STEFAN EDBERG produced some of his vintage best to extend his Grand Slam career by toppling Wimbledon champion Richard Krajicek in straight sets at the US Open in New York last night.
Edberg, competing in his 54th consecutive and last Grand Slam event, turned back the clock on Stadium Court with a flowing 6-3 6-3 6-3 serve-and-volley victory over the Dutch fifth seed.
Earlier, Pete Sampras and Monica Seles boarded fast trains to first round victories, though both have experienced such trials and tribulations this year that it is impossible to be certain that their blood will not be on the tracks a little further down the line.
The relative poor form of Sampras this year, and his failure to win a Grand Slam title, can largely be put down to the long-term grief he suffered over the illness and ultimate death of his close friend and coach, Tim Gullikson.
Sampras, the world number one and top seed, has won two Grand Slam tournaments in each year since 1993. He should have begun his defence against Adrian Voinea but the Romanian pulled out in the morning with an ankle injury and was replaced by Jimy Szymanski of Venezuala.
Szymanski (20), had never played a Grand Slam match before and was duly blown away in straight sets.
The reasons for Seles's struggles this year are altogether more complex. She began the year with a victory in the Australian Open against Germany's Anke Huber, a first-round loser here on Monday, but then began to have problems with her right shoulder.
At the French Open she was beaten in the quarter-final by Jana Novotna, who repeated this victory during the Olympic Games, while at Wimbledon Seles lost tamely in the second round to Slovakia's Katerina Studenikova.
What blurred the nature of these defeats was the American's obvious inability to win the big points; her mental strength was suddenly called into question.
But yesterday, against the 19-year-old American Anne Miller, there were few problems, as the 6-0, 6-1 score suggests. The stickiest moment for Seles came in the third game of the opening set when Miller took the number two seed's serve to a series of deuces.
Here, albeit briefly, were the tell-tale signs of her current vulnerability but Miller did not have the experience to sustain the challenge.
Seles has still not decided when she will have an operation to the deep-rooted shoulder tear. She lost more than two years of her career because of the stabbing and faces six months' rehabilitation if she has an operation.
Austria's Thomas Muster, the number three seed, made short work of Argentina's Javier Frana, winning 6-1, 7-6, 6-2, and there was an equally emphatic first round victory for America's Lindsay Davenport, the Olympic champion, against Italy's Adriana Serra-Zanett
The first night match of this year's tournament saw Andre Agassi, resplendent (or otherwise, according to taste) in a blue shirt the shade of a French garage mechanic's overalls, turn out the light on Colombia's Mauricio Hadad in extremely straight sets.
Late on Monday the strength of the men's tournament, which had already lost two top-10 players - Boris Becker (injured) and Yevgeny Kafelnikov (returned home in a huff) - was further weakened when Jim Courier, the number eight seed, pulled out with a bruised left knee.
