"The Whole Thing, I Loved It"

As I threaded my way through the overstuffed grounds at Flushing Meadows in the early evening yesterday, I caught the sound of John McEnroe’s voice on a café television. The New York native was saying that it felt like one of those special nights at the Open, when there was a little something extra in the air. If anything, Johnny Mac was understating the case. There was a lot in the air, and all over the ground. Humans, many with tans, many in pink shirts, many with nice hair, many of whom looked like they’d just been helicoptered in after a long summer at the Hamptons, were sprawled over every inch of pavement. To get from one end of the place to the other meant sidling past jacket-wearing Martini-drinkers on your left and folks forced to eat sushi standing up—is there a greater indignity?—on your right.

The reason for this vast recession-what-recession-can-you-possibly-mean party? She was on a practice court just out of sight of the Manhattan masses, scampering around and hitting tennis balls with her boyfriend, Austin Smith, to get loose. And that’s pretty much where Melanie Oudin would end up a few hours later, hugging Smith in a quiet hallway underneath Arthur Ashe Stadium while her mother spoke in a whispery voice to a huddled group of reporters a few feet away. If this Southern girl was alone in an ocean of New Yorkers before her match, she was even more alone now—that's how losing in tennis works. As Oudin approached her family, she looked a little forlorn. She had reluctantly answered a couple questions from Pam Shriver immediately after falling to Caroline Wozniacki 6-2, 6-2, and then she’d been caught in the wrong spot in the hallway outside the court and forced to wait by herself as Roger Federer and Robin Soderling were called to do their introductory interviews with ESPN.

“You made it to the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open.” These were the words of Smith and a younger boy next to him when they saw Oudin. “That’s awesome, Melanie.” It was a touching attempt from people so young to help Oudin keep the moment in perspective.

She needed those words. Oudin was initially crushed by the loss. “I came off and was pretty disappointed,” she said in her press conference, “so my coach was like, ‘You’ve had an incredible two weeks. You should not be as hard on yourself.’ For me, I wanted to win more than anything, losing wasn’t good enough.”

By the time she faced us, though, the message had begun to sink in and Oudin had begun to see the long view. “Now I realize, I mean, I got to the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open, so I know that hopefully I can do it again and again.” You could hear the echo of her friends' consoling words in hers.

Why didn’t she go further? Looking back, it’s not too hard to understand. At Wimbledon, Oudin beat former No. 1 Jelena Jankovic in three sets and then lost to the less-heralded Agnieszka Radwanska. Like Wozniacki, Radwanska is a steady baseliner—“pusher” is the uglier term for it—and she makes her opponents hit a lot of balls just a hair out of their comfort zones. Wozniacki followed that formula to a T last night. She backed the 5-foot-6 Oudin up with moonballs, she scrambled and re-started points with floating slices, and, unlike her previous opponents at the Open, she made Oudin hit that fabled and at times mythical “one more ball.” It really did work this time: On many crucial occasions, Oudin worked Wozniacki out of position only to send the final putaway forehand long or into the net.

While Oudin has an inherently risky flat forehand—it skips through the court beautifully when she hits it right, but she has to hit it just right to keep it in—credit the Dane for forcing her to try those putaway shots from behind the baseline. Wozniacki showed what a strong and smart defender she is last night, as well as a deceptively stubborn competitor. She won the long deuce games, and she didn’t panic when Oudin seemed on the verge of mounting another comeback early in the second set. Wozniacki just kept making her hit one more shot, knowing the pressure from the crowd was on both of their shoulders. How much Wozniacki herself felt it was evident from her reaction when she won. Despite the lopsided scores, she dropped to the court with that I can only describe as relieved disbelief. Yes, she had made her first Grand Slam semifinal, but she’d also survived America’s sweetheart.

Was the accumulated pressure of the last week too much for Oudin? Having been inside the tournament itself, I didn’t have a full grasp of how much her image had penetrated beyond the walls of the National Tennis Center, until I saw the crowds there yesterday. There were stories of kids who had begged their parents to get them tickets because “they’d become tennis fans last week.” The trouble was, by the time the gates opened for the evening session in Ashe, there were so many of them massed outside—they’d turned into a gently swaying sea of humanity—that only a few thousand made it to their seats by the time Oudin and Wozniacki played their first point. Is it a coincidence that Oudin began this match even flatter than she had in her previous first-set losses?

I’m told by a colleague who was watching on TV that she looked a little disappointed when she entered the stadium. It had to be a bit of a shock after the heat and noise of her day-session victories to play in cool night air in front of a sophisticated city crowd that took a good five games to show up. Even the “Believe” shirts that her family and coach wore—they were nowhere to be seen afterward—seemed to break the innocent spell of her earlier matches; Oudin was already branded. She periodically tried to rally herself and generate a buzz of her own, but her trademark “Come on!”, which had sounded defiant early in the tournament, just evaporated into the night. Or maybe her words got lost in the hair of the Donald, whose imperious glare from the first row of his luxury box set the tone for the evening. The recession-busting party was over.

Of course this is a happy story, and we’ll see Oudin again. When they go that far that young, they tend to do it again—or “again and again,” as Oudin said hopefully. So let me end the first chapter of her story with the part that made me laugh last night. Asked near the end of her presser what surprised her the most during her run at the Open, Oudin, her loss fading quickly in her mind, didn’t hesitate.

“Well, I never thought I’d play Maria Sharapova on Arthur Ashe Stadium at the U.S. Open this year,” she said with rising amazement, which she quickly cut with a little teenage sarcasm. “Definitely did not see that coming. So that whole match, just getting to play her and beating her, I’ve never met her before, so shaking her hand after the match was the first time I met her. It was crazy. The whole thing, though, I loved it.”

The whole thing, we loved it, too.