NEW YORK—Sports fans and sportswriters can never let a win just be a win. Whether it happens in the Super Bowl or the first round of the U.S. Open, there’s no result that doesn't immediately inspire a question. "Team X, you just won the World Series, but are you ready to become a dynasty?" "Player Y, congratulations on your first Wimbledon win; now, do you think this signals the beginning of a new era in the men's game?" Not satisfied with describing or enjoying what we see in front of us, we must make it into something historical, a Turning Point, a Sign of Things to Come, a Changing of the Guard, a Symbol of Decline. Never mind that 9/10ths of these imagined futures never come to pass. We seem to be hard-wired for reckless speculation.
In tennis, there’s a subdivision of this scenario that we might call the “For Real” phenomenon. It begins when a player makes a surprising run at a prominent event. It can be surprising for a number of reasons: youth, previous journeyman status, history of underachieving, etc. Whatever the reason, if the player is lucky (or, just as often, unlucky) to make their run at the U.S. Open, inside the “media capital of the universe,” it doesn’t take long to become a very big deal. Three wins is generally enough. It’s then that fans and writers will raise their voices in unison with this question: “Is he for real?”
The lucky/unlucky player on a surprising run at this year’s U.S. Open is Donald Young. And, as expected, within minutes of his third-round win over Juan Ignacio Chela last weekend, I began to hear, from the subway to the press room to the Twitter page, those inevitable words: “Do you think he’s for real?” My answer so far has been: “I want to believe, but I’m not there yet.” My other answer, to myself, has been "What does 'for real' mean, anyway?'"
At 22, Young, a former junior No. 1 currently ranked 84th, has certainly had the best season of his (deceptively long) career. After years of toil in the game’s minor leagues, years of disputes with the USTA, years of being criticized for everything from accepting too many wild cards to staying too close to his parents to generally not working hard enough or living up to his potential, Young has beaten Andy Murray and Marcos Baghdatis in 2011. In the last week he’s added two more established scalps, Chela’s and Stanislas Wawrinka’s. If Young beats Murray again at the Open tomorrow, the former pariah of U.S. tennis would go a long way to answering the “for real” question with a definitive yes.
Beating Murray is a big if, of course, and we’ve been disappointed by Young in these situations in the past. He followed his win over the Scot in Indian Wells with a brutally quick loss to Tommy Robredo in the next round, a match in which Robredo did little more than keep the ball deep and wait for Young to miss. That could easily happen against the ultra-consistent Murray.
But even if Young acquits himself well, will that make him “for real”? What counts as real in most tennis fans', specifically American tennis fans', minds? Once it would have meant, Can this kid be No. 1 in the world? Anything less would have been a betrayal of our tradition of dominance. That’s not quite the case anymore. A decade of non-dominance has lowered our expectations, but not by a whole lot. Andy Roddick, a Slam winner and perennial Top Tenner, isn’t viewed as a failure, exactly, but for many of the game's casual observers, his name does carry an aura of disappointment with it.
It’s probably safe to say that John Isner, Mardy Fish, and Sam Querrey qualify as "real" in the eyes of today’s American fans. Fish is Top 10, and the other two have been Top 20, even if Isner is much more famous for winning a single, 11-hour match. All three have been established on tour for a significant amount of time, and all three offer us at least a little home-country hope as each major begins. But unless or until they win one, it’s hard to say that those guys are exactly what we’ve been waiting for. After Jimbo, Johnny Mac, Pete, Andre, and a dozen other legends, the bar for “realness” as a tennis player is still set pretty high around here.
What about Young? What would be an acceptable future for him? His performance has brought out the usual hopes and predictions. Patrick McEnroe went so far as to say that DY became a man at this tournament. Bill Walton said he was breathing new life into the moribund U.S. tennis scene. And it's true, if nothing else, it's been great to see Young smile.
But unless he proceeds to beat Murray and win this tournament, we’re not going to know anything definitive about him—whether he’s someone who can reach second weeks of Slams, make main draws at Masters, and crack the Top 25. We should all probably heed the words of advice that Roddick gave to another, temporarily forgotten, U.S. hopeful, Ryan Harrison, this year at Wimbledon. After Harrison lost a five-set match to world No. 6 David Ferrer, Roddick said that while that was a great effort, Harrison would ultimately not be measured by his ability to play the top players close on the big stages, but by his ability to beat the players he should beat, week in and week out, on the small ones.
Whatever happens to Young on this big stage, the same will be true true for him. Let’s see him, for example, follow this up by winning early rounds in main draws this fall. That's not something he's ever done with any consistency before. This year Young has shown that he’s very strong at the qualifier level, but he's struggled after that. In January, I watched him rip his way through the qualies in Australia. I went out to his main-draw first-rounder with Marin Cilic believing that he could give his old junior rival a real run, but Young didn’t look he believed. He was broken in his opening service game and appeared out of the match by the middle of the first set.
It’s too late for a meteoric rise for Donald Young. His improvement will have to be step by step. And as Roddick says, those steps will be taken far from Flushing Meadows. They'll be taken in Challenger tournaments, in smaller ATP events in cities like Valencia and Winston-Salem and San Jose. Young’s game has always been flashy—he can rip a forehand and make a great get as well as anyone—and this has been a flashy result so far in Queens. But his game has also been inconsistent and at times sloppy. He’ll rip one of those forehands on one point, then be late getting his feet in place for a backhand on the next.
It may not be glamorous, but it’s the latter that matters most at the level that Young hopes to reach. The man who beat him in Indian Wells, the solid and unspectacular Tommy Robredo, didn’t hit many screaming forehands, but he was always where he was supposed to be; he's been a successful pro for a long time simply by managing that. Doing the little things correctly won’t win you any Grand Slams alone, but you won’t reach the Top 20 without them, either. If Young can do those, if he can win in the main-draw trenches, if he can play with more consistency than flash, if he can beat the players he’s supposed to beat, if he can make himself a regular threat past the qualies—if he can do all of those things, then, yes, he’ll be for real. Until we find that out, though, we're better off forgetting the future and just enjoying what the kid is doing at the moment.