BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 10 : Star Search Nets Few Rewards

As long as we’re in the Olympics of the dream teams, I thought I would go out and check on one of them. I hadn’t been out to the tennis stadium at Montbau and news had been sporadic and in Spanish, but I assumed everything was going all right.

I asked the official at the gate when I arrived, “What court does Jim Courier play on?”

The man looked surprised.

“Perdone? “ he said. “Quien? “

“Jim Courier,” I told him airily. “You know, the No. 1-seeded tennis player in the world. He’s on the American dream team.”

“Ah, Dream Team!” the fellow said. “You want the Palau d’Esports. The basketball!”

“No, no,” I said. I was getting irritated. “I want Jim Courier the tennis player. Not those clumsy basketball players.”

“Ah!” my friend said. “Jim Courier, the tennis! No aqui. “

“No aqui? “ I frowned. “What do you mean, not here? He’s playing in this tournament.”

“No more,” my informant explained. “He has, how you say it, suffered a perdida. He is lost.”

“Lost!” I howled. “Can’t be! He’s the best player in the world!”

The fellow shrugged and said, “No here, he isn’t. He has lose to M. Rosset, in, how you say, parallel sets--no straight sets! 6-4, 6-2, 6-1.”

“Stop with the joking!” I growled at him. “Courier does not lose to Marc Rosset at all. Rosset is No. 44 in the world. Rosset! Courier beats him, love-love-love!”

The guy grins. “Not this week.”

I pushed on. “Well, all right. We have Michael Chang and Pete Sampras on our dream team. They will show these geeks how it’s done. What court are they on?”

The guy grinned again. He was enjoying himself.

“Ah, Chang!” he hissed. “He loses almost immediately. He is not here either.”

“Hold on a minute!” I protested. “Chang lost to one of these comedians? You’re putting me on!”

The fellow smiled wickedly. “He loses to J. Oncins in Round dos-- two, as you say.

I am struggling to hold my temper. “Well, I’m not saying I buy this. Jaime Oncins is No. 53 on the world list. Michael is No. 6. If this is your idea of a joke, it’s not funny. But never mind. What court is Pete Sampras on? You know Pete Sampras, don’t you? No. 3 in the world, right behind Courier and Stefan Edberg?”

The fellow spread his hands and tried to look sympathetic. “Oh, I am so sorry. A nice young man. But he is no aqui either. But he did put up a good fight. Andrei Cherkasov took five sets to beat him. Sampras even leads, two sets to none. But he lose last three, 5-7, 0-6, 3-6.”

“Pete Sampras loses a love set in this rinky-dink tournament?” I was outraged. “Cherkasov is not even in the top 25! What is going on here?”

The fellow shrugged. “A bad dream, no?”

I sighed. “Well, so much for dream teams. But speaking of that, the Germans have a mini-dream team. I’ll go see Boris Becker and Michael Stich. Four Wimbledon titles between them. What court are they on?”

The fellow spread his hands again. “None, senor. They are not here, either. Maybe in the doubles. They have not been eliminated there. Yet. However, I have to tell you Courier and Sampras have. They have lost to Emilio Sanchez and Sergio Casal.”

“Bloody hell!” I roared. “Well, take me to Edberg’s court anyway.”

He looked sad. “Ah, senor, Edberg is fallen in the first round. Andrei Chesnokov beats him, 6-0, 6-4, 6-4.”

I was thunderstruck. “What kind of anarchy is this? You mean to tell me five of the top six seeds have been eliminated by the quarterfinals? Well, take me to Guy Forget.”

He looked simpatico again. “So sorry,” he bowed. “ Senor Forget loses to Magnus Larsson, 6-3, 6-3, 6-1.”

I threw my hat to the ground. “Well, if that isn’t a let ball in a high wind! Where’s this tennis court at? Who in the name of heaven is left? These guys might as well play in masks.”

“Oh, senor, both our great champions, Arantxa Sanchez Vicario and her brother are still in it.”

I went into the court and I saw why. The last internationally known seed, Goran Ivanisevic, was on court, looking like a guy being attacked by a flea, struggling to stay ahead of a wall-banger named Fabrice Santoro of France.

Ivanisevic, a serve-and-volleyer who lost in the Wimbledon final, looked as if he were playing in wet concrete. He hung back on the baseline like a clay-courter from Indianapolis, looking miserable.

“Why, that stuff’s like quicksand,” I told my companion. “Look at it! It’s glue! I’d like to be hitting nine-irons into it. The ball just sticks where it lands! Those big-game players must have felt as if they were playing underwater!”

Down on the court, Ivanisevic was playing as if he were banging the ball off a barn door. The harder he swung, the slower the ball bounced. Santoro, a bunter, just kept returning his bombs as easily as if they had been soap bubbles.

Ivanisevic, frustrated, began throwing his racket, bellowing in Serbo-Croatian. He fell behind, 6-7, 6-7. The temperature on the court hit the 38-mark, Celsius. American translation: blast furnace heat.

Ivanisevic rallied to win the next two sets but he was trailing, 2-5, in the deciding set before he began to settle back into his big game. He looked uncomfortable at the base line but dealt with it between curses.

He pulled the match out, winning the final five games for an 8-6 victory. But it had taken him nearly five hours in open-hearth heat to do it.

Ivanisevic is the nearest thing to a star player the Olympics have left in the men’s draw. Steffi Graf is still alive. But when I asked her if the surface had anything to do with the casualty list of great names, she just put her head down on the table and laughed.

“It’s hard to play tennis on a surface that with a little luck could be made into molasses,” my friend, the gatekeeper, said.

I was still grumpy. “Ah,” I scoffed, “you think the Dream Team in the baskets cares what kind of wood they got on the floor? You think Jack Kramer or Rod Laver worried about surfaces? Those guys’d beat you on an iceberg or on the sand. You name it and if you got a bet up or a medal up, they’d take you, love-love-love.

“You think Dempsey cared what size the ring was? These guys are a bunch of wimps. Ivanisevic’s my dream team. He doesn’t fold just because he’s asked to play on a court that’s like a pan of paella. Michael Chang said this court was like a cup of Nestle’s Quik. So what? If you’re a champion, you play the cards you’re dealt.”