Chang Unable to Palate What Sampras Serves Up

This just in: Pete Sampras does have a weakness. . . . Repeat. . . . Sampras does have a weakness.

“He doesn’t cook well, I can tell you that,” Michael Chang said.

Then again, it depends on your appetite. Sampras has a taste for Wimbledon championships and proved it Wednesday by flicking away the usually tenacious Chang, 6-4, 6-1, 6-3, to advance to Friday’s semifinals. He will play fellow American Todd Martin, who beat Wayne Ferreira, 6-3, 6-2, 3-6, 5-7, 7-5.

In the other half of the draw, No. 4-seeded Goran Ivanisevic will play No. 7 Boris Becker. Ivanisevic slipped past France’s Guy Forget, 7-6 (7-3), 7-6 (7-3), 6-4, while Becker, the subject of yet another mini-controversy, disposed of Christian Bergstrom, 7-6 (7-5), 6-4, 6-3.

Sampras, the tournament’s top-seeded player and closet perfectionist, didn’t merely beat his longtime friend; he dominated him. Chang scored only 17 points against Sampras’ vapor serve--five in the first set, two in the second and 10 in the third. He didn’t break Sampras.

“I didn’t feel like I was in a zone, but I was getting there,” Sampras said.

Any closer and Sampras would have been holding hands with perfection. He hasn’t lost a set in his five matches. Two more three-set victories and he joins exalted company, such as Becker, the last men’s player to win consecutive Wimbledon championships (1985-86), and Bjorn Borg, the last male player to win this tournament without losing a set (1976).

The 10th-seeded Chang, who has known Sampras since he was 7, began the match with an overall lead in head-to-head meetings. But they had never played each other on grass, Sampras’ best surface. Nor had Chang, making his first Wimbledon quarterfinal appearance, seen Sampras like this . . . like, well, not of this tennis world.

“Pete’s at the moment (where) I think he’s really reached the peak of his career.”

In the old days, Chang used to tinker with Sampras’ mind. No matter how hard the serve, Chang somehow would find a way to get it back. No matter the Sampras lead, Chang would close the gap and more times than not, overcome it. No matter the situation, Chang’s unrelenting style would expose cracks in Sampras’ psyche.

“I was able to beat him mentally, to be honest with you,” Chang said.

Sampras barely needed a sweat towel Wednesday. He had eight aces to Chang’s three. He won 89% of his first-serve points. He volleyed with ease, hitting 17 winners, compared to the baseline-happy Chang, who ventured close enough to the net for only five volley points.

“Today’s match was pretty much flawless on my side,” Sampras said. “I really didn’t give him a chance to get into his game.”

All in all, it was a performance good enough to give almost everyone else here a case of the Sampras willies. They can read a scoreboard. They have seen the three-set romps. They’ve seen him extended to only two tiebreakers.

“I think for anyone to beat Sampras it’s going to be very tough,” said Sweden’s Bergstrom, “and he’s probably the favorite, for me, to win the tournament.”

The vote isn’t unanimous. Ivanisevic, who usually says exactly what’s on his mind, wasn’t conceding a thing. Sampras has a big serve, but Ivanisevic has a bigger one. He blasted a screamer past Forget that registered 136 m.p.h. on the radar gun.

And enough already with the unbeatable Sampras stuff, said Ivanisevic. First he has to make it past No. 6 Martin, who beat Sampras in the Queen’s Club final on grass. Then Becker, the three-time champion, or Ivanisevic, the 1992 finalist, awaits.

“He didn’t have any tough guy to beat him,” Ivanisevic said. “Today . . . I was just wondering how long that match is going to last, because Chang is a great player, but he can’t beat him on grass. He can maybe win a set, but it’s very tough.

“So Sampras didn’t have any tough matches. Now we see. I mean, I hope I’ll get with him in the final. We’ll see. He doesn’t like to play lefties. He doesn’t like lefty serves.”

Ivanisevic, a left-hander, didn’t exactly have a marathon match Wednesday. There were the two tiebreakers and a few tense moments during the third set, but that was it.

Martin should have been so lucky. Four of his five Wimbledon matches have gone five sets. If you count the hours played, Martin has spent more than double the time on the court than Sampras during the fortnight.

Besides the fatigue factor, there was the Ferreira factor. The unseeded South African began the match with a 3-0 record against Martin and beat him in the semifinals at Queen’s Club last year.

This time Martin took a two-set lead and then held on as Ferreira nearly pulled off the improbable comeback. Now he gets Sampras. On Centre Court.

“That’s like my second-favorite dream come true,” Martin said. “Maybe a couple days after that I’ll have my first dream come true.”

Of course, no Wimbledon day would be complete without the obligatory Boris boo-boo. So far he has been accused of cheating, of stalling and after Wednesday’s match, of purposely disrupting the concentration of Bergstrom on set point in the first.

With the score 6-5 in the first set tiebreaker, Bergstrom hit a high volley that Becker thought landed long--and gestured so to the chair umpire just after returning the shot.

Bergstrom then missed the return and immediately claimed he was distracted by Becker’s raised hand.

“I was a little bit disturbed,” Bergstrom said.

Not half as disturbed as Becker in the post-match news conference.

“I want to make one thing clear: I don’t like what’s going on for the past two or three days,” Becker said. “I’m doing the same things for the past 10 years. All of a sudden, this is not supposed to be fair play.”

Becker had two theories for the sudden inquiries about his playing tactics. The first: “Maybe the main reason why they speak up is because they lost,” he said. The second: “The main problem is Andre Agassi is out and (the newspapers) got to find a guy to fill in the space. You’ve found one here, you know.”

Wimbledon Notes

Today’s women’s singles semifinals is the first time in the open era (since 1968) that two unseeded players (Americans Lori McNeil and Gigi Fernandez) have advanced this far at Wimbledon. . . . With her Wednesday doubles match, Martina Navratilova broke Billie Jean King’s record for most matches played at Wimbledon. Navratilova, who made her first appearance here in 1973, has played 266 matches. She plays Fernandez today, and McNeil faces Conchita Martinez of Spain.