Spanish-American War
The same thing that Red Brick must go through to become the clay on which the French Open is contested, a tennis player must go through to win the thing. The surface at Roland Garros is brick pounded into a fine, russet dust; the players pound each other for two weeks, with the fickle Parisian weather getting in a few licks too. Tare battue, the French call red clay—literally, beaten earth—and this year even the winners, Spain's Sergi Bruguera and Germany's Steffi Graf, were by the end both beaten in their own, happy way.
So it was that Bruguera, a 6-4, 2-6, 6-2, 3-6, 6-3 victor in Sunday's engrossing men's final, lay flat on his back, unable to celebrate his triumph with the customary exultation and jaunt to the net. The man he beat, two-time defending champion and second seed Jim Courier, hoisted him to his feet. "To win at Roland Garros, everything has to be aligned—the heart, the head, the legs," says Sergio Casal, Bruguera's Davis Cup teammate and fellow Catalan, in a testament to the slow surface. "You know you'll have to suffer to build each point." Over nearly four hours, the 10th-seeded Bruguera cobbled together enough points to pull off the upset and win his first Grand Slam title.
Courier described his route to the final as "going to work and clocking in." Bruguera, meanwhile, was working half time, and that may have been his key to victory. The trick at Roland Garros is to spend as little time as possible securing each win, so that you have a few whacks left in you for the next opponent. Before he and Courier hooked up, Bruguera had averaged only one hour and 43 minutes per match, including a 6-0, 6-0, 6-0 second-round rout of Thierry Champion. (If you're looking for an omen that a French title is meant to be, serving a triple bagel to a Parisian named Champion is a pretty good one.) Bruguera needed every bit of the energy he spared, for he would require treatment for exhaustion and dehydration in the training room after the championship match.
Like most clay-courters, Bruguera, who's 22, unspools a long-drawn forehand seasoned generously with topspin. Yet the skills he displayed as he marched through the draw were far from stereotypical for a clay-court specialist. In his six matches before the final, he lost serve only five times, and Courier would wind up on the business end of numerous deft volleys. When a clay-courter on clay folds thunder and lightning into a sound baseline game, it's not a question of beating him, only of how nobly you will lose.
With all due respect to the two champions, few recent Grand Slam tournaments have been so dominated by those not present as this one was. Andre Agassi didn't enter because of tendinitis in his right wrist, although he did find it within himself to fly to Paris on the eve of the tournament to appear at a function on behalf of his corporate patron, Nike. There he tossed off a remark about Pete Sampras, the American who's No. 1 in the world. "Nobody should be ranked No. 1 who looks like he's just swung out of a tree," Agassi said. This utterance belongs on a shelf alongside Agassi's 1990 description of Philippe Chatrier, president of the International Tennis Federation at the time, as a "bozo" and his 1991 comment that reaching the finals of the French that year had left him "as happy as a faggot in a submarine." To his credit, Sampras resisted the temptation to point out that no one should win Wimbledon who looks as if he has just scrambled out from under a bridge. Instead Sampras graciously accepted an apologetic fax from Monsieur L'Image C'est Tout.
A much more agreeable Andre—or Andrei—did play: Medvedev, the 18-year-old ethnic Russian from Ukraine, whose personality is far too outgoing to be confined by a tennis court. Medvedev means bear in Russian, and in this case it is no misnomer. He's 6'4", with the painterly strokes of Miloslav Mecir to go with his power, and before Bruguera brought him rudely to heel in the semifinals, Medvedev eliminated third-seeded Stefan Edberg and enchanted everyone he came in contact with.
Medvedev kept a stash of autographed pictures in his equipment bag so that he could service his fans as obligingly as possible. During a second-round victory he spotted a fetching woman cheering him on and, astonished that he should merit her affections, directed a lingering smile her way. "When I want to laugh, I cannot hold my smile," he said later. "That is what I wanted to do, because she was beautiful. I am not like a robot. I cannot only hit the balls." Although his English is staggeringly good, Medvedev says, "I still want to have the accent, because I think it is charming."
The most notable absentee was Monica Seles, sidelined since April 30 with the knife wound she received from a deranged fan of Graf's during a tournament in Hamburg. (This incident, coupled with the apprehension in Rome two weeks later of another German tennis sicko, who tried to enter the grounds of the Italian Open with several knives and a gun and told police he was James Bond, led to unusually strict security. When a fan tried to present Graf with a bouquet of yellow roses last week, a rent-a-cop inspected each blossom before permitting her to accept them.) Seles did nonetheless seem to be on hand for the first week in the form of Iva Majoli, a 15-year-old from Zagreb, Croatia. Majoli giggles like Seles. She grunts like Seles. She does her hair like Seles. She whacks her two-fisted backhand passing shot—picked up at Monica's alma mater, Nick Bollettieri's Tennis Academy—like Seles. She clearly enjoys the comparisons, making her perhaps the only Croat on earth right now delighted to be mistaken for a Serb.
