!201009131508545094505-p2@stats_com
by Pete Bodo
NEW YORK—Today, we're going to try something a little different. With 23 players from the U.S. in action in various events on sundry courts, I'm going to keep a running diary of their fortunes, all the way until the end of tonight's feature match on Ashe between two American men, Andy Roddick and Michael Russell. So return to this page periodically for updates on the red, white and blue contenders.
11:27 AM—I'm just getting my computer fired up and gulping down one of the free Oikos Greek yogurts (peach and mango, if you want know) provided in the press restaurant when I hear a muted roar. It's coming from over on Louis Armstrong stadium, the Louee, where determined and talented 16-year-old Madison Keys from Rock Island, Ill leads Lucie Safarova just won the first set. Time to get to work.
12:30 PM—Safarova has a set point in set two, thanks to an ill-advised drop shot that Martina Navratilova, commentating on the Tennis Channel, describes as, "first shot Madison has hit that looks like something a 16-year old would do." Keys' eighth double-fault takes the 5-6 game back to deuce. But she gets the ad again with a great backhand approach off the Safarova's service return; Keys is 9 for 9 at the net. The third double-fault of the game by Keys takes it back to deuce. Another poor drop shot gives Safarova the set. Keys seems to be running out of gas; as a result, she's making more and more of the mistakes you expect of a typical teen.
1:24 PM—You have to feel for Madison Keys; she had numerous chances late in the second set to close out the match, and led by a break at least once in the third, but once again the veteran - Safarova - found a way to pull it out, despite having been behind 0-5 in the first set. Afterward, Safarova tells Tracy Austin: "The crowd was quite fair and nice . . . she (Keys) was serving well and she has a very good forehand. She was pushing me, I had to fight. It was a tough match."
A tough match and a missed opportunity, although Keys will have plenty more in the months and years to come. In any event, there's your first American casualty of the day. I have a feeling it won't be the last.
1:38 PM—Court 7 is one of the best courts at Flushing Meadows. It has a tall, permanent grandstand on the east side, where you feel right on top of the action. When I arrive, Ryan Sweeting is up 6-4—but down a break at 3-4 in the second set to Uzbekistan's Dennis Istomin. If you saw Istomin at a Starbucks and were asked his nationality, I can't imagine you'd come up with "Uzbek." He's light-skinned with light brown, curly hair. Could be from nearby Manhasset. There's a lesson in there somewhere; not every Uzbek has a beard and an AK-47 slung over his shoulder.
Sweeting, on the other hand, looks American as apple pie to me, and not just because he's dressed in Nike head-to-toe. He's got the skinniest legs since James Blake, and on top of that he's into the ankle socks that are all the rage among U.S. players (does Mardy Fish get royalties?). Sweeting is a lean 6'5" and from a distance you could mistake him for Todd Martin. He has a chestnut tan; smallish, well-proportioned features and carries himself in a leisurely but confident way. He would have made a good cowpuncher. A Hollywood one, anyway.
Anyway, Sweeting has a nice history here—this was the first Grand Slam he ever played (2006) and he won a match that year. Today, he's whacking his forehand awfully well and breaks back to even the set at four games each. Could it be? Will we have another U.S. man in the second round (Donald Young booked a place there yesterday)? Well, not so fast. . .
After a trade of holds, Sweeting hits a beautiful, heavily-wristed, snap forehand pass on the dead run to go up 30-15. He twirls and in one commanding motion points to the ballboy, the tennis esperanto for "Get me the towel." It looks like he's completely in charge, but at 30-all he puzzlingly hits a loose forehand wide and suddenly he's down break point. He misses his first serve, and the second serve doesn't bounce until it's nearly at Istomin's baseline.
Game, Istomin. Sweeting calls for the towel again, but this time it's without authority, a weak gesture in which his frustration is evident.
As if that's not bad enough, Sweeting wins the first two points against Istomin in the next game but surrenders that advantage with two errors. Istomin blows a volley to give Sweeting a break point—or tiebreaker point—but the Americna wrenches a forehand approach into the net. Pfffft. A poor backhand service return and another out-of-control forehand error from Sweeting, and Istomin has the second set.
Sweeting takes his anger out on an innocent ball and earns a code violation for hitting it toward the elevated subway platform in Jackson Heights. Did I mention that the rap on Sweeting is that he's a bit of a head case?
4:07 PM—Well, Sweeting went down some time ago and Christina McHale has put up a spectacular win over Marion Bartoli. Go USA! If anyone's getting it done, it's the women, although we suffered a major blow when Venus Williams withdrew, citing an autoimmune disease known as Sjogren's Syndrome. But I'm on Court 11, where Steve Johnson is doing the macabre cramp dance. When a player is cramping, it looks like he's a puppet and suddenly the strings have been attached to electrical terminals. They're jerking him in all the wrong places. Thankfully, it's rarely as painful an experience as it looks.
