U.S. Open: In battle of youth, Nadal serves best


By Karen Crouse The New York Times
September 2nd, 2005

NEW YORK If the teenagers had curfews, they would have broken them. Rafael Nadal, 19, and the 18-year-old Scoville Jenkins played a second-round match at the U.S. Open that was so chock full of drama, it could not be contained in one day.

� A one-hour rain delay before the start of the late match Wednesday night was followed by two and a half hours of riveting tennis that ended with Jenkins limping to the net to congratulate Nadal, the French Open champion, on his 6-4, 7-5, 6-4 victory.

� Jenkins, who is 112 days younger than the second-seeded Nadal and 350 spots below him in the world rankings, was treated for blisters on his left toes between the second and third sets. He appeared to have trouble walking between points, but during them it was another story as he hit huge forehands and clutch volleys to the bittersweet end.

� The match figured to be winding down when Nadal was serving at 5-2 in the third set. To that point, he had lost only 10 points on his serve. But Jenkins, who received a wild card into the tournament, broke him and then held. It was not over until Jenkins hit a lob shot long in the tricky winds that swirled all day through Arthur Ashe Stadium.

� The first match of the evening at Ashe featured Serena Williams, who was every bit as entertaining to watch as the flamboyant Nadal. There is no stage on which Williams looks more at home than the U.S. Open, where the lights are brighter and the audience stirs to life at night.

� "I love playing here at night," Williams said. "For me, it's the biggest stage."

� When Williams walks onto the court at Ashe, her game is transformed. In her second-round match Wednesday against Catalina Casta�o of Colombia, she looked like a two-time U.S. Open champion, and not the player who came into the year's final major with a 3-4 record in her last seven matches.

� Neither Casta�o nor a confounding wind could slow Williams's march toward a potential fourth-round showdown against her sister, Venus. In a 6-2, 6-2 victory, Serena Williams's ground strokes were sharp, her movement was fluid, and aggressiveness oozed from her.

� After dispatching Casta�o, Serena Williams told the crowd that she will donate $100 for every ace she hits for the rest of the season to a charity to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

� Wearing her heart on her sleeve and designer eight-carat Crown of Hearts earrings in her lobes, Williams said, "I thought it would be a halfway decent gesture," and added, "I've always considered myself a philanthropist."

� She had two aces against Casta�o in the 70-minute match, which ended shortly before it began raining, delaying the start of the match between Nadal and Jenkins.

� Williams had 25 winners and 25 unforced errors, most of the latter off her forehand side. The errors were a reflection of her aggressiveness, not a flaw in her stroke. "Just because I'm going for it more," she said.

� Williams's next opponent is Francesca Schiavone. Venus Williams, who beat Maria Kirilenko, earlier Wednesday, will face Daniela Hantuchova, whom she beat at Wimbledon. If the sisters win, they will meet each other.

� "I definitely was at a point where I could have picked up my level," Serena Williams said. "I'm definitely excited to play Schiavone. It's going to be a good match."

� Williams looked much fitter Wednesday than she did at Wimbledon, where she lost in the third round to Jill Craybas. Then, she said, "I was definitely a little bit out of shape."

� Williams came to the net 17 times and won 16 of the points, which she took as an encouraging sign given that, in her words, "when times get tough, I stick to that baseline."

� Williams, who lives in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, had her home buffeted by two hurricanes last year. She thought the destruction they caused was bad until she saw images of the areas battered by Katrina, the hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast on Monday.

� "I've been in that situation the last year," she said, "but nothing like it is in New Orleans. It was just horrible. It was like, oh my God. It was quite shocking.

� "It just looks like a war scene," she said. "It's just horrifying."

� � Mirza finds motivation

� It figures that Sania Mirza would find inspiration in the first-round upset of Andy Roddick by Luxembourg's Gilles Muller, The New York Times reported.

� Mirza, like Muller, knows how it feels to carry a racket bag sagging with the weight of a country's expectations.

� Mirza is ranked No.42 in the world. She is the first woman from India to grace the top 100. After weathering the wind and Maria Elena Camerin, 6-4, 1-6, 6-4, in a second-round match Wednesday afternoon at Armstrong Stadium, Mirza said Muller's monumental victory made her feel "that you can do it, too, like a lot of people out there who are coming out of the odds."

� Mirza, 18, does not appear to lack self-confidence. She showed up at her postmatch news conference wearing a T-shirt that said, "I'm cute?" and offered by way of reply an off-color equivalent of "Duh."

� At Wimbledon, where she lost in the second round to the 2004 U.S. Open champion, Svetlana Kuznetsova, her T-shirt read like a manifesto: "Well-behaved women rarely make history."

� Asked about her wardrobe statements, Mirza did not bother to hide her exasperation. "I don't think you should take a lot of things seriously that I wear," she said. "Let's just put it that way. It's just a T-shirt."

� "I can say what I want to," she added. "I don't need to wear it on my T-shirt. I think I like to be 18 sometimes."

� Mirza hits with the same conviction with which she speaks. Her ground strokes are powerful, especially her forehand, which she hits with all the force that her 5-foot-7, or 1.70-meter, 130-pound, or 60-kilogram, frame can muster. Her go-for-broke approach produced 56 unforced errors, versus 36 winners, in a stiff breeze.

� "You really have to keep moving," Mirza said, "because you have no idea till the last second where the ball is going to go. Toss is all over the place on the serve. I'm just happy I came through because I guess it's just giving me more and more practice for the bigger matches I'm hopefully going to play."

� Mirza, who won her first WTA title in February in her hometown, Hyderabad, then said: "I'm feeling the ball good. I guess I'm just playing the best tennis I've ever played. Just feels like I'm improving on a daily basis."









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