June 11, 1995

The newest French Open champion coughed, cried, drank a glass of champagne and admitted she looked forward to trading in her adrenaline for a nap. The older and sorer you get, said Steffi Graf, the harder it is to grind your way to Grand Slam titles like this one. Still allergic to the dusty red clay of Roland Garros -- or perhaps to the marigolds and zinnias that border the center court where she captured her first Grand Slam title in 1987 -- and still employing the rapier forehand that launched her stellar career, Graf sneezed and sputtered to a 7-5, 4-6, 6-0 victory over Arantxa Sanchez Vicario of Spain.

Even as the West courts Serbia's President in hopes of bringing peace to Bosnia and winning the release of the 52 remaining United Nations hostages, his military is secretly assisting the Bosnian Serbs, American and European officials say. The Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, vowed last year to seal the border between Serbia and Bosnia, and he won an easing of United Nations sanctions as a result. Mr. Milosevic insists that since then only non-lethal aid has been sent to the Bosnian Serbs, an assertion generally accepted by United Nations monitors.

STEPHEN NAIFEH, new to Aiken, S.C., asked around town for a real estate lawyer and hired the first one he talked to. Susan Illston and her husband went to his old college roommate when they needed a will. Nicholas Carroll, who has moved often and hired lawyers at nearly every stop, has consulted the Yellow Pages. And these three probably know as much as anybody about lawyers, if that's any indication of how hard it is to find a good one. Mr. Naifeh is co-editor of "The Best Lawyers in America" (Woodward/White, 1995); he and his partner are both lawyers and have a staff of seven who evaluate lawyers' evaluations of other lawyers. Ms. Illston is a Federal judge in San Francisco who spent 20 years as a trial lawyer. Mr. Carroll wrote "Dancing With Lawyers" (Royce Baker, 1992), a guide for small-business owners.

In a culture where it is unseemly for anybody except Clint Eastwood to appear in public with a wrinkle, it may be hard to fathom that the fastest-growing segment of the population is not the middle-aged (those baby boomers again) or the merely old, but the oldest old -- people who are 85 and older. The oldest old remain a tiny percentage of Americans over all, but their numbers are climbing at a swifter clip than those of any other age group. And while centenarians seem such rare, unearthly creatures that Rose Kennedy's survival to age 104 was considered as remarkable as her political legacy, and the story of the 100-plus Delany Sisters was deemed worthy of a Broadway play, "Having Our Say," in fact this most tenacious group is growing even faster than the oldest old overall. . In the last 35 years, the population of 85-plusers increased by 232 percent, compared with an expansion of 30 percent for the population as a whole. Right now, the oldest old account for 1.2 percent of all Americans, but by some projections that figure could rise to nearly 10 percent by the middle of the next century.

D. WAYNE LUKAS had just won yet another triple crown race yesterday -- Thunder Gulch had something to do with that -- when somebody asked him to test the microphone for the news conference. "One, two, three, four, five," Lukas said, deadpan.