Tennis at Manhattan Beach : Canadian Passes Qualifying Test : Hetherington, a Doubles Specialist, Takes the Hard Way

The way Jill Hetherington looks at it, she is already two matches into the tournament, so having to get through the qualifying for the $300,000 Virginia Slims of Los Angeles may give her some kind of an edge when the event starts today at Manhattan Country Club.

Or maybe it won’t.

Hetherington, who studied psychology at the University of Florida, knows something about math, too. There is $60,000 waiting for the winner, so why couldn’t it go to a qualifier who went to school for her first psyche job?

“Well, anything’s possible in tennis, but I haven’t done any amazing things in tennis this year,” Hetherington said.

Actually, she has had a pretty amazing run of rotten luck. Hetherington, a 24-year-old Canadian, is a successful specialist in doubles with Patty Fendick of Sacramento, but her singles play has been less than thrilling. Hetherington has seven first-round losses in 13 tournaments this year and reached the third round only once when she lost in three sets to Pam Shriver in the quarterfinals of the 32-draw Virginia Slims of Newport, R.I.

That was worth $4,500, Hetherington’s biggest payday, although she earned $3,443 at Wimbledon for losing in the first round to Martina Navratilova, seeded first in this week’s tournament.

Such results have forced Hetherington to qualify for tournaments in which she wants to play. Hetherington, who reached No. 64 in the world in February of 1988, is now No. 109, which means her ranking is seldom high enough to get into a main draw without qualifying.

After she won her second qualifying match Sunday, Hetherington had worked her way into the main draw the hard way. She plays Mary Lou Daniels today in a first-round match. They are both in the bottom half of the draw, the half belonging to second-seeded Gabriela Sabatini. Through the luck of the draw, six of the tournament’s eight qualifiers are in Sabatini’s half of the draw.

“If I’m going to meet Sabatini, that would mean I’d have to win a couple of rounds, but I’m just going to go out and try to play some good tennis,” Hetherington said.

Playing Sabatini is not always a pleasant task, but Hetherington can’t think of many things that are tougher than having to win two matches in qualifying just to get the chance.

“I’ve been struggling a lot with my singles, so it was hard to get psyched up knowing you have to win two matches just to get in the tournament,” she said. “But maybe I’ve got an advantage in match play.”

And one more thing.

“There’s also always a chance to do well then the players see they have to play a qualifier,” she said. “They may be more relieved they don’t have to play a top player, so they might make a mistake and look ahead to the next round or something.”

Tennis Notes

The first day’s top match at Manhattan Country Club is between 11th-seeded Lori McNeil of Houston and Tami Whitlinger, 20, who played for Stanford last year. McNeil, whose ranking had reached No. 9 last year, has plummeted to No. 24. Last week, she lost in the first round at San Diego, 6-2, 6-0, to Bettina Bunge, who was playing her first singles match in two years because of injury. . . . Gabriela Sabatini will play her first match Tuesday night and Martina Navratilova will get the latest start, playing her first match Wednesday night. Both, as well as the other top six seeded players, received first-round byes.