February 9, 1981

Maybe it is time to take Vitas Gerulaitis seriously again on the tennis tour. After sliding from fourth to ninth in the world rankings and admittedly on holiday for the second half of the 1980 season, Gerulaitis collected the $175,000 first prize in the Molson Challenge today with a 6-4, 4-6, 6-3, 6-3 victory over John McEnroe. Bjorn Borg defaulted the third-place playoff to Jimmy Connors with what officials described as a ''touch of the flu.'' The difference between third-and fourth-place money in the eight-player event was $30,000 ($80,000 to $50,000), but Borg might have received as much as a $100,000 guarantee and probably did not want to play a meaningless match against a rival he had already lost to once here.

Since Michael Ray Richardson led a third-quarter surge that carried the Knicks to a 116-102 victory over the Nets today, he was asked if he felt any sympathy for a team that was struggling with a 15-44 record. ''In this league you don't feel sorry for anyone,'' he said. Richardson, the Knick playmaker, scored 14 of his 20 points in the third period. His scoring came mostly on the fast break as the Knicks built a 25-point advantage and coasted to their fifth straight victory and second over the Nets in two days. The Nets have lost five games in a row.

Semiconductor makers are bracing for a poor year. Mounting competition from Japan is combining with soft demand and lower prices to worsen the downturn in earnings that began in the fourth quarter of 1980. Semiconductor sales rose 26 percent last year, compared with 36 percent in 1979. (Page D1.)

For six years Edward M. Korry, United States Ambassador to Chile from 1967 to 1971, has insisted that he was not involved in and indeed tried to stop White House efforts to induce a military coup in Chile in 1970 to prevent Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens, a Marxist, from assuming the presidency. Evidence has come to light suggesting that Mr. Korry, despite his strong opposition to the Allende candidacy, was frozen out of the planning for a proposed military coup and warned the White House that it would be risking another ''Bay of Pigs'' if it got involved in military plots to stop Dr. Allende's election. Mr. Korry has not worked in his professions, journalism or public affairs, since 1974, two years after the columnist Jack Anderson published International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation documents that seemingly linked Mr. Korry to joint I.T.T.-Central Intelligence Agency operations to block Dr. Allende's election. Mr. Korry expressed particular bitterness toward The New York Times for what he said was unfair reporting about his role in articles in 1974 that revealed the C.I.A.'s activities in Chile and in refusing in later years, despite his entreaties, to investigate his actions accurately.

With unemployment mounting sharply, Spanish labor has demonstrated new signs of pragmatism and moderation, dealing a recent rebuff to the Communist-dominated Workers' Commissions in plant elections and giving important victories to the Socialists' General Workers' Union. The striking progress registered by the Socialist union, which pulled to nearly equal strength with the Workers' Commissions in balloting that began in October, was also an unspoken victory for Spain's new business executive's organization. Under the deft guidance of Carlos Ferrer Salat, a Catalan electronics executive and a one-time Davis Cup tennis star, the Spanish Business Confederation has achieved a major goal: clipping the Communists' wings. Ministry of Labor figures show that 30.7 percent of the 158,454 factory delegates elected over the past four months were from the Workers' Commissions, 29.6 percent from the General Workers' Union and 9.4 percent from the Workers' Union, a Government-backed group. Compared with the last balloting in 1978, the vote means a drop of almost 4 percent for the Communist-led group, and an impressive 8 percent jump for the Socialists.