!81789854 By Pete Bodo
It may seem improbable that a player finds a silver lining in a tennis match that he lost after leading 40-15 on serve at 5-all in the third, and that’s doubly true if the winner went on to make the third round of the US Open. But good things have happened to Ryan Harrison, the 17-year old from Bradenton, Fla., since he let that US Open qualifying match against Turkey’s Marsel Ilhan slip through his fingers.
In recent weeks, Harrison has been on fire, and he’s won a few comparably tight matches in the process. He was in the final of the USA Futures event at Costa Mesa, and he won the Futures tournament at Laguna Niguel. Presently, he’s in the quarterfinals of a tournament at the next level up, the Sacramento Challenger. He was a wild card entry, but he’s already beaten the no. 8 seed, Grega Zemlja. Only two players since 1990 have won ATP-level matches at a so young an age: Richard Gasquet and Rafael Nadal.
“I used that loss (to Ilhan) as an excitement,” Harrison told me. “Although I lost that one, I thought, ‘Wow, I could have done a few things better, yet the guy who beat me went all the way to the third round of the Open.’ It gave me a little confidence that’s paying off now.”
The experience also taught Harrison a valuable lesson: when you have an opponent backed into a corner, make him earn every point. Harrison remembers that at 40-15, he “stressed a little bit” and tried to end the game by attacking the net behind his second serve. Ilhan stepped around the delivery and hit a cold winner. Next, Harrison pulled the plug on a developing rally with an ill-advised drop shot, and from deuce it was all downhill for Harrison.
“In that situation the guy is nervous. You have make him earn the point,” Harrison said. “He might make a mistake, or start pushing, so you really have to stay calm and construct the points. I guess I was just trying to get out of the game, instead trying to break him down. If I had constructed either of those last two points, I might have broken him down and maybe it would have been me, not him, in the third round of the Open.”
It’s a good thing any time you hear a 17-year old with an atomic serve talk about constructing points on the court instead of blistering the paint off it. Harrison’s took a bit step toward maturity as a player that day, and his current form should elevate his ranking to inside the top 400. That’s still a long way from his destination, the ATP main tour, but he’s still technically a junior. Plus, he lost a good portion of last year, and the early part of this year, because of a stress fracture in his back.
Harrison, whose father Pat is a teaching pro at the Nick Bollettieri IMG Tennis Academy (the family moved there last November), made the risky decision to turn pro long before his junior eligibility expired, even though his best 18-and-under result in a Grand Slam was a semifinal at the Australian Open of 2007.
“My aspiration all along was to turn pro, and when I came back from my back injury in April the time seemed right. I didn’t even have to think about it very long,” he said. “This is what I’ve wanted to do all along.”
Harrison, whose gifted younger brother is also at the Bollettieri Academy, was born in Shreveport, La., although the family later moved to New Braunfels, Tx., so the boys could train at John Newcombe's tennis ranch. In elementary school, Ryan missed so much school when he was eleven because of tennis that at one point the teachers refused to allow him to make up work. They just started giving him zeros.
“My parents were always going in to apologize, because I was always off playing events, and really enjoying it,” Harrison recalled. “Finally, my parents asked how I felt about being home schooled, to take off some of that school pressure. That was okay with me. My mom Susan was a teacher when my parents got married anyway. She insisted I study and she stayed on me about my grades all along.”
Harrison is a poised, thoughtful, articulate young man with an impressive vocabulary and a realistic grasp of the trade-offs he’s made – not exactly what you might expect of a kid who fundamentally insisted on running off to join the circus. He seems years more mature than many of his contemporaries.
“I don’t really think I’m missing out on what they call a ‘normal’ life. Most kids my age have never been out of their home towns, while I played all the Grand Slam qualis this year, and have already been to and a lot of the major cities in the world. This is the life I always wanted to have.”
Harrison also had a chance to sing before a banquet hall full of people not long ago, although that wasn’t really part of his grand blueprint for life. It happened during the US vs. Croatia Davis Cup tie a few months ago, when he (along with Devin Britton) joined the squad as practice players. The US Davis Cup squad has a rich hazing tradition, and the veterans on the team (James Blake, Mardy Fish, Bob and Mike Bryan, and Andy Roddick – the latter via SMS text) gave the newbies a choice: one had to sing at the traditional teams banquet, the other had to make the speech customarily given by the team captain.
“If you know Devin, he wasn’t about to get up and sing. So he shotgunned the speech right away,” Harrison said. “So I got stuck with the singing. They wanted me to do this Journey song, Don’t Stop Believing. Bob Bryan had an iPhone, and he pulled up the lyrics in the men’s room at the banquet hall. I studied the words for about ten minutes, but of course once I got up there I forgot almost all of them. I was awful. Just terrible. But I guess I got a little respect out of just going up there and doing it.”
Harrison doesn’t lack for friends. He’s good buddies with a number of promising American players, including Britton and Chase Buchanan. They talk, text, and compete in a fantasy football league of their own. They’re also aware of the hue and cry about the apparent demise of American tennis. No American male has won a Grand Slam title in six years – the longest dry spell for the US in the history of the game.
“We hear what people say,” Harrison said. “At least in my case, when I hear that we’re not dedicated, that we’ve become soft, stuff like that – it only motivates me. And I know Devin feels that way, too, because we’ve talked about it. We’re trying to give everything in order to get American tennis going again.”
With American tennis to save, the career as a recording artist can wait.