US Open: Day 6

Wow. Even for a tennis ignorant such as myself, the US Open is pretty spectacular. We had day tickets for Louis Armstrong, which guaranteed us good seats in Armstrong and seats in Grandstand and all of the minor courts. Tickets for Arthur Ashe were incredibly hard/impossible to get, but the other matches were spectacular. Essentially, I saw parts of 8 different matches, mens and women's singles and doubles. It was really fun, especially the Murray/Melzer match.

The first two matches at Louis Armstrong were rather lackluster. The first was Sam Querrey of the US upsetting Ivo Karlovic of Croatia, the 14th seed. We only stayed for part of the first set, which was boring because neither players broke serve and...it was just uninteresting overall. Querrey beat Karlovic in straight sets, and by the score, it didn't look like either one broke serve in the first two sets. Maybe it was too early in the day to generate much excitement. I must say that it was the first time in two months that I have woken up before 11, much less at 8:15 AM. We only stayed half an hour into this match and went to watch some women's doubles at 11:30. Querrey went on to make the 4th round without us in attendance.

Then came a second round match of the Chinese women's doubles contingent of Zi Yan/Jie Zheng (seeded 8th), who thoroughly trounced the European team of Lucie Safarova/Mara Santangelo. The Chinese placed the ball extraordinarily well, and the Europeans really didn't have a chance. Safarova crumbled a bit under pressure, and she double faulted several times. There were a lot of Chinese supporters at this match, but they failed to make any noise at all until it was clear that their team would win without any effort. In contrast, we were surrounded by Europeans of different nationalities, all of which screamed "Brava!" and other such Italian phrases as well as conversing in Parisian French.

Then we watched the men's doubles match of Igor Kunitsyn/Dmitry Tursunov and Simon Aspelin/Julian Knowle, who were ranked 6th. We didn't even stay for an entire set in this match, but the ranked team was pretty hot. In particular, Aspelin was hot until he started playing. Needless to say, they were upset in three sets. After this match, we caught a few minutes of Amelie Mauresmo(32) vs Julie Coin. Unseeded Coin suddenly found herself a celebrity after beating top-ranked Ana Ivanovic in the second round on Thursday. This match against Mauresmo, a former #1, was highly anticipated. It turned out to be uninteresting as Mauresmo beat her fellow Frenchwoman in straight sets, 6-4, 6-4. There wasn't anything noticeable about this game except that Mauresmo does look very manly in her uberbuffness. The far more interesting women's singles match was Nadia Petrova (19) vs. Flavia Pennetta (16). That was a thrilling three-setter, which we caught the end of. Both women just pound the ball across the court, but they look graceful while doing it. Pennetta won the first set, lost the second, but persevered in the third. In the third set, it looked as if Petrova was suffering from a toe injury. Both Petrova and Pennetta did very well in 2008 and led undistinguished careers previous to this year. They were pretty fun to watch. As their game stretched on, more people came to the court just like us. We had to wait a while because there's supposed to be no movement allowed when the ball is in play, especially in the players' line of sight while serving. In Armstrong, we had seats directly in the line of sight, so getting up wasn't possible until each break.

The third match in Armstrong, Gael Monfils (32) vs. David Nalbandian (7), was also lackluster at best. Monfils is an up and coming French star, but his playing style is very awkward. His movements are rather jerky, and he looks like he doesn't know where to put his body sometimes. And his sneakers squeak abominably. Monfils is fun to watch because he does little dances and he's a bit flamboyant. He doesn't have the intense look of murderous concentration that seems to be stamped on every other tennis player's face. In his last match, his racket went flying into where the photographers were sitting and he got stuck on the divider while trying to retrieve it. Monfils pulled off a straight-set win over Nalbandian, but it was a boring game. My tennis friend claimed that both players were very out of shape, and Nalbandian had a belly. I'm not sure about the second point, but both Monfils and Nalbandian did not look particularly good on the court compared to the other matches. Even Querrey and Karlovic, while dull, looked smooth. Monfils essentially steamrolled over Nalbandian, 6-3, 6-4, 6-2.

The two amazing matches of the day were Murray/Melzer and Ferrer/Nishikori. These are two instances where watching on TV is incomparable to watching live action. I'm going to wax poetic about my love of sports again, but these two long, grueling games really embody the determination and beauty of tennis, and sports in general. Melzer and Nishikori (as underdogs), fought unbelievably and bravely. In Melzer's case, he played the last two sets through cramps and extreme pain. Nishikori, ranked 126 in the world, lost his composure a bit in the third and fourth sets, but heroically rallied himself and managed to outplay 4th ranked Ferrer in the fifth set. I don't usually cheer for the underdogs, but both gave superhuman efforts. Even though Melzer didn't pull off the mindblowing upset that Nishikori did, he still deserves a lot of credit for pounding Murray during the first three sets and almost wrapping up the match.

Next stop: Wimbledon.