Hewitt's weird win Bruce Wilson
Paris 27may04
LLEYTON Hewitt got it right, on court and off, when he finally made it to the
French Open late on a golden spring afternoon. "It was weird out there," he
said, and so it was.
Hewitt eventually beat the Casablanca-born Frenchman Arnaud Di Pasquale in a
weird scoreline 6-0 7-6 (7-5) 4-6 6-1 and will now play the Austrian Jurgen
Meltzer, whom he beat convincingly a couple of weeks ago in Hamburg.
Weird, too, was the stat that showed that in the first set Hewitt struggled
to get his service game anywhere at all much, missing with two out of three
of his first serves. Yet he won it six-zip.
Then, he lifted his game to where at one point about 80 per cent of his first
serves were going in and he was not just struggling to hold serve but was
broken in four consecutive service games and that cost him the third set.
Weird.
"You know, I think I was probably more aggressive on his service games than I
was on mine," Hewitt said of a period in which seven of nine serves were
dropped. It was, in fact, Di Pasquale who kept his nerve, and held for the
set.
Di Pasquale, who had an injury-plagued 2003 but was once ranked as high as
39th, had not played any senior tennis this year and was at Roland Garros on
a deserved wildcard. After all, he did win France a bronze medal at the
Sydney Olympics.
The rustiness that gave Hewitt the first set so easily suddenly changed and
until the Frenchman cramped in the fourth set, needing a lengthy treatment
break and then really playing like a semi-cripple, he was giving Hewitt a
hard time.
Hewitt said Di Pasquale had nothing to lose, one of those cliches that are
so often true. Although Hewitt won, it was Di Pasquale, who hadn't played
for more than a year after serious back surgery, who inspired the crowd.
When both players were at their best, it was a cracking match of prolonged
and often violent rallies.
John Fitzgerald and Wally Masur, the Davis Cup gurus, sat courtside urging
the man they call "Rusty" on to greater things as Di Pasquale started to get
the range. For all that, Hewitt served for the second set at 5-3 and was well
broken. He needed all his reserves to win the tiebreak.
So, for the first time since 1982 only one Australian has advanced to the
second round of the French Open. That year Peter McNamara made it to the
quarter-finals. The statistic continued to underline serious questions now
being asked about the depth of Australian tennis.
Hewitt suggested that one way would be to have more genuine claycourts in
Australia. He said that after mastering clay -- the sliding, the movements
needed -- the transition to other courts was easier than the other way around.
Historians among us recalled that the last Australian to win here, Rod Laver
in 1969, learnt his tennis playing on rolled ant-bed courts in the Queensland
sticks near Gladstone, a surface very like clay. Laver and another ant-bed
graduate, Roy Emerson, each won the French twice. They also won every other
grand slam title.
And so Hewitt had a point. He said: "I think you have to look at the 10, 12,
14-year-olds, on claycourts and learning how to move and slide." He thought
that 16 was getting too old to learn.
"I think it's a lot easier to adjust from a good claycourt player to become a
good grass or hardcourt player than it is vice versa. The game has changed so
much that you can play from the back of the court on all surfaces now."
And for the benefit of anyone listening, he also said that it was "impossible"
to play both tournament and Davis Cup tennis at the pace he has been.
In a way, he said, being out of the Davis Cup now gave him a much better shot
at winning this tournament.
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