TENNIS / BILL DWYRE : Sampras Lost Match, but May Have Gained New Image

This was to have been Pete Sampras’ U.S. Open, and maybe, when all has been said and done, it was.

In a strange sort of irony, Sampras had to go through public hell to demonstrate to the tennis world that he is human. If you watched him blast his way through one tournament after another over the last couple of years, emotionless and totally non-demonstrative except for a Michael Jordan-esqe tongue flopping out as he serves, you knew nothing about him. The line originated years ago by Gertrude Stein about Oakland applied to Sampras. Was there any there there?

Then along came Jaime Yzaga, and five sets and nearly four hours later, Sampras had suffered a stunning defeat but come out of it with a sparkling new image. Actually, it wasn’t a new image, because he really hadn’t had one before.

Obviously nearing total exhaustion, Sampras kept going, point after point, frustration after frustration. He was bent over in fatigue between points when he lost a fourth-set tiebreaker that would have taken him off the hook. And he was near collapse when he went down a service break in the fifth.

But against a tough Peruvian, who has been on the tour forever, who had nothing to lose against the No. 1 player in the world, and who was, after years of playing clay-court matches in South American places dripping with humidity, ready to play all night, Sampras kept going.

He broke back, kept hitting with a guy who is a hitting machine, and even in defeat, won the hearts of millions. No more do we have Pete Sampras, the enigma. Now it’s closer to Pete Sampras, street fighter.

“I was going to go the distance,” Sampras said afterward. “There was no way I was going to just give it to him.”

And none other than Rod Laver, Sampras’ tennis hero and the man whose Grand Slam sweep 25 years ago was the object of Sampras’ pursuit after he had won the opening Slam event in Australia in January, praised the sudden spunk in Sampras.

“It’s a shame that Pete lost, because I think he is a great asset to the sport,” Laver said, “But I think at the same time, he probably showed marvelous abilities to be resilient out there on the court and show that he’s not going to just tank and walk off the court, even though he is exhausted. He was still out there, plucking away.”

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Laver, who lives in Rancho Mirage and was here most of the second week for ceremonies honoring his 1969 Grand Slam, was promoting an idea that might speed up the game a bit and cut into the dominance of the big servers. Laver’s rule would allow for a total of three second serves in any game.

“I think, if you analyze it a bit, it has some merit,” he said. “ . . . You’d have to protect your first serve a little more, so you’re going to be hitting three-quarter speed first serves. . . . Restricting the server a bit, you could slow the court down and slow the ball down a little bit.”

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The third-seeded doubles team of Paul Haarhuis and Jacco Eltingh of the Netherlands won the men’s title Friday, beating their longtime rivals, fourth-seeded Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde of Australia. Haarhuis and Eltingh broke service twice and took a 7-1 tiebreaker for the match in a 6-3, 7-6 victory.

“I consider the Woodies the best team around,” Haarhuis said. “It is always a great challenge to play them.”

At Wimbledon this year, Woodbridge and Woodforde took the quarterfinal match between the teams, 7-5 in the fifth.

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Davis Cup captain Tom Gullikson said that neither Sampras nor Jim Courier will be available, but Todd Martin will be, for duty against Sweden in the World Group semifinal at Goteborg, Sweden, Sept. 23-25. Gullikson was asked if he had talked to “a player who was born in Las Vegas” but deflected the question about Andre Agassi’s possible involvement by saying that the news conference was supposed to be about Martin.

Gullikson, who is believed to also be considering the doubles team of Jared Palmer and Patrick McEnroe, as well as current No. 1 doubles player Jason Stark--who on tour plays with former USC player Byron Black of Zimbabwe--in some combination with another player, said he would make an announcement on team personnel in a few days.

A longshot for the Davis Cup doubles spot is Patrick Galbraith, the left-handed half of the mixed doubles team that included Elna Reinach of South Africa and beat Woodbridge and Jana Novotna in the final Thursday. Galbraith’s problem is similar to Stark’s, in that his regular tour partner, Grant Connell of Canada, is not an American.

Galbraith, former UCLA All-American and top-ranked doubles player in the world in the fall of 1993, said, “It is frustrating to me, and Tom Gullikson knows that. I just don’t want to go down in history as the only No. 1 in the world never to play Davis Cup.”

Tennis Notes

Promoter Charlie Pasarell, whose Newsweek Champions Cup in March is the first of the nine championship series events each year on the ATP Tour, has brought his tournament, and the week-long Evert Cup that precedes it, to the subways of New York. Advertising about Pasarell’s tournament is plastered all over the route of the No. 7 train to Flushing Meadow, with 400 signs and posters telling New Yorkers about the sun and fun in the desert Feb. 27-March 12, 1995. . . . Lindsay Davenport’s father, Wink, played volleyball for the United States in the 1968 Olympics. Her mother, Ann, is president of the Southern California Volleyball Assn. So does Lindsay play a lot of volleyball? “No, they tried to teach me, but I can’t jump very high,” she said.

Ann Grossman, the Ohioan who made it to the final of last month’s Virginia Slims of Los Angeles and upset Mary Joe Fernandez in the U.S. Open, was ousted in the round of 16 by Aranxta Sanchez Vicario. The match was played on the Stadium Court, and Grossman’s reaction to that was: “My heart was pounding so fast I couldn’t settle down. For (Sanchez Vicario), it was like nothing. She just walked out and played like she does it (on that court) every single day. . . . Grossman, asked after one of her early matches here whom she would leave tickets for if given the chance of anybody in the world, said, “David Letterman. That way, he could come and heckle my opponents.”