It’s Agassi Against Ace : Men: After overwhelming McEnroe, the return specialist will play Ivanisevic, whose big serve beats Sampras.

At Wimbledon, on the grass court where John McEnroe once presided, there was a new call to order Saturday, but the jury is still out on what it all means.

Is the most famous tournament in tennis going to be won today by a bleached-blond guy who appears to comb his hair with a fan or a left-handed-serving building crane who churns out aces as if he owns the patent?

It’s an intriguing matchup after the semifinals consisted of McEnroe being deposited on his bruised psyche by Andre Agassi and Goran Ivanisevic sending shellshocked Pete Sampras ducking for cover under a barrage of serves.

Agassi beat McEnroe, his sometimes doubles partner and Davis Cup teammate, in three sets, 6-4, 6-2, 6-3, and reached his fourth Grand Slam tournament final.

There he will face the withering serve of Ivanisevic, the 6-foot-4 Croatian who launched himself into his first Grand Slam tournament final with a 6-7 (7-4), 7-6 (7-5), 6-4, 6-2 victory over Sampras, punctuated by 36 aces.

By the time the last of Ivanisevic’s aces had bounced off the wall of Court 1 and stopped rolling, statisticians began adding up how many he has in six matches: 169.

The sheer number of his aces seems to have inflated Ivanisevic’s confidence.

“I am not afraid of anybody,” he said.

At the same time, Agassi is not exactly falling apart under the possibility of winning his first Grand Slam event final at Wimbledon.

“That would be something, huh?” Agassi said.

And the way Agassi blitzed McEnroe, that was unexpected. It was a tennis demolition derby. In only 1 hour 51 minutes, Agassi broke McEnroe seven times, powered 35 winners into the open court and returned serve better than anybody since, since. . . .

“The only guy that I had ever seen before who returned that well was Jimmy (Connors), and now it seems to me like (Agassi has) taken it to another level,” McEnroe said.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t try anything he could think of to get his serve past Agassi. McEnroe recited a laundry list of ideas.

“I tried to hit out wide to his forehand. I tried to hit it into his body. I tried to swing it into his backhand. I tried to take a little off of it,” McEnroe said.

“It just goes to show you that if he is in the right frame of mind, that he can really be awesome on the return,” McEnroe said.

“If anyone can break Goran’s serve, it’s Andre, so it should be interesting.”

As for his own frame of mind, McEnroe’s emotions followed the usual tortured-artist pattern.

He bounced his racket. He buried his head in a towel. He stared holes in linesmen. He looked up at the darkening sky and said hopefully, “It’ll rain, maybe.” He fell on his back. He bent over from the waist. He fell to his hands and knees and put his forehead on the grass.

It was not a pretty sight. Neither was it a particularly elegant finish for a three-time former Wimbledon champion, who at 33 knows his best days are long gone.

Agassi’s feelings did not include sympathy for McEnroe.

“I did not feel bad out there,” he said.

Maybe not, but Sampras did. No one could blame him, either, not with the near-impossible task he faced trying to get a racket on Ivanisevic’s serves.

Sampras, who had been pleased with the quality of his returns, simply didn’t have a chance against Ivanisevic. The statistics showed a total mismatch between Ivanisevic’s serves and Sampras’ returns.

Sampras never got a break-point opportunity. He never won more than two points in any of Ivanisevic’s service games.

Ivanisevic won 91% of the points on his first serves, a figure bloated by 36 aces.

It was all pretty distressing to Sampras, who finally was forced to give up tracking the aces.

“I had absolutely no idea where the ball was going,” said Sampras, who isn’t sure whether Agassi will fall under a similar spell.

“You’ve probably got the best returner and the best server in the game playing,” Sampras said. “I think a lot depends on Goran, how he serves and how he is mentally. . . . It’s an extremely big moment for both these guys, (and) Agassi might have a little bit more pressure--the fact that he hasn’t won a Grand Slam.”

Agassi’s Grand Slam tournament failings are a matter of public record--he lost finals in the 1990 French Open, 1990 U.S. Open and 1991 French Open--so he would like to end the discussion today.

“I think (winning) will help the people who tend to criticize me in that respect a lot, which in turn will help me not having to hear it,” Agassi said.

“But you know, I want this one really bad,” he said. “I don’t want it for a Grand Slam. This is Wimbledon. This is not a Grand Slam final to me. This is Wimbledon. It is separate and it is especially special.”

McEnroe has been a special tennis personality since 1977, when he reached the Wimbledon semifinals as an 18-year-old qualifier.

He made it there again 15 years later, though he would rather have been able to judge its significance a little later.

“It’s like . . . we sit here and reflect on my great runs when I lose in the semis,” McEnroe said. “It’s hard to feel that good right now, but I know that I’ll feel very proud of it soon.

“But after you have gotten beaten badly in a semifinal, it’s just . . . hard for me to remember the victories,” he said. “That’s just the way it is.”

Even a final without McEnroe is not without intrigue. Agassi is 0-2 against Ivanisevic, which Ivanisevic knows. Agassi is also 0-3 in Grand Slam tournament finals, which Ivanisevic also knows.

“Maybe he was not playing very well in the finals,” Ivanisevic said. “I don’t know what’s happened to him. I hope he is going to play like that tomorrow.”