TENNIS ROUNDUP : Connors Quickly Falls to Yzaga in Return

Jimmy Connors, coming back after a near six-month layoff, could not scrape the rust off his game fast enough to avoid a 6-3, 6-0 defeat Tuesday by 65th-ranked Jaime Yzaga in the first round of the Volvo-Chicago tournament. The match lasted 58 minutes.

Connors, 38, had not played a match since losing to Ronald Agenor at Toulouse, France, early last October. He underwent surgery on his left wrist later that month, then spent nine weeks in a cast.

“Was I nervous to play? Yeah, a little,” Connors said. “But not about playing. I was nervous to see how my wrist would hold up.”

Connors said the loss hardly discouraged him and called his comeback effort “a day-to-day thing.” He refused to set a deadline for determining how long he would continue but said he hoped his game would improve enough to warrant a shot at the U.S. Open, which he has won five times.

“It feels a lot different playing tennis than helping my boy with his homework--which is what I’ve been doing for most of the last year or so,” he added.

In other key first-round matches Tuesday, No. 1 John McEnroe defeated Gilad Bloom of Israel, 6-2, 6-1; sixth-seeded Kevin Curren beat Spain’s Tomas Carbonell, 6-3, 6-7 (3-7), 6-2; and No. 7 Patrick McEnroe split a pair of tiebreakers to escape Brad Pearce, 6-1, 6-7 (7-9), 7-6 (7-4).

Second-seeded Thomas Muster of Austria and No. 6 Jonas Svensson of Sweden were upset in the first round of a $500,000 indoor tournament at Rotterdam.

Muster lost to countryman Alex Antonitsch, 2-6, 7-5, 6-2. Svensson was defeated by Paul Haarhius of the Netherlands, 7-5, 0-6, 6-3.

In other matches, No. 3 Emilio Sanchez of Spain beat Belguim’s Libor Pimek, 6-3, 6-3; No. 5 Andrei Chesnokov of the Soviet Union defeated Richard Krajicek of the Netherlands, 6-4, 6-3, and Ctislav Dosedel of Czechoslovakia beat Henri Leconte of France, 5-7, 7-5, 7-6.