Tuesday (again I had meeting!) was a smorgasbord of watching tennis at the Open. Carol Wood invited me to the President’s Suite (thank you Carol!) which is the best seat in the house (Arthur Ashe Stadium). I arrived in the second set of Ivanovic/Azarenka. Azarenka pulled out the second after dropping the first and we went into lunch with Cindy and Bruce Babb. It was really good (scallops and mocha chip ice cream were the highlights), and then we returned to watch Na Li and Makarova (who took out Radwanska and Lisiki). Li won the first set and we watched a bit of the second, then left to go see Hewitt/Youzny play on Armstrong. . I hadn’t seen Hewitt in person and it was an interesting match. Lots of sliced backhand rallies, long points, mixing up of pace. Hewitt won the 2nd and third sets and was up 4-1 in the fourth…then Youzny ripped a few wonderful one-handed backhands, and won 5 straight games and it looked like it was over…especially when he won the first two of the 5th…then Hewitt won 5 straight games! Of course, that was too good to last (for all the Aussie fans in the crowd…lots of cries of “Oi Oi Oi). Youzny took over again and won the final 5 games of the match…overall he had a little more firepower off both sides and on serve.
After the Youzny match we returned to Ashe and saw Djokovic manhandle yet another opponent, Granollers from Spain (who took out American Smyzek in 5 sets the previous round), 6-3 60 60, winning the final 15 games. He’s looking awfully good this tournament. He never seemed rushed…Granollers never seemed to have time to get set!
Next up on the agenda was a junior match…we went to see Taylor Fritz play his first round of boys doubles on a side court. They play no ad and match tiebreak if they split. They did split sets, winning the first and losing the second, but won the tiebreak decisively to move on to the second round.
We moved on to women’s doubles, with Makarova playing doubles now on Grandstand with Vesnina from Russia against Erakovic from NZ and Cara Black from Zimbabwe. It was really fun doubles to watch, good net exchanges and lots of lobs. Black has terrific hands! However, the Russians won the match to reach the quarters. It was fun to watch a match courtside, we were right behind the baseline
We ended the day watching in Armstrong, a very good match between Berdych and Wawrinka. It was played at a different level from that of Youzny/Hewitt, in the sense that the pace was much harder. Wawrinka looked really good and won in four sets.
That was the last of the Open for 2013 for me…I was off the next day to Germany and today, Friday, to Austria on the train.
