TENNIS / WOMEN’S TOURNAMENT AT MANHATTAN BEACH : Navratilova Has Her Number: 31-1

What is the most remarkable sustained feat in sports?

Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak? The Lakers winning 33 consecutive games? UCLA’s 10 NCAA basketball titles in 12 years?

Not bad, not bad, but here’s another that could be considered for the list: Martina Navratilova 31, Zina Garrison 1.

If it were baseball rather than tennis, this series would have been stopped long ago because of the 10-run rule. On a steamy court Friday at Manhattan Country Club, Navratilova soaked Garrison yet again, 6-3, 6-0, in 48 minutes of effortless tennis in the quarterfinals of the Virginia Slims of Los Angeles.

“I didn’t make any mistakes,” Navratilova said. “You can’t complain after a match like that.”

Arantxa Sanchez Vicario made more than a few mistakes against Helena Sukova, but took advantage of a key double fault in the third set to score a 2-6, 6-3, 6-2, victory that featured a total of 84 unforced errors.

Sanchez Vicario, who plays Monica Seles in the daytime portion of today’s semifinals, survived a ragged first set and a second set lowlighted by five service breaks to get even to force a third set.

Sukova gave her doubles partner the only edge she needed when she put a second serve into the net at break point to give Sanchez Vicario a 3-1 lead.

Afterward, Sukova found no one to blame for the loss but herself: “I had so many opportunities and I don’t take one of them . . . just what can you do?”

There is one other agent that worked against her, Sukova said--the lights at Center Court.

“The lights are bad . . . ridiculous,” Sukova said. “It’s hard to do something with the ball when you can’t see it.”

Sanchez blamed her 41 unforced errors on being unfamiliar with hard courts.

Said Sanchez: “It must be maybe that I think sometimes it is clay.”

For Garrison, acknowledging the obvious was nearly as simple as getting beaten again by her so-called friend. She has a mental block, Garrison said.

“Same old thing,” she added.

True, the latest loss in the one-sided series did take on a familiar sheen. Garrison did not serve an ace, double faulted three times, made 23 unforced errors and won one point on her second serve.

The highlight of the match occurred in the first set with the score tied, 3-3, but the suspense was brief. Navratilova won the last nine games while expanding another remarkable record--68 sets to Garrison’s five.

In fact, Navratilova has lost one set to Garrison in 11 matches over four years dating back to Garrison’s only victory--in a three-set match at the 1988 U.S. Open.

Navratilova cannot help but remember her feelings from that lone blot on her Garrison ledger: “I played lousy and scared tennis.”

Garrison, well, she didn’t play scared then. Back at the 1988 U.S. Open, it was a completely different Garrison who defeated Navratilova.

“I came in a lot, I was 10 pounds smaller, I was able to move around the court a lot quicker,” Garrison said.

Besides a crash diet, there probably wasn’t much that could have rescued Garrison Friday. Navratilova won 24 points at the net and got passed only four times.

“She was just knifing her volleys,” Garrison said. “Usually, I get another shot at her volleys, but today, they were just gone.”

So, Navratilova moved on to tonight’s semifinals, where she will face a familiar nemesis, Manuela Maleeva-Fragniere, who took advantage of 36 unforced errors by Kimberly Po to post a 6-1, 7-6 (7-2) victory.

Navratilova is 9-2 against Maleeva-Fragniere, one of the defeats a fourth-round upset in the 1990 U.S. Open, less than two month after Navratilova had won her ninth Wimbledon title.

“I’ll worry about (her) later,” Navratilova said. “That U.S. Open is so far gone, I don’t think about that at all.”

Tennis Notes

Monica Seles is 9-0 against her semifinal opponent, Arantxa Sanchez Vicario. . . . Martina Navratilova said she had her own mental block when she played one particular player--Hana Mandlikova. “I would get really aggravated playing her,” Navratilova said. “There was just something about her. Even when she made a bad mistake, she acted like she meant to do it. You know, like a cat that knocks something over, then turns around and just gives you that look, like, ‘Yeah, I planned to do that.’ Hana could do the same thing. She could double fault and act like that’s what she intended to do. I was totally psyched out by that.”