TENNIS ROUNDUP : Playing on His Best Surface, Agassi Loses in First Round

Undermined by his own errors and handcuffed by his opponent’s 115 m.p.h. serve, Andre Agassi lost his 1992 clay-court debut Tuesday to 94th-ranked Jacco Eltingh, 6-4, 1-6, 1-6, in the second round of an $800,000 tournament at Barcelona, Spain.

Agassi has won only four of his 10 tournament matches this year and has failed to reach the quarterfinals of any event.

Eltingh, who grew up playing on clay courts in the Netherlands but has a serve-and-volley style more appropriate to hard courts or grass, dominated against a player whose best surface is clay.

Except for a brief flurry in the second set, when Agassi turned up the power and forced his opponent into mistakes, Eltingh overwhelmed Agassi with his serve and took advantage of Agassi’s frequent errors.

“The guy played a perfect game at the beginning of the third set to break me, and then I got scared to hit the ball,” Agassi said. “When it got tight in the third set I couldn’t hit, and I feel sad about that.”

Eltingh said his familiarity with the surface helped.

“You could tell he was not used to the bad bounces,” said Eltingh.

Jimmy Connors won his opening-round match in the $1.19-million Japan Open at Tokyo, beating Byron Black of Zimbabwe, 7-6 (7-5), 6-3.

Connors, 39, battled through a first-set tiebreaker and 13 deuces in the second set’s second game.

Defending champion and top-seeded Stefan Edberg of Sweden, scoring with what he said was a changed serve, beat Kelly Evernden of New Zealand, 6-3, 6-4, in a second-round match.