“It's different, definitely. I mean, older guys, they are just ten centimeters taller and 15 kilos also more than before. Before it was about the game. Now I feel it's more about the serve, the return. But that's how it is. I just try my best every time to beat the guy I have in front of me.”—Gilles Simon on the state of the game following his 6-3, 3-6, 6-1, 6-3 third-round upset of No. 4 seed David Ferrer.
NEW YORK—It seemed like the assignment from hell, a match with Ferrer, the ultimate grinder, on a day when the mercury zoomed into the 90s with humidity over 50 percent—and that was without the microwave effect of playing inside a reflective cement bowl surrounded by some eight or ten thousand bodies.
“To play David in this condition is really demanding physically,” Simon said later. “At one point I was really tired. I felt it would be difficult. But then I had more energy; I felt he was in trouble, also.”
Simon, who’s seeded just a lowly 26th here, was in many ways the right man for this grueling assignment, even though Ferrer had a 5-1 head-to-head advantage going in (in fact, Simon hadn’t even won a set from him since the 2011 Cincinnati Masters). Still. Once ranked as high as No. 6 (2009), Simon is the closest thing in tennis to that critter that was born to run, the North American antelope.