NEW YORK—“Do something different, Donald!” This was the advice that a woman deep in the stands on Court 17 kept giving to Donald Young today. Virtually every time he lost a point, he received the mysterious instruction. People around me chuckled, but I couldn’t decide: Were her words completely idiotic, or were they the only admonition that might still be useful for American tennis’s former prodigy turned cautionary tale?
In the end, Young seemed to take them to heart. He certainly did something different. He didn’t wilt in the heat. He didn’t throw his racquet over the fence. He bounced back after serving for the match and blowing it. He hung in physically with a taller and stronger (and usually better) opponent, Stan Wawrinka. He outplayed him at the moment when he absolutely had to. He won the first five-setter of his career. And, at the end of it all, this terminally unhappy tennis player smiled more broadly than he ever has on a court. We’ve grown so used to Young’s scowl of frustration over the years that this may have been the most surprising development of all. Young even inspired his sometime nemesis Patrick McEnroe to Tweet afterward that he “became a man today.” (This was news to Young, who joked that he thought he had become a man when he turned 21 last year).
The last time I witnessed the Donald-Young-finally-grows-up moment that the screenwriters in us have all been waiting for was at Indian Wells this past March. Young beat Andy Murray that day, and as he did today, he called it the biggest win of his career. That time I wrote about interviewing Young when he was a kid in Atlanta with his mom sitting next to him. I wrote about watching him practice with his dad as a 16-year-old and thinking that he would have to go elsewhere if he wanted to take his training seriously. I wrote about seeing him at the less-than-deluxe local motel where we were both staying during Indian Wells, again accompanied by his mom. I wrote about how his sentences still trailed off midway in his presser, like a kid’s, and how he said he’d finally realized what hard work was when he started training with Mardy Fish and Sam Querrey that winter in California. I wrote about how he admitted, with a smile, that Pete Sampras had whupped him in a game of 21 and then called him a “little princess.” Then Young went out in the next round and played a dog of a match to lose to Tommy Robredo and everyone either forgot about him all over again, or wondered how we ever could have believed anything would ever change with DY.
Here we are again, six months later. Today Young looked over at his parents after virtually every point, good and bad. He remains deeply connected to them, on court and off, much more so than, say, Andy Murray is with his mother. When Young served for the match at 5-4 in the fifth, he was obviously nervous to start. After he’d flown a forehand 10 feet over the baseline and double faulted, he tapped a tentative backhand into the net. It was 15-40. He was blowing it. Young’s first reaction was to stare at his parents and hold up his arms like a kid: “Why is this happening to me?”
You could see from this why McEnroe and the USTA have urged Young to break away from his folks and work with them full-time. The look of persecution etched on his face is part of a wider trend with him. Young is quick to assign blame for his troubles, whether it was with his now famous, but temporarily forgotten, expletive-laced Tweet about the USTA earlier this year; or the way, after he hit a forehand well long today, he punched his strings, looked at his parents, and yelled in outrage, “It flew!” He hit right, apparently, but the strings made an error.
So, while Young won, was this another case of an opponent handing him a breakthrough? Wawrinka looked indifferent for much of the afternoon; he consistently overhit, as he typically does; and he appeared utterly lost by the end of the fifth. He blew a 4-1 lead, and on one crucial point in the breaker he sailed an inexplicable backhand softly into the air and wide. I could certainly see Young going out in his next match, against Juan Ignacia Chela, and throwing in another clunker in what should be a winnable match. He still doesn’t get nearly enough free points with his serve, and he still uses an old-fashioned, both-arms-down, both-arms-up service motion, one which gives him very little racquet-head acceleration. Beyond the serve, Young is never going to be a physical force on the court—you could hear the difference between his shots and Wawrinka’s today—and while his winners are flashy, he doesn’t have a go-to attacking play (primarily because he can’t feed off of his serve) when he needs a point. And Young still has trouble containing his emotions. He was shouting angrily as early as the second game, and his default look on court is that of a man hanging his head, waiting for the inevitable disaster to arrive.
But we can put our concerns for the future aside for the moment, because this one was special. Young has been cast as the bad guy of American tennis, the racquet-throwing ingrate who took the easy way, with wild cards, and squandered his long-term chances for the quick money those wild cards bring in. And that reputation is not wholly unearned. Young admitted this spring that he hadn’t always worked the way he should have—he hadn’t, he said, even realized he wasn’t working hard enough. But today, while the 22-year-old’s sentences still trailed off like a teenager’s, he said something that I’m going to take as a hopeful sign.
Nick Bollettieri once watched a 14-year-old Donald Young play a junior match, one in which Young showed off both his ball-striking talents and his explosive temper. Bollettieri, in his deceptively sage-like way, put his finger on the kid’s future concerns. He said that Young had the game, but he would someday have to learn how to handle adversity, learn how to adjust if things didn’t go the way he wanted them to right away. For the most part, Young has never learned to do that; he gets defeated midway and stays defeated.
Today, Young was asked if it was “nerves” that got to him when he served for the match.
“It was all nerves,” he said. “I’ve served for matches and gotten broken, but not in the fifth set with someone of Stan’s caliber. I know that chances like that aren’t going to come through too often.”
That thought, that a chance like this wasn’t going to come along too often, was enough to help Young through this latest moment of adversity. It was enough to help him hold to stay in the match at 5-6, when he could have folded, and enough to help him play some of his best tennis in the final tiebreaker. This afternoon, at least, Young did what Bollettieri knew he would have to do one day.
When it was over, Young pulled out every celebration in the book. He pounded his chest, he did the lawnmower, he pumped his fist, he raised the roof, and he did a tried one-legged dance step. When he did the latter, he looked at his parents one more time. This time, though, you couldn't hold it against him. This time he was taking the woman in the crowd's advice and doing something different, something we haven't seen enough from him. This time he was smiling. He might have become a man today, but he looked younger than he has in a long time.