COMMENTARY : It’s Time for a Clock in Tennis

“Wasn’t that a long match last night?” the first guy on the bus from U.S. Open parking said to the other guy.

“Did you watch it?” the other guy said.

“Not all of it,” the first guy said. “I went to sleep.”

Tennis, the rules say, is continuous. Ivan Lendl and Boris Becker, and Stefan Edberg and Richard Krajicek, and Lendl and--the mind is numbed--who?

Too long. They should fix the game. Get on with it. Let the players learn to live with the tumult. Are their powers of concentration less than that of Patrick Ewing, who can make two free throws with the crowd whistling and stamping their feet and waving their hands in his face.

Play. Use the 25-second clock. Leave the deuce-ad-deuce-ad-deuce-ad for old times.

They’d get used to it just as they got used to the big money. Of course, they would. John McEnroe would. “Quality over quantity,” said Billie Jean King, the dowager queen of team tennis, where they do those things.

They learned to live with the shocking tiebreaker, didn’t they? You know they used to do it here with a first-to-get-to-five format. That was real sudden death.

Lendl and Becker--heavyweights, former champions--played 5 hours and 1 minute in their quarterfinal. It is the longest match in U.S. Open records, and omnibus Bud Collins believes there was nothing longer before they kept records, either. Too long. It was bloated with dead time, killed time and wounded time.

“I went to sleep. How about that!” said noted tennis authority Harold Zimman of the noted H.O. Zimman Inc. of Lynn, Mass., which prints and, with the speed of light, gets the daily draw sheet to Flushing for each day’s play.

It was too long for him--and he really cares. A marathon runner could do the course, take 20 minutes’ rest, run it again and still catch the end of Lendl-Becker. For goodness sakes, it was longer than Monday Night Football. The game gets longer and longer. When baseball gets beyond three hours, it’s too long. When the NFL began running longer than three hours, the cognizant rulesmakers took three minutes out of halftime. If big-time tennis in New York ran longer than two weeks once a year, the game would sink of its own weight in the Flushing ooze.

It’s not as if all of this tennis time is full of gasping, temple-throbbing, breath-holding tension and excitement. The Lendl-Becker match had 3 hours and 20 minutes--or more--when players were wiping their faces and racket handles, stalling before service and sitting at courtside. That’s what baseball is becoming.

They wait for quiet, which even baseball doesn’t ask, and New York sits still for no man. “If you wait for quiet here, you’re never going to play,” Arantxa Sanchez Vicario noticed. For 1996, the Stadium is to seat 38,000. That’s a ballpark, not the lock-jawed West Side Tennis Club of Forest Hills, where matches were played in the daytime and the class of people who patronized tennis could take the day off. They could wander to the clubhouse for a julep or two and wander back in, and on grass, even long matches were done in 3 1/2 hours.

Times have changed, the tennis crowd is far different, which is how players come to make all that money. Sponsors so dearly love the expanded demographics. The game remains the anachronism. Wake up.

“How many hours can a spectator watch anything?” mused Stan Smith, and he won the U.S. Open and Wimbledon in the early ‘70s. “Other games--football, basketball, baseball--think 2 1/2 hours, three hours is their window.”

After Edberg and Krajicek played 4:19 Tuesday, not only the window was slammed, but the turnstile, too. So the Lendl-Becker match had to be moved to nighttime.

All of this was performed with the man in the chair playing school librarian with eyeglasses on the tip of her nose and her hair in a bun, hissing, “Shhh.”

When a baseball game goes extra innings, those extra moments are fraught with peril and sudden death. Tennis has deuce-ad-deuce-ad--and another set. Got to win by two, y’know.

At least baseball, basketball and football give a fan a chance to air emotion and enthusiasm until there’s excitement. So does team tennis.

At least when McEnroe, Jimmy Connors and Lendl played each other, their hostility stirred the juices. When McEnroe and Connors played, they gave off sparks. This crop will cure insomnia.

It was a monumental thing at Forest Hills when Manuel Orantes and Guillermo Vilas played a semifinal past midnight rubber-legged with cramps on the artificial clay of Forest Hills. But that was thought to be left behind when the Open moved to the swift hard surface.

Not anymore. “They don’t serve-and-volley as much as we did,” Smith said. The big racket makes the return of service a greater threat to the man who rushes the net. Players are more secure at the baseline than learning to volley.

Then it got to be like golf and every shot was life or death or money. Lendl stalls and Becker complains. Becker towels his face. An independent survey found most of those service intervals ran close to 50 seconds and the umpire never said, “Play, Mr. Lendl.”