to make big mistakes, I’m not going to win it today because I didn’t have enough energy. So I was already, during the match, thinking about why.”

Actually, Becker acknowledged he was thinking about many things during the match, few of them, apparently, having to do with tennis.

Among the things he said afterward were:

--”It wasn’t me out there, I must say.”

--”My mind was very tired and wasn’t up to my normal standards. That’s the reason I lost.”

--”Really, in a final at Wimbledon, the tactics are not that important. It’s really who has the stronger mind, and it was his day.”

For Becker watchers, Sunday was a sad sight. While Stich slammed and bammed, Becker skulked and sulked. He was like a relief pitcher with no stuff, fidgeting and stalling and trying anything and everything to hold back the inevitable bursting dam.

He changed shirts four times, wrist bands twice as often.

He talked to his racket, yelled at himself in German, chose the proper ball from the ball boys and girls like someone shopping for Waterford crystal and even got a code warning from the chair umpire for playing so slowly.

When the match was over, and he collapsed in fatigue and frustration in his sideline chair, the area behind him was littered with used shirts and wrist bands. Like his game had been, it was a mess.

He talked afterward about how the rain in the first week forced him to play so many late matches, and matches on consecutive days. It also forced him to be ready at all times, giving him no time to relax mentally. He said that Sunday’s match was probably “one too many this week.”

He ended his news conference by saying, “At this stage, I feel very old.” In November, Becker will turn 24. He is 11 months older than Stich, but if age were measured in terms of tournaments played and days in the world spotlight, Becker is fast becoming a tennis ancient mariner.

When it was over, and Stich had watched his forehand return drop into the deep right corner of Becker’s court, Stich sank to his knees in joy and disbelief. Becker quietly walked to the net, stepped over it, and wrapped a bearhug around his Davis Cup teammate.

At the end of a tournament that featured both a men’s and women’s champion from Germany, and on a day when they should have changed the name of the main road into this place to Wimbledonstrasse, it was a moving moment.

Why did he do it?

“Because I know how it feels,” Becker said. “I know how important the day can be in a life. I know that his life is not going to be the same anymore, and he’s beaten me at home (on Wimbledon’s Centre Court).

“That’s how I treat people who beat me at home.”

Even when they play as if they have just stepped out of a phone booth, wearing a cape.