In a historic flop for US men’s tennis, no player reached the fourth round of the US Open, or any Grand Slam this year, with the loss of last man standing Tim Smyczek on Sunday at Flushing Meadows.
Spain’s Marcel Granollers beat the 109th-ranked US wild card 6-4, 4-6, 0-6, 6-3, 7-5 after three hours and 24 minutes to reach the last 16 and complete a humiliating and unprecedented Open-era Grand Slam wipeout for American men.
It came on the heels of no US man reaching the third round at Wimbledon for the first time since 1912 and last month, which produced the first week in rankings history without a top-20 US player.
While US boys once dreamed of being the next Jimmy Connors or Andre Agassi, US tennis has been reduced to trying to pilfer the next potential Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods from rival sports to try and reverse the fall from grace.
“We’ve been trying to encourage some of the kids that were going to play basketball or American football to get out on a tennis court,” said former world No. 1 and seven-time Grand Slam singles winner John McEnroe. “We need truly great athletes, need to try to nab some of the kids playing some other sports.”
With a growing challenge from Asia and Eastern Europe, there is a far tougher global landscape than decades past for who those who accept the task of trying to win the first US men’s Grand Slam singles title since Andy Roddick captured the 2003 US Open.
US 13th seed John Isner said after his third-round loss that he was off to watch a national telecast of his beloved collegiate American football squad.
While major US network television coverage beyond the Grand Slams and pre-US Open events is limited, some form of American football is shown all year long.
Toss in such popular sports as basketball, baseball and US stock car racing, and add the growth of soccer and golf, and US tennis is fighting for talent without Grand Slam-champion role models to offer.
Taiwanese world No. 1 women’s doubles star Hsieh Su-wei on Saturday overcame a first-set loss to win her opening match at the Madrid Open. Top seeds Hsieh and partner Elise Mertens of Belgium, with whom she last month won her fourth Indian Wells women’s doubles title, bounced back from a rocky first set to beat Asia Muhammad of the US and Aldila Sutjiadi of Indonesia 2-6, 6-4, 10-2. Hsieh and Mertens were next to face Heather Watson of the UK and Xu Yifan of China in the round of 16. Thirty-eight-year-old Hsieh last month reclaimed her world No. 1 spot after her Indian
EYES ON THE PRIZE: Armed with three solid men’s singles shuttlers and doubles Olympic champions, Taiwan aim to make their first Thomas Cup semi-final, Chou Tien-chen said Taiwanese badminton star Tai Tzu-ying yesterday quickly dispatched Malaysia’s Goh Jin Wei in straight sets, while her male counterpart Chou Tien-chen beat Germany’s Kai Schaefer, as Taiwan’s women’s and men’s teams won their Group B opening rounds of the TotalEnergies BWF Thomas and Uber Cup Finals in Chengdu, China. World No. 5 Tai beat Goh 21-19, 22-20 in a speedy 33 minutes, her fourth straight victory over the world No. 24 shuttler since they first faced each other in the quarter-finals of the 2018 Malaysia Open, where Tai went on to win the women’s singles title. Malaysia followed up Tai’s opening victory
Chen Yi-tung (陳奕通) secured a historic Olympic berth on Sunday by winning the senior men’s foil event at the 2024 Asia Oceania Zonal Olympic Fencing Qualifiers in United Arab Emirates. Chen defeated Samuel Elijah of Singapore 15-4 in the final in Dubai to secure the only wild card in the event, making him the first male Olympian fencer from Taiwan in 36 years and only the sixth Taiwanese fencer to ever qualify for the quadrennial event. The last appearance by a Taiwanese male fencer at the Olympics was in 1988, when Wang San-tsai (王三財) and Cheng Ming-hsiang (鄭明祥) competed in Seoul. The
Rafael Nadal on Tuesday lost in straight sets to 31st-ranked Jiri Lehecka in the fourth round at the Madrid Open, while Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei advanced to the semi-finals in the women’s doubles. Nadal said that he was feeling good about his progress following his latest injury layoff. Nadal called it a “positive week” in every way and said his body held up well. “I was able to play four matches, a couple of tough matches,” Nadal said. “So very positive, winning three matches, playing four matches at the high level of tennis. I enjoyed a lot playing at home. I leave here with