TENNIS MEN AT L.A. : Sampras, Chang Pass First Test This Week

How to Win the Opening Round, the tennis course that Pete Sampras and Michael Chang flunked last week, looked a little bit easier Tuesday at the Volvo/Los Angeles tournament.

Sampras passed the easy way, dispatching Gilad Bloom, 6-0, 6-2, a 56-minute romp noteworthy for a 119 m.p.h. ace in the second set.

Actually, Sampras had only three aces during the match, but even if they were few in number, their velocity was great.

A critique?

“Pretty good,” said Sampras, who was admittedly pretty bad when he was dumped in his opening match last week in Montreal by Shuzo Matsuoka.

Meanwhile, Chang seemed strangely perplexed by his 2-6, 6-1, 7-6 (7-0) first-round victory over Mikael Pernfors.

“I kind of really don’t know what happened,” Chang said.

It was a battle of hats. Chang wore a conservative all-white number while Pernfors donned a purple and pink thing that looked as if somebody spilled paint on it.

Stefan Edberg and Ramesh Krishnan spilled service breaks all over the court in their first-round encounter, which Edberg eventually won, 6-4, 6-3, the match ending fittingly enough when he clipped the net cord with a backhand on the second match point.

There were six breaks in the second set, eight breaks in all, an indication that Edberg was slightly rusty playing his first match since Wimbledon.

“It’s quite normal,” Edberg said. “Sometimes I didn’t have enough crisp in my serve.”

It didn’t seem too normal a week ago in Montreal when Chang was out of town about as quickly as Sampras. Chang lost his opening match to Stefano Pescosolido, a 20-year-old Italian who was ranked No. 109.

Last year’s champion in Montreal when he moved from No. 24 to No. 11 in the rankings, Chang went the other way, falling from No. 11 to No. 20 after the defeat. He was on the verge of another when Pernfors held two match points at 15-40, 5-4.

But Chang saved both of them and rolled through the tiebreaker with ease, even though he wasn’t sure how or why.

Here is the official Chang version of the match: “The first set was just him, the second set was just me and the third set was back and forth.”

What Chang couldn’t explain was why he struggled to beat a player on the comeback trial who played two tournaments in 13 months after surgery on his left Achilles’ tendon.

Pernfors returned to the IBM/ATP Tour in April, a year after surgery, and is playing his fourth tour event in 1991.

Pernfors, once ranked as high as No. 10 and the 1986 French Open runner-up to Ivan Lendl, is allowed to play six tournaments with a temporary ranking of No. 105. It may take months for him to develop the attitude required for another run in the rankings, he said.

“After I lost the second set, I said to myself, ‘Please don’t let me lose the third set, 6-0,’ ” Pernfors said. “That’s not exactly a good attitude.”

Sampras’ attitude could be a little better, especially with the U.S. Open approaching. Sampras has won more than one match only three times in 11 tournaments this year.

“I don’t think I’ve lost my desire, I just had sort of a letdown . . . some losses,” Sampras said. “That’s just bound to happen.”

He waded past Bloom with relative ease, although he hit only 54% of his first serves.

Sampras lost only 10 points on serve, saved the only break point he faced and was left to explain how his serve might hold up when he defends the U.S. Open title.

“Right now, I’m serving in streaks,” he said. “If I’m serving a lot, the better I serve. The looser my arm gets.

“I can’t explain what happened at the Open. I just kind of peaked. It was unbelievable. It just all came together, and I’m hoping I can do it again.”

Tournament Notes

Fourth-seeded Brad Gilbert worked his way to a 6-3, 7-5 victory over Javier Frana. . . . Last week at the Canadian Open, after first-round byes, Michael Chang lost his second-round match to Stefano Pescosolido and Pete Sampras lost his second-round match to Shuzo Matsuoka. In the second round of the Volvo/Los Angeles tournament, Chang plays Pescosolido and Sampras plays Matsuoka.