WIMBLEDON : PLAYERS ENCOUNTER A NEW BALL GAME.

Byline: Steve Wilstein Associated Press 

The Stop Sampras Movement is raging at Wimbledon, where the grand pooh-bahs of the All-England Club are reacting as if they were in the grip of mad ball disease.

Fear of boredom, personified by the prospect of Pete Sampras acing his way to a fourth straight Wimbledon title, is relegating the plain, old yellow tennis balls into oblivion.

Softer balls last year did nothing to slow down the game, change the champions or cut down on aces, so now the club has come up with a kind of Day-Glo yellow felt that might make the missiles a tad easier to track at 120-plus mph.

``New balls, please,'' the traditional call from the umpire, will be taken quite literally.

The basic idea is to inject more rallies into the grass game so players such as Sampras, who starts on Centre Court today, won't keep winning games like this: Ace. Serve-return-volley. Service winner. Ace.

The pooh-bahs think that if the ball is visible a millisecond sooner, players will hit it back and forth more often. Maybe it will be so easy to spot that even an Englishman will be able to see it enough to win here for the first time since before World War II. Though probably not.

Nothing short of the most flagrant shenanigans - Jeff Tarango, where are you now? - is likely to keep the usual suspects from ruling Wimbledon again.

That means, among the men, Sampras, three-time champion Boris Becker, two-time finalist Goran Ivanisevic, former champions Michael Stich and Andre Agassi, and the latest Grand Slam winner, French champ Yevgeny Kafelnikov. For a dangerous floater, there's Mark Philippoussis, who sometimes lives up to his nickname, Scud.

Among the women, there's defending champion and six-time winner Steffi Graf - and no one else, unless Martina Navratilova makes a last-minute comeback.

If Graf is healthy - she took last week off to recover from her latest ailment, a touch of tendinitis in the knee - don't expect anyone to beat her on Centre Court, even if they can see the balls better as they fly by.

Monica Seles, last seen here in the final against Graf four years ago, has three major problems - head, shoulder and belly - that are likely to thwart her bid for a first Wimbledon title.

Seles' once-unparalleled tenacity is less intimidating these days after all the starts and stops she's been through in her comeback from the stabbing three years ago. She's had a bum left shoulder since winning the Australian Open in January. And the weight she gained during her layoffs is slowing her down and throwing off her timing.

All that may not mean much for Seles most days against most players, but she's more vulnerable now in any given match.

Maybe this will be the year that Jana Novotna finally breaks her habit of choking and gets to cry happily on the Duchess of Kent's shoulder. Or maybe Arantxa Sanchez Vicario will make the leap beyond the final she barely lost last year. Or perhaps Conchita Martinez will rediscover the magic of 1994. But, alas, it still looks like Graf.

The reason for the limited view of who can win the men's or women's trophy at Wimbledon is tied to their styles more than any special affinity they may have for Centre Court and the crowd. It's not just a case of horses for courses, but rather one of all the courts in the sport.

Tennis evolved in the 1980s from finesse to brute power, and it is evolving again to a blend of both. The contenders for Grand Slam titles now, whether on hard courts, clay or grass, are those players who can do it all - crush opponents with a serve-and-volley game, stay back patiently and rally, flick drop shots and lobs, work their way shot by shot through each point, and point by point through each match.

That's why it doesn't matter if the ball is a little softer or a little brighter. As long as it's the same for both players, the ones who are leading the evolution toward the ultimate all-court game are the ones who will triumph.

Sampras showed that when he outlasted Agassi in their spectacular 22-shot rally in the U.S. Open final last year, a corner-to-corner, baseline-to-net-to-baseline duel that demonstrated Sampras' versatility as much as his endurance.