Johnson is cramping at the worst possible time—at 1-all in the fourth-set tiebreaker of his match with fellow American Alex Bogomolov Jr. Johnson, a 6'2" native of Orange, Ca., is ranked No. 525, but he recently won the NCAA singles title (he's playing at USC) and earned a U.S. Open wild card for his achievement. Bogomolov is having a career year; he was ranked No. 167 at the start of 2011 and is presently loving life at No. 44.
Johnson was mounting a desperate effort to reverse the tide in a match that had already seen one enormous shift of momentum: Johnson had won the first two sets, but Bogomolov fought back and won the third. The fourth set was a inconclusive tug of war right up to the tiebreaker.
Johnson's success flowed from a reliance on a Bernard Tomic-like vision of the game. He used a combination of off-pace groundstrokes, mostly hit with the backhand (he's adept at both one-handed slice and the two-handed drive, which makes Johnson a model for the next wave of players—why have to choose between them?), freely mixed with big forehand blasts.
Johnson's forehand is a little rough looking, the punch thrown by a barroom brawler rather than a highly trained and disciplined fighter, but it's effective nonetheless. And Johnson's general feel and overall skill level gives him a lot of technical leeway—he frequently hits shots that look better suited to squash (although they can be waspishly effective) and he's too liberal with his use of the drop shot. (The drop shot/lob combo, an amateurish ploy that, Johnson will learn, ATP pros dismiss with utter contempt.) Johnson's mother is a math professor, which kind of makes sense once you see her boy exploiting the angles. He's that welcome and rare creature, the player who's first and foremost "interesting."
Bogomolov is much more of a meat-and-potatoes man, a former prodigy of whom much was expected. But he matured slowly and has just recently found his most effective game, and mentality, at age 28. True to his lifelong identity as a journeyman, Bogomolov wears his trucker cap backwards (presumably to protect his scalp, for he's got a modest mohawk), and today he was attired in black shorts, socks and shoes. Just looking at him, you can probably conjure up smell of stale sweat and other locker room odors. But don't underestimate his diligence and patience, the single quality most valuable against an unpredictable, creative player like Johnson.
But those cramps. . . The first one hit after each player held his service point for 1-1. Bogomolov won the next point with an overhead, after which Johnson began dancing in pain, clutching the quads and hamstrings on either leg. He served the next two points and, impaired, quickly lost them both. He looked up at the umpire as if he could find some help there, but the man just shrugged. Still, Johnson asked him to telephone for the trainer. But the tiebreaker would not be stopped; it was over quickly, Bogomolov winning it, 7-3.
Cramps are thought to be the result of tension and/or anxiety combined with improper hydration. Harold Solomon, once a Top 10-pro and later a coach, drank pickle juice (right off the supermarket shelf; all he had to do was find a pickle-lover to take the contents) because of its high salinity. What does it say about the top players that they never suffer from cramps?
Anyway, Bogomolov went on to take the fifth set. He advances, and that's fine—he has much ground to make up. Johnson by contrast has much to learn, and a good game to gather that knowledge with.
7:16 PM—Jack Sock is in trouble; he won the first two sets against one of the most dangerous slap-shot artists this side of the NHL, Marc Gicquel. But Gicquel found his range in the third set, capitalized on an early break and narrowed Sock's lead to one set. By the start of the fourth set, both men were swinging from the heels and raiding the net at every opportunity (the average set lasted just over 36 minutes, which is about the same amount of time it takes for Novak Djokovic to get the magic number of bounces before he serves, or for Rafael Nadal to arrange his water bottles).
It's hardly surprising that this "big game" style comes easily to Sock, a solidly built, 6'1" Nebraska boy of just 18. He routinely tags serves in the 130-plus range and has a wicked wrist-snap forehand. But Gicquel is another story. For one thing, he's French, and you know those folks can get a little, well, complicated. On the other hand, he was born in Tunisia and that may explain why he skews more toward the straighforward and explosive, risk-laden game—following in the footsteps of those other mercurial north Africans, Younes el Aynaoui and Hicham Arazi.
Sock would make an interesting third leg on a tripod with John Isner and Sam Querrey (provided Querrey finds his game and desire again); he's as powerful as either of them and moves better than both. But he faltered and surrendered his service game for the first break of the fourth set, and suddenly Gicquel was serving for a 4-2 lead. But Gicquel, whose game was sizzling for a set and a half, began to go cold in the very next game. Sock broke back and consolidated the break with an overpowering hold at love, one of the points a 133 MPH ace.
