TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070290/0702260.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.2 KB | 178 lines

                                                                                SPORT, Page 62

Stalking Memories At Wimbledon


As talented teens nip at their heels, Lendl and Navratilova
shoot for the history books

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- With reporting by Tala Skari/Paris
and David E. Thigpen/New York


    In the beginning, athletes play for the moment, for the
sheer unmeditated joy of doing it. In mid-career they play for
the money. At the twilight of fitness, they play for the
memories, seeking one last accomplishment to etch their names
in history. For the two dominant tennis players of the decade
past, Ivan Lendl and Martina Navratilova, all the conceivable
goals of a career have narrowed to one: the All-England Lawn
Tennis championship, or Wimbledon, which starts this week and
is the sport's premier tournament precisely because it is the
most historic.

    The skittish, demonstrative blond woman and the brooding,
phlegmatic chestnut-haired man have much in common. Both grew
up in Czechoslovakia, and both left. Navratilova, who defected
in 1975, is a naturalized U.S. citizen; Lendl, who renounced
his former homeland more subtly, soon will be. Both struggled
to master English, and both now speak it fluently, with a dry,
self-belittling wit. Both love all manner of sports: Lendl is
a fiend for golf and hockey, while Navratilova is enchanted
with skiing, basketball and, as a spectator, American football.
Both rose to the top through raw physical power, and both have
seen the game evolve so much, in terms of their opponents'
fitness and sheer anatomical size, that each now relies more
on cunning and finesse. Both have probably earned less in
endorsement contracts than their achievements merited:
Navratilova's bisexuality makes advertisers nervous, while
Lendl's unsmiling manner on the court and his passion for
privacy off it come across, wrongly, as meanness. And both,
while seeming indifferent to their reputations of the moment,
yearn for a good name in future annals of the game. That is
inevitably linked to Wimbledon. The men's circuit has 79 events
this year, the women's tour 62, but no one much remembers who
prevails in Cincinnati or Stuttgart.

    Navratilova and Lendl both bypassed June's French Open, one
of the sport's four Grand Slam events and a pivotal factor in
determining the No. 1 ranking that Lendl has and that
Navratilova aches to regain from Steffi Graf. They stayed away
because the slow brick-dust surface in Paris rewards tactics
that are entirely different from what works on the fast and
often bumpy grass at Wimbledon. With only two weeks between the
tournaments, there was too little time to shift gears.
Clay-court players typically stay back near the baseline and
trade shots until an opponent makes an error. Grass-court
players rush the net and smash unplayable returns low along the
sidelines. On clay there is always one more chance to win the
point; on grass it's now or never. The surfaces are so
different that, among men, only Bjorn Borg in the past two
decades -- and no one since 1980 -- has won the French Open and
Wimbledon the same year.

    This week Navratilova, 33, begins what seems to be her last
plausible quest to win the 106-year-old Wimbledon ladies' title
for a record ninth time. If she does so, or if she loses in a
fashion that convinces her that another victory is an
impossible dream, many of her peers expect her to retire.
Perhaps she will linger a season or so to surpass her longtime
rival Chris Evert's record total victories in matches (1,309)
and tournaments (157). But in 1985, after winning Wimbledon
over Evert, Navratilova said, "Whenever she retires, I'm sure
I'll follow shortly." After a gallant semi final loss at
Wimbledon last year to Graf, Evert now sits in the NBC
broadcast booth.

    Navratilova was voted by U.S. newspaper editors as the
outstanding woman in any sport of the '80s, and her record 74
consecutive victories in singles and 109 straight in doubles
ensure a place in history. She has earned tens of millions of
dollars in endorsements, appearance fees at tournaments and
exhibition matches, and prizes. What drives her is the desire
to be the winningest ever at Wimbledon: "It is the thing I want
to win more than anything else in the world. It has nothing to
do with money. It's the best tournament."

    To add a ninth victory plate to the eight she once described
as a complete dinner service, she must surpass a field in which
everyone else is younger and the hottest players are from
twelve to nearly 20 years her junior. Her main worry, Graf, has
become almost an obsession. Since Graf wrested away the No. 1
ranking three years ago, they have met only five times, and
Graf has won the last four. Twice Navratilova was within
shouting distance of victory only to lose through what looked
like sheer nerves. If she can couple a Wimbledon victory with
a vindicating triumph over Graf, the temptation to do what
almost no athlete ever does -- win the last one and depart --
may prove irresistible.

    For the first time since her own teens, however, Navratilova
faces not just one but an abundance of worrisome competitors
-- several young enough to be her daughters. Says Patrice
Clerc, director of the French Open: "Tennis is getting to be
a younger and younger sport. We've seen something similar in
gymnastics and swimming, and now we're seeing it here." The
fastest-rising women are actually girls. Monica Seles, 16, beat
Navratilova in the finals of the Italian Open in May, then won
her next two tournament finals against Graf, including the
French Open, where she became the youngest winner in this
century of a Grand Slam title. The penultimate player Seles
beat at the French was the youngest Grand Slam semifinalist
ever: Jennifer Capriati, 14, who has just finished the eighth
grade. Seles tends to hover around the baseline and is less
than overpowering on serve, so she may not flourish on grass,
although her crushing return of serve is a potent weapon on any
surface. But Capriati has an aggressive all-surface game. Says
veteran NBC commentator Bud Collins: "She could do some real
damage."

    Navratilova's once and future countryman Lendl is similarly
closing in on Jimmy Connors' record for most tournaments won.
He already holds records for prize money won in a season,
$2,334,367, and in  a career, $16,282,293. But the only goal he
speaks of with affection is to win Wimbledon for the first
time. To achieve that, he has invested ten weeks in unpaid
practice on grass courts on three continents. He wants to
become the fifth man ever, and the first in more than two
decades, to complete a career Grand Slam. (Wimbledon and the
Australian, French and U.S. Opens acquired this collective
honorific when Don Budge won them all in 1938; they were the
national championships of the only countries that had yet won
the annual Davis Cup for team play.)

    But at 30, Lendl too is aging in a sport increasingly
dominated by those in or barely out of their teens. Of the 127
other players in the men's draw, about 120 will be younger. His
deadliest rivals, Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg, are veterans
of half a dozen years on the pro tour at, respectively, 22 and
24. Already these fresh-faced youths show signs of ennui. Says
Arthur Ashe, the former everything of U.S. tennis: "Half a
dozen 20-year-olds are playing now with net worths around $15
million to $20 million. It's natural their desire will drop."
Billie Jean King, who competed at Wimbledon until age 39,
partly because the big-money days came along late in her career,
agrees about the prevalence of burnout: "Graf has lost her
intensity, and emotionally she's not there. Becker seems to be
just going through the motions. Edberg too."

    What distinguishes a champion in any sport is an
unquenchable drive to meet goals set from within. For Lendl,
the goal at Wimbledon seems not to be victory so much as
Zen-like peace of mind about doing his best: "I did not want
to look back and wonder, `If I tried this or that . . .'" After
years of his being an unpopular hero, that dogged determination
is at last winning him fans -- and memories may follow.