By Art Spander
The Sports Xchange/CBSSports.com
NEW YORK — It was the day that wouldn’t end. It was an afternoon that became evening and offered American tennis a future as bright as the moon that eventually rose over Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Youth will be served — and volleyed and backhanded.
First, Melanie Oudin, the wunderkind, and then John Isner tossed caution to what little wind there was on this historic day at Flushing Meadows and tossed the schedule of the U.S. Open upside down and inside out.
The 17-year-old Oudin, who’s becoming adept at this sort of thing, upset Maria Sharapova 3-6, 6-4, 7-5, in 2 hours, 58 minutes on Saturday.
Then the 24-year-old Isner upset No. 5 seed Andy Roddick 7-6 (3), 6-3, 3-6, 5-7, 7-6 (5) in 3 hours, 51 minutes.
They came back-to-back, the matches, nearly seven hours of tension, and for a sellout crowd of more than 24,000, there was such excitement that the spectators didn’t want to leave.
Except two more matches, the evening program, were still to be played. And the fans who held tickets for those matches, which wouldn’t begin until 10 p.m., not the announced 7 p.m., were waiting to get their seats. They had been watching the big TV screen in the plaza for more than three hours.
What they saw was the 6-foot-9 Isner smashing 39 aces and keep Roddick, who has the record for the fastest serve ever, 156 mph, off balance and out of sorts.
This after Oudin, who for comparison’s sake is more than a foot shorter than Isner — she’s listed at 5-foot-6 — kept coming at Sharapova with the aggression of a UFC fighter.
Two days earlier, Oudin had knocked off the No. 4 seed, Elena Dementieva, a Russian. Then she discombobulated Sharapova, the 2007 champ, the No. 29 seed, a Russian. Maria had 21 double faults. Next, in the fourth round Oudin will play Nadia Petrova, a Russian.
It sounds like Napoleon’s campaign against the Czars in the 19th Century.
“I had every emotion possible,” said Oudin. “I mean, I was crying. I was so happy and excited. I’m pretty sure I screamed after that last shot.”
Which was a cross-court winner.
Isner’s last shot was, of course, a monster serve in the fifth-set tiebreaker. Roddick hit it out.
“I had to play the match of my life to beat him,” said Isner, referring to Roddick, who won this tournament in 2003 and two months ago took Roger Federer to a fifth set at Wimbledon, where there are no fifth-set tiebreakers, and lost 16-14.
“On this stage, this setting, I proved I can play with anybody.”
We’re only maybe eight miles from Broadway, 42nd Street, the Great White Way. You know the cliche, “You’re going out there a kid, but you’re coming back a star.” Oudin and Isner have filled that role.
She’s from Marietta, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, home-schooled so she could become the champion Melanie seems destined to be. He’s from North Carolina but was a star at the University of Georgia. Must be something in the water down there.
Tobacco Road? How about Topspin Highway?
“There’s a lot out of your hands, the way he plays,” Roddick said of Isner, whom he had beaten twice in two previous matches, including a few weeks ago in the semifinal of the Washington, D.C., tournament.
“You can’t teach 6-9,” Roddick said of the angle and power of Isner’s serve. “Sometimes you try to fight it off. But it’s not like the majority of matches we play, where if you play well you win. He doesn’t allow you to get into the match.”
Isner contracted mononucleosis in the late spring and couldn’t enter either the French Open or Wimbledon.
“I remember how ticked off I was at home,” said Isner, “but it may have been a blessing in disguise. I took a month off, then started working hard and smart.”
Oudin, who has “BELIEVE” embossed on the ankle of her multicolored tennis shoes, also credits her practice routines for success.
If you recall, after Melanie stunned Jelena Jankovic at Wimbledon, Jankovic contended Oudin didn’t have “the weapons,” primarily a serve. What would anyone expect from a Munchkin? But she has staying power and courage.
“I think my biggest weapon can be mental toughness,” said Oudin. “I developed it. I wasn’t born with it.”
Someone wondered if she’d been labeled a giant killer, although to her every opponent is rather enormous. “Yeah,” she said, “a couple of people have called me that.”
What you could have called Saturday’s play in the Open was confused. The afternoon matches went so long and so deep into the evening that the women’s competition between top seed Dinara Safina and Petra Kvitova was shifted from Ashe Court to Armstrong Court so the James Blake-Tommy Robredo match wouldn’t be starting around midnight.
That’s one of the unpredictable parts of tennis. You never know how long a match might run. The ones involving Oudin and Isner seemed to run forever, but they didn’t mind. Neither did the fans on this wonderful long day’s journey into night.
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http://www.cbssports.com/tennis/story/12162826
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