Stalking Memories At Wimbledon

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

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 semifinal 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.

With reporting by Tala Skari/Paris and David E. Thigpen/New York