TENNIS ROUNDUP : Courier Gets Favorable Open Draw

The draw for the U.S. Open Tennis Championships in New York was held Thursday and the ceremony left top-seeded and No. 1-ranked Jim Courier in the easier half of the men’s competition with an apparently smooth road to the quarterfinals.

Courier, who reached the final of all three Grand Slam events this year, winning the Australian Open, drew 116th-ranked Spaniard Marcos Aurelio Gorriz as his first-round opponent for the U.S. Open, which begins Monday.

Courier will face a qualifier in the second round before possibly being tested by 28th-ranked MaliVai Washington in the third.

In sharp contrast, second-seeded Wimbledon champion Pete Sampras will probably have No. 16 Andre Agassi awaiting him in the round of 16.

Sampras, last year’s runner-up, opens against 56th-ranked Frenchman Fabrice Santoro, but found himself in the half of the draw stacked with Agassi, Michael Chang, defending champion Stefan Edberg and former Wimbledon winner Michael Stich of Germany.

The third-seeded Edberg begins his quest for a third consecutive U.S. Open title against 96th-ranked Olivier Delaitre of France and faces a potential quarterfinal match with sixth-seeded Stich.

Fourth-seeded Boris Becker has a probable fourth-round match with three-time champion Ivan Lendl.

Steffi Graf, the women’s top-seeded player, drew Robin White as her first-round opponent, and second-seeded Arantxa Sanchez Vicario opens against Florencia Labatt of Argentina.

If form holds, the quarterfinals will pit Graf against fifth-seeded Gabriela Sabatini in a rematch of the 1988 and 1990 finals.

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Cedric Pioline, who will be seeded No. 15 at the Open, upset Stich, 6-7 (7-5), 6-4, 7-6 (8-6), to advance to the quarterfinals of the Hamlet Cup at Commack, N.Y.

In an earlier match, Goran Ivanisevic used a powerful serve to rout Carl-Ewe Steeb, 6-2, 6-1.

With a courtside thermometer reading 129 degrees, Ivanisevic played his “best tennis in a month” in advancing to the quarterfinals with Marc Rosset of Switzerland and Luis Mattar of Brazil.

Rosset had 10 aces in beating Arnaud Boetsch of France, 4-6, 6-4, 6-2. Mattar downed Andrei Chesnokov of Russia, 6-4, 6-4.

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Lendl defeated Germany’s Joern Renzenbrink, 6-3, 6-3, to advance to the quarterfinals of the OTB International Open at Schenectady, N.Y. Lendl will face Thomas Enqvist of Sweden, a 7-6 (7-4), 6-7 (8-6), 7-5 winner over Bernd Karbacher of Germany.

In the women’s draw, unseeded Natalia Medvedeva of Ukraine upset second-seeded Sabine Hack of Germany, 4-6, 6-1, 6-2.