U.S. Open Quallies!

I know that we're still at the end of the U.S. Open warm-up tournaments, with the Pilot Pen going on this week. But since I moved to New York last year, my focus has shifted slightly. Today was the first day of U.S. Open qualifying, and I got to take in some great matches.

It was heart-breaking to see Ryler DeHeart lose in three after coming back from a break down in the second. Last year, he made it to the second round in the main draw and lost (in a pretty tight match) to Rafael Nadal, so that's got to be disappointing.

It was great to see Kimiko Date Krumm come back from a lousy first set to dominate the next