Going, Going, Gone At Wimbledon

By Tom Callahan

With no John McEnroe from the start and no Jimmy Connors for long, the 100th Wimbledon felt its age. According to Chris Evert Lloyd, 31, "Anyone who chases that yellow ball around a tennis court has to feel young." To exaggerate the point, last week her husband John lost his opening match and retired from singles competition at 31. The championships took on a theme of passage.

By their own frequent accounts in the public prints, the Lloyds are prone to slight disagreements. He has liked rock music; she has liked a rock musician. But they differ on nothing else quite as much as tennis. To Chris, "It's in your blood, putting something on the line every day. It's a great feeling when you win. And when you lose, I think you're wiser." But the Englishman she married in 1979 never regarded tennis as a blood sport or a life. While Chris expressed eagerness even for practice, John had to admit, "It was such a push this year. Normally before Wimbledon it's a breeze."

The sun was blazing, but Fleet Street was overcast. Sports pages throughout the British Isles have been strewn with black crepe. England's footballers were jobbed in the World Cup at the hand of Maradona; the cricket team was embarrassed by India; Irish Featherweight Barry McGuigan was flattened by a substitute from Texas. At Wimbledon, Best Brits Annabel Croft and John Lloyd were sacked straightaway, and here Lloyd was quitting in a manner that seemed to cinch the national sense of failure.

"By whose achievements is it measured?" he asked. "I don't consider 21-in-the-world, or whatever, to be a failure." When Lloyd was ranked 24th, he married the top-rated woman player, Evert. Before long, like Claude Rains or Mr. Thatcher, he began to disappear (to 331st). After Evert spoke publicly of losing respect for her vanishing husband, Lloyd fought his way back into the 30s and even to the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open. But his passion was not for winning. "If I wanted it more, maybe I would have gone higher. Maybe I didn't have the champion's mentality of sacrificing everything to one aim. If that's bad, that's bad."

Against South African Christo Steyn in the anticlimax of Lloyd's 14 Wimbledons, he could summon no joy even while taking the first two sets. "Christo was awful the first two. The final three, I was horrendous. He didn't have that much to beat, really. If I'd actually wanted it and enjoyed it--if it came from within--I would have won. But there was no charge in me. I've been doing this since I was eight, thinking of the next tennis match." One of the gentler fish wrappers inquired about his overpowering emotion. Lloyd said, "I feel, in some ways, relieved."

A fishier one wondered how angry Connors was after losing to Minneapolis Doubles Specialist Robert Seguso in the first round. "You don't need to know everything," replied the third seed, still able enough for that perch but old ; enough (33) to have to defend his continuing presence. "What's your problem?" he bristled. "Why do you want me to get out of tennis? You don't know what you have until you lose it." Connors referred, of course, to McEnroe, the tabloids' favorite foil, away on a paternity leave. "He's not here and you miss him. If I'm not here next year, maybe you'll miss me."

Connors and Evert Lloyd, fiances of the early '70s, proved their fealty to winning and Wimbledon at the same time, back when his mother helped cool the romance with that chilling line, "Nobody wins Wimbledon on their honeymoon." Of his 3-6, 6-3, 6-7, 6-7 loss to Seguso, 23, Connors said, "I played all right. He was kind of unconscious, serving bomb after bomb. If he'd faltered an inch, I'd have been all over him." Mentioning archly how Seguso must "play up to his responsibility" now, Connors questioned whether the pretender could do it again "the next day, the next day and the next." And he did not just mean Seguso.

For a man coming off his second $2 million season, and who has dominated men's tennis for the past year and a half, first-seeded Ivan Lendl of Czechoslovakia and Connecticut stirs minimal conversation at Wimbledon. His aversion to grass is as well known as its aversion to him, but doubts about Lendl run much deeper than the surface. Breaking through against McEnroe at the U.S. Open last summer seems to have brought him only slightly more confirmation than doing it at the French the year before. Maybe McEnroe, 27, is missed by Lendl, 26, most of all. Without a definitive adversary, his achievements are vaguely undefined and his profile subtly incomplete. "Lendl is a great server and a great volleyer," '30s Champion Fred Perry has noted. "But he's not a great server and volleyer." He could put it all together this week, charm included.

A few grace notes have slipped through in the past year. Lendl's former countryman Martina Navratilova, after eleven years away, is returning this month to Prague to compete in the Federation Cup, the women's Davis equivalent. Pressed to offer advice and counsel, since he has been in Czechoslovakia far more recently, Lendl considered the matter solemnly before responding "I would tell her to stay away from the dumplings." Navratilova and Evert Lloyd made their usual voracious work of the dumplings last week, though Dominican-born Mary Joe Fernandez, the latest model in a Florida baseliner, made a bright 6-4, 6-1 impression on the prototype. "It's been a while," smiled Chris, "since I played a 14-year-old." Pam Shriver, 23, an affable six-footer who has waited most patiently for Navratilova and Lloyd to clear the stage, cannot bear to look in the wings. "There's only one thing to do," she sighed after also exiting early, "take John away from Chris and start a family." The newspapers were back in business.