The next thing you know, Gicquel was serving to stay in the match at 4-5. That's always a tough assignment, because it invites your opponent to lay on maximum pressure. Sock jumped to a 30-15 lead, and during the next point he hit a forehand blast that the linesperson called out—and immediately reversed. Gicquel challenged, and I'm not sure why the chair umpire referred the case to Hawkeye; no matter what the result, a reversed call always demands a replay of the point. But when Hawkeye confirmed that Sock's shot was indeed in, the American youngster had every reason lose his composure, given the difference between 30-all and 15-40 (and two match points). But Sock played a solid point to force an error and win the point again. Double match point.
Gicquel hit an ace to eliminate one of them, but he made a backhand error in the next point to give Sock the first Grand Slam singles win of his life. I have a feeling it won't be his last.
8:03 PM—Robby Ginepri is almost 29 and playing in his 12th Grand Slam. He defeated Joao Souza on the Grandstand—immediately after McHale's very welcome blow for the U.S. game. It was Ginepri's first win on a Grand Slam stage since the spring of 2010. When he arrived in the main press interview room, aka Room One, there was exactly one reporter waiting to speak with him.
8:42 PM—McHale, Bogomolov, Ginepri, Isner, Sock. . . their matches were overlapping and impossible for one man to cover. I had planned to catch some of the Isner v. Marcos Baghdatis match on Louis Armstrong, but opted for Sock. And here I was, in the interview room, listening to him describe how he came to the decision to turn pro, instead of attending college.
Bear in mind that this is a kid who likes to finish what he starts and considers it an honor to compete for his school; he played high school tennis all four years (which is unheard of, for a world-class junior) less because of the teen credibility he earned with his record (a perfect 80-0) than because he didn't want to let down his teammates or his school. I asked if he agonized over the decision to turn pro instead of accepting any one of the pile of tennis scholarships he was offered.
"Not all along. Even after I won the juniors here last year I was telling myself I was going to go to college. And then I think once my game developed and once I was doing things well in practice and getting some results out on the futures, challengers, lower?level ATP tournaments, I just felt ready. I felt everything came together. I felt very good about my game. Here I am."
I wondered how Sock managed to keep a cool head and a steady hand when Gicquel mounted his fightback. Was he worried in that fourth set that it was all going to slip away?
"Yeah, I mean, I guess. . . No, I wouldn't say 'worried.' I was probably more alert after I got broken (for 2-3) , for sure. He was serving pretty well. I knew I had to buckle down, get the break back and stay in the set, which I did.Then just played a pretty good set from there. Finally got the break at the end."
He may be just 18, but he already knows how to grade his own performance, and deliver the short version when asked.
9:15 PM—Isner knocked off Baghdatis; his reward is a match against his friend and countryman, Ginepri. So another American is guaranteed to be out of the tournament after the second round, but one guaranteed to make it to the third. In his press conference, Isner said: "It will be a lot of fun, I know the crowd will be split down the middle. Two Americans. He's a good friend of mind so I expect a good, clean match."
BTW, while I was otherwise occupied, another American woman struck an unexpected blow for the home team. Irina Falconi ushered out No. 14 seed Dominika Cibulkova on a match moved to Arthur Ashe stadium after Venus Williams' shocking withdrawal from the singles. After Falconi won, she paraded around the floor of Ashe with the Stars and Stripes. It was that kind of day.
10:24 PM—Appropriately enough, the last American singles player on the court today is Andy Roddick, and his supporting actor is yet another American, much-loved and respected 33-year-old journeyman Michael Russell. Using his authoratative, oppressive serve to full effect, Roddick won the first two sets. But Russell, a grizzled, leathery, indomitable veteran, just won't quit. He finds a way to win the third set, escapes a potentially disastrous break midway through the fourth set and finds a second (or third, or fourth?) wind.
But Russell falls behind 0-30 when serving at 4-5. He claws his way back to 40-30. Showing nerves, Roddick flubs a second-serve return and it's 5-all.
10:38 PM—It takes a Russell error for Roddick to finally close out the player John McEnroe aptly describes as a Jack Russell terrier. "God bless MIchael," McEnroe says as Russell walks off. "He always gives you your money's worth."
In the on-court interview, Roddick says: "Mike's one of my favorite players. He's all heart and hustle and he makes you win."
Of his next opponent, Roddick says: "He's full of piss and vinegar and he reminds me of another 18-year-old I knew way back when. . ."
Roddick's next match is against Jack Sock.
Somehow, it's a satisfying way to end a day on which, discounting matches between Americans and the unexpected withdrawal of Venus Williams, the U.S. finished a very respectable 5-3 in singles matches on this, the Longest (American) Day at the 2011 U.S. Open.