U.S. OPEN

September 10, 1993

Martin Damm

Karel Novacek

KAREL NOVACEK: We are a good combination of personalities, I think, because Martin is kind of calm and I am aggressive-- get along quite well. Plus we are good tennis players, so that is maybe the reason why. We also like to stick to the outside of the courts.

MARTIN DAMM: Actually played our first tournament was in Spain, in February, or March, and we won it, so we decided to play a couple of more tournaments. So we played Wimbledon and here and play maybe two, three more at the end of this year. Hopefully the same results like here.

MARTIN DAMM: It depends. Of course we are-- first of all, we are a singles players, so it depends on our schedule because Karel is playing a little different tournament than I play, higher ranking. But if he is going to play the same tournaments, I think we can try to play a few more tournaments.

KAREL NOVACEK: Well, jobs are everywhere, so just you have to be sure that you have the right people to take this program out or just to minimize them. So it is up to the Federation to solve the problems and try to do a good job to provide the best possible practice possibilities. You have to start over there. Then you can expect some players later in the future that will become represent-- or to represent our country for the Davis Cup or any other competitions. So it is-- really it starts at our Federation, builds up the program for the youngsters. Once they able to find money and to pay the best coaches and all the people involved around; then you can expect some kind of results.

A. Well, I am not that surprised, maybe as you maybe or some other people. But because if you look all over, there was only very few players who were dominating tournaments this year. That was probably Jim Courier, Pete Sampras and Sergi Bruguera on claycourt tournaments. Pete is in the semifinal and Jim has lost a match against Cedric Pioline who played fantastic and he is in the semis now. Maybe that was one surprise, but then the rest I think all the players just getting more even and trying to play the best as possible and train harder. So for the top guys who really -- the huge pressure is on them and it is very difficult to handle for them all these matches. Like Boris coming first day from two sets to love behind, to save the match, but later in the week, it really-- it shows that these tough matches took him so much power out of him that he was not able to repeat the same performance few days later. So that altogether shows that there is a lot of players who are sometimes very prepared than some of the top guys and after that you can see this for somebody-- surprising results.