Curren’s Serve Sends Connors to Defeat, Too : Player Who Earlier Upset McEnroe Moves Into Final

WIMBLEDON, England —  Kevin Curren, recently in the African bush on safari, has bagged his second lion on the grassy preserve of the All England Club.

Jimmy Connors followed John McEnroe into his sights, and Curren, though he uses a camera in the bush, fired away unabashedly in this suburb hard by the seat of Western Civilization. It wasn’t pretty.

McEnroe fell Wednesday and Connors Friday, and now Curren, the man with the rifle serve, finds himself in Sunday’s final round of Wimbledon, lying in wait for one last victim--either Boris Becker or Anders Jarryd, whose rain-interrupted semifinal will be concluded today.

Maybe next time, Curren will offer a blindfold and a cigarette.

“He just throws it up there and boom, boom,” said a shell-shocked Connors, who was on the wrong side of 17 aces. “When he’s catching the ball on the way up, spanking the ball the way he does, it’s tough to counteract.”

Connors, like McEnroe before him, was at a loss. Curren blew Connors off Centre Court, 6-2, 6-2, 6-1, in Friday’s first semifinal. McEnroe, in the quarterfinals, managed all of eight games in his three-set loss.

These are not your average pro players, remember. These are guys who will have busts made of them some day. And Kevin Curren, who isn’t all that far from your average player, not only beat them--he humbled them.

How do you explain it? Apparently, it all has to do with the grass surface, where a big server can dominate a better player.

“You can do it on grass, but you can’t do it on any other surface,” former Wimbledon champion Arthur Ashe said. “The way he’s serving, it really isn’t that big a surprise.”

Actually, it is. Big servers do well here, but they rarely win. This is a place where class tells.

Over the last nine years, the winner has been either McEnroe, Connors or Bjorn Borg. Only once in history, in fact, has a player seeded as low as eighth--Curren’s rating--ever won here.

Curren, a native South African who turned American citizen earlier in the year, has no illusions about his game. He says he’s too big and rangy to perform well on clay, not sufficiently gifted athletically to perform well on hard courts.

“The game is altogether different on grass,” he said. “I can’t be there on all surfaces . . . but on the fast surfaces, I’ve proven I can play with anybody.”

Curren made it to the final last year in Australia on grass. He’d been to the semifinals here in 1983, the same year he last beat Connors, the well-known returner of serve, on the strength of 33 aces.

It is an odd serve, with a toss that Curren’s racket catches on the way up. The returner has no way to guess where the serve is headed. It’s a fast serve, and it’s a varied one. Nobody handles it well.

Curren has lost his serve only four times in the tournament and not at all on his last 44 service games. Against Connors, he was successful on 43 of 66 first serves. Connors put only 10 of Curren’s first serves in play, winning only five points in the process.

Of course, Connors did not play like the Connors of old, more like the old Connors. He served poorly, volleyed poorly and looked all his 32 years. Curren, 27, was never rattled, which hardly surprised Connors.

“Why should he be?” Connors wondered. “He was kicking my butt pretty good.”

There was one moment in the match that sticks out, when Connors was serving to open the third set. Someone in the crowd, which generally favored Connors, shouted, “Come on, Jimbo.” Jimbo raised an index finger, apparently signaling that he would be finished in a minute.

It didn’t take much longer. Curren broke him again. And in the final game of the match, Curren, obviously pumped up, delivered three consecutive aces and then won the match on an overhead smash.

Connors, who doesn’t have many Wimbledons left in him, would not want to remember that as his parting moment.

Princess Diana, who was in attendance, left after the match. Maybe she couldn’t take any more, either.

And so it is left for either Jarryd, the No. 5-seeded player who had never won a match here before this year, or Becker to stop Curren.

They each won a set before the onset of showers, which had spared the All England Club for most of the tournament’s second week.

Jarryd, a stylish Swede with a great return of serve, won the first set, 6-2, breaking Becker twice, but Becker won the second, 7-6, after fighting off two set points and sending it to a tiebreaker. In the tiebreaker, Jarryd went up, 3-1, but Becker won the last 6 points.

Though only 17, Becker is not unused to adversity, having lost the first set in three of his matches here.

Curren made no secret of where his rooting interest lies. He’s for Jarryd. When it was announced that Jarryd was leading in the first set, Curren said, “Keep going.”

Curren wants no part of Becker and the young German’s big serve.

“He’s got a lot of power, and that could match me on serves,” Curren said. “If I played Jarryd, I’d have that little bit of an edge.”

The Jarryd-Becker match will be completed today and will be followed by the women’s final between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert Lloyd.