Real Story on Stich: He Fell Victim to Jinx, Not Draper

You know, you never see a fat tennis player. You see a fat wrestler, a fat football player, a fat baseball player, even a fat basketball player, a fat prizefighter, a fat golfer--lots of fat golfers--but never a fat tennis player.

Even so, Michael Stich overdoes it. He’s not only non-fat, he’d have to beef up to be merely skinny. You don’t know whether that’s his name or a description. When he turns sideways, he disappears. You half suspect they found him at the edge of a cornfield with straw sticking out of his wrists. If you held him up to the light, you could see what he had for breakfast. He’s so flat he could fax himself to the tournament. Someone said he looked like Olive Oyl with a tennis racket.

But he’s good. Top five in the world, maybe. Certainly, the top 10. Doesn’t have to bring his surface with him either. There are guys who are great on clay. Others on grass. Stich doesn’t care. He could play in two feet of snow.

But it doesn’t matter. No matter what he does, no matter how good he is, he’s the Other German. In a country that produced Boris Becker and Steffi Graf, he might as well play in a mask.

That makes him a good story in my book. Which is enough to make me want to go over to the Infiniti Open at UCLA this week and do a story on him.

Now, I have to tell you about tennis and me. First of all, tennis is a “knockout” sport. In other sports, you can have a bad round or a bad inning or a bad game and still come back the next day. Tennis, you have a bad day, you go home.

Tennis has always been a formful sport, though. Used to be, you could count on the big guns prevailing.

But that was then, this is now.

There are two ways you can tell tennis is losing its formfulness. You can look at the Grand Slam championships. Used to be Bill Tilden won them. Then Don Budge. Then Jack Kramer. Then, the top Aussies, Rod Laver and company. Even as late as Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg, form prevailed.

Now, look at it: the Wimbledon winner this year is a guy named Krajicek. The French Open was won by, of all things, a Russian, Yevgeny Kafelnikov. Look for next month’s U.S. Open to be won by a guy who better not leave home without his credit cards.

There’s another way to tell tennis is losing its form: Just send me to cover the heavy hitters.

It all began a few years back when I went to a Manhattan Beach tournament to cover Gabriela Sabatini. A perennial finalist and semifinalist at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, Sabatini was one of the great players of the world.

Until I got in the act. She got beat, as I recall it, by a Japanese player, Kamiko Date, who was never a finalist in anything in those days.

I know now it was my fault. Because last winter, I was covering the men’s tournament in Indian Wells. The nice safe approach was to do Pete Sampras. You all know Pete Sampras--three Wimbledons, three U.S. Opens, an Australian. All-World.

I had the story written when I decided to drive over to the venue and watch him dispose of a nobody called Paul Haarhuis.

Well, you know the story. Sampras lost. So did I.

So, I went over to the Infiniti the other day fearing the worst. It happened.

Michael Stich, winner of Wimbledon in ‘91, finalist at the U.S. Open in ‘94, finalist in the French Open only this year, stunk out the joint. He lost to Scott Draper, considerably to Draper’s surprise. Draper is a young Aussie, 22, whose chief claim to fame was that he climbed from 420 in the computer rankings to 81 in a year.

He didn’t play great. He didn’t have to. Stich handed him the match. Stich couldn’t get his first serve in all afternoon. Sometimes he couldn’t get the second one in either. When he had an easy lob to smash away for a winner, I couldn’t look. I knew he would short-arm it into the net. He did. He was the defending champion at the Infiniti, but he looked more like a weekender at Griffith Park.

He thinks it’s his fault, but we know better. I’m getting like that character in L’il Abner who goes around with that cloud hanging over his head. I think I’ll go over to the tournament this weekend and see how much the rest of these guys will pay me not to schedule a story on them this week. The bidding should start in the high hundreds.