August 29, 1996, Thursday
SPORTS DESK
New York Times
A Class Act Without An Encore By HARVEY ARATON

THEY met briefly yesterday morning, in the corner of a crowded men's locker room, stopping to chat before heading out to spin a few off-day serves. Pete Sampras didn't congratulate Stefan Edberg for defeating Richard Krajicek the previous day. Champions don't pat each other on the back. They don't have to.
Sampras took the occasion to ask Edberg what it's like to suddenly become the darling of the United States Open. Then they shared a hearty laugh.
''I think people have learned to appreciate Stefan,'' Sampras would say after Edberg had gone off.
He didn't say ''finally,'' but he might as well have. It has taken Edberg 14 years at the Open to get a crowd behind him the way he did Tuesday, the way he will for as long as he survives in this his farewell visit. Finally, the New York crowd appreciates Edberg for the two Open titles, the nine consecutive years of top-five tennis, the serve-and-volley savvy and the gentlemanly grace.
This is what Sampras, another great player who mostly evokes detached admiration and little else, apparently has to look forward to.
''People notice you when you're young and when you're old,'' Edberg said. ''And in between. . . . ''
They want to know how many chest hairs Andre Agassi has bleached, thank you very much.
''Tennis is not so much a social thing in Europe,'' said Edberg. ''Here, it's more of a happening. People are looking for celebrities, for winners. From the first day of the tournament, there is so much focus on the last day. Maybe people need to take a little wider look.''
American tennis, that peculiar derivative of the sport played elsewhere, continues as a stage conducting the eternal search for the noisy celebrity showdown, Cheech versus Chong. But such superficiality should be left to political conventions. The ability to commune with the crowd is a wonderful thing but the definition of personality is more than bouncing racquets off the court and throwing wristbands to the kids.
''I think it's true that tennis needs personalities, but I think it needs different personalities,'' said Sampras. ''I think when a player like Stefan says he's playing here for the last time people realize how much they appreciated his consistency, his style, the way he played for them for so many years.''
America's Grand Slam has always been a bewildering experience for foreign players, and Edberg was no different when he showed up as a 16-year-old, looking up in disbelief at the planes, at the fans making mad dashes for nachos in the middle of a game, at the howling wolves yelling for Jimmy Connors to draw some poor opponent's blood.
But Edberg never screamed that the place should be nuked, as Kevin Curren once did. He never attacked the spaghetti in the players' lounge, as Andrei Medvedev did. And he certainly never let the degradations of the Open send him off to the airport, a seething quitter, as Yevgeny Kafelnikov did last week when the clumsy tinkerers of the Open draw ignored his No. 4 ranking and dropped him, the French Open champion, down to the No. 7 seeding. Edberg just dug in until he had the place figured out and the National Tennis Center became, as he said, ''one of the special places to come to.''
In the early 1980's, when Connors and John McEnroe owned the Open, it was fashionable to say that the Swedes -- and Ivan Lendl, for that matter -- didn't have enough heart to conquer the late New York summer. It was a classic all-American myth. Starting in 1985, Lendl, Mats Wilander and Edberg combined with Boris Becker for a European takeover that produced seven Open titles in eight years. The era is not fondly recalled because it followed McEnroe/ Connors but if the current one isn't soon improved upon, the days of Lendl and Edberg may yet be remembered as golden.
Today, players like Krajicek, Goran Ivanisevic, Jim Courier and even Agassi rise and fall through the rankings. Young players like Medvedev, MaliVai Washington and Marc Rosset flirt with breakthroughs, then go nowhere. Sections of the Grand Slam draws open up like the Grand Canyon for the unseeded masses.
Several years back, during one of his Open runs, Edberg the stoic was challenged to lighten up by telling a joke. ''Why did two Norwegians bring sandpaper to the desert?'' he said. No one knew. Edberg said, ''So they would have a map.''
The Open next year will miss this classy player, who never needed one to show up.