Mac the dinosaur close to extinction

The sight of John McEnroe flat on his face at the Royal Albert Hall yesterday was not so much symbolic as tragic. At the age of 42 the greatest player the modern game has seen looks very close indeed to the end of the road, ambushed by his own initiative in introducing younger players on to the Senior Tour of Champions, or as Mac himself calls it, "the dinosaur circuit". It was against such fresh blood as Guy Forget and Petr Korda that McEnroe sought to test himself further and, as it happened, to destruction.

A 6-4 7-6 defeat by Forget in the semi-finals meant that, for the first time in the five-year history of the Honda Challenge, McEnroe had failed to reach the final of an event which had increasingly come to be constructed around his personality and genius. But time waits not even for Johnny Mac, more's the pity. Korda beat him in straight sets at the round-robin stage on Friday and Forget did an even more thorough job in the semi-finals, walloping 21 aces.

That the fire still retains considerable heat was dramatically illustrated by the second-set tie-break, in which McEnroe held 11 set points before succumbing to the Frenchman's fifth match point. The 20-18 count was four points longer than the most famous tie-break of all, the 18-16 affair between McEnroe and Bjorn Borg in the 1980 Wimbledon final.

Yesterday, McEnroe was hobbled by some form of back strain which even he seemed at a loss to describe, and infuriated (what's new?) by what he perceived to be poor line-calling. But he was also, for the second day in a row, unable to impose himself on a younger, bigger-hitting opponent. Korda is 33, Forget 36, and McEnroe has not been slow to point out the disparity. The seniors tour used to involve only those over the age of 35, but the rules have been massaged in an effort to introduce new faces.

"Maybe I'm getting too old," was McEnroe's summary of what went wrong, followed by complaints about the speed of the court and praise for the serving of Forget. "I don't know what the hell Guy is doing but I would like to find it," he added.

McEnroe says he would be "open to suggestions" of a return to the Albert Hall, which he classes the Wimbledon of the tour. "Right now I intend to take a step back and see what's going to happen, who can be depended on as a senior player, whether people are going to pull together and realise this is positive for tennis."

Certainly this match was a positive for a brand of tennis which has too often been classed "hit and giggle". All the guile of his glory years went into McEnroe's bid to get to the final but he came up fractionally, and crucially, short.

Forget, the non-playing captain of the French team who won the Davis Cup in Australia last week, looked sharp enough to have played more than a wacthing role in that stirring victory. He was virtually impregnable on serve, winning nine of his 11 games to love. There was a lone break point for McEnroe, just after he had dropped his own serve in the first set's third game. The fact that he was unable to capitalise, plus the nagging injury which obliged him to undergo treatment on court, was enough to turn him into the Bad Mac of old, berating a female line-judge when she apparently reported him to the umpire for bad language.

The umpire, Tony Little, came in for his share of verbals, too, and at one stage, there seemed the likelihood of a McEnroe default when he refused to play on after anargument over a serve. He sat and sulked until Little imposed a time-delay warning, something which should not be necessary at this level.

Though acknowledging Forget's superiority, McEnroe insisted: "I was only a shot or two away. I kept waiting for my game to pick up and to feel physically there. But it just didn't happen." And he was too honest to avoid adding: "I could have said the same thing 10, 15 years ago."

In this afternoon's final Forget will face the Czech left-hander, Petr Korda, who defeated the defending champion, Pat Cash, 7-5 6-4.