But Majoli was just a poor imitation, as Graf made clear by shooing her away 6-4, 7-6 in the round of 16. The real thing was convalescing in Vail, Colo., disappointed that the Women's Tennis Association had decided not to freeze her atop the rankings until her return. The WTA made its ruling after canvassing players on the tour for their feelings on the matter. The organization was unmoved by pleas from the Seles camp that to fail to keep her at No. 1 would give her attacker the satisfaction of seeing his stated goal—not to kill her, but to injure her sufficiently so Graf might lord once again over women's tennis—come about.
Graf was one of the first people to visit Seles in the hospital. But ascending to No. 1 during Seles's absence, which Graf did by reaching the French final, seemed to leave her out of sorts. Every inquiry about the rankings she sliced away with verbal backhands. "Over the years I've said the rankings don't mean much to me, and that's the way I feel now," she said as the tournament began. "What I care about is winning here." When Bud Collins, the man who has popularized the Graf moniker Fräulein Forehand, came upon her following her 6-3, 7-5 quarterfinal victory over Jennifer Capriati, he was struck by her downcast mien. "Smile," he urged her. "It's not Fräulein Forelorn."
"You know, she, like, didn't make any errors," said Capriati, sporting a new Katie Couric 'do that, until she opened her mouth, made her come off less like a teenager than a PTA mom getting in a quick set at the club. Nor did Graf make many errors in her 6-1, 6-1 semifinal defeat of countrywoman Anke Huber, 18, who has been touted as "the next Steffi Graf," although the more likely "next Steffi Graf"—or so the joke on the circuit goes—is No. 75 Stephanie Rehe, who is dating Graf's brother Michael.
In Saturday's women's final, Graf did commit a spate of errors, although fifth-seeded Mary Joe Fernandez matched her blunder for blunder. For Fernandez the mistakes at least had some therapeutic value. A frugal, considerate, early-to-bed type who helped organize a benefit exhibition in her hometown of Miami for the victims of Hurricane Andrew, Fernandez has always found it against her nature to do something as reckless as come to the net, much less dictate a point. But her coach, Harold Solomon, has begun to convince her that she can't expect to move higher in the rankings as long as she remains a prim baseliner. Down 6-1, 5-1 to Gabriela Sabatini in the quarterfinals, she ultimately fought off five match points en route to winning 1-6, 7-6, 10-8 in three hours and 35 minutes, making this the longest women's Grand Slam match in the Open era.
Fernandez displayed her new confidence in beating Arantxa Sànchez Vicario in the semis, 6-2, 6-2. In the final she again dictated play, but Graf rode out the 4-6, 6-2, 6-4 win by picking up her final three points on unforced errors. In victory Graf exhibited a joy that, she acknowledged, was founded mainly on relief. On the podium in Hamburg she had spoken movingly of Seles after having lost to Sanchez Vicario in the final there. In Paris, however, she made no mention of Seles, and the oversight took some aback. Later Graf expressed regret that she hadn't said anything. She said she had meant to but had forgotten. Could it be that there was something subconscious in the constitution of a competitor like Graf that didn't permit such a mention?
Bruguera's happiness, by contrast, was unalloyed, as was that of his father and coach, former Spanish Davis Cup captain Luis. Sergi was 14 when he first beat his dad, and they haven't played since. But about the time they quit playing each other, Luis's primary pupil, Juan Aguilera, became disenchanted with his coach's doting ways and the two parted. After some soul-searching, father and son became coach and player. "It was very hard at the beginning to have him as my coach, because I was young and there's a lot of tension in tennis," says Sergi. "We had the normal problems of a father and son, along with the normal problems of a coach and player. Double problems."
Sergi has also had his problems with the Spanish press. Journalists had seared him for losing his last four Davis Cup singles matches and for flaming out in the second round of the Olympics in his hometown of Barcelona, largely because of an injury suffered while playing soccer. Now all is forgiven.
With the final even at one set apiece, Bruguera picked up a service break in the first game of the third set by outlasting the purportedly indomitable Courier through eight deuces. Then, after dropping the fourth set and going down 2-0 in the fifth, Bruguera gathered himself again and broke back. He did so once more, stringing together 18 of 22 points over one stretch. Grueling matches are supposed to be foregone conclusions for Courier, but he wound up wearing his trademark vertical stripes like the bars of a jail cell.
A lunch-bucket soul like Courier could appreciate as well as any the title won by the man who had wound up flat on his back. Asked moments afterward to say a couple of words about Bruguera, Courier took the request literally.
"French," he said, "champion."
TWO PHOTOS
SIMON BRUTY/ALLSPORT
Less-demanding matches on his way to the final helped Bruguera (left) outlast Courier.
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DAVID WALBERG
It wasn't service with a smile for Graf, whose rise in the rankings didn't bring her any joy.
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SIMON BRUTY/ALLSPORT
Fernandez, who played more aggressively than she had in the past, may have gained in losing.
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SIMON BRUTY/ALLSPORT
Film legend Jean-Paul Belmondo was prepared for Paris's fickle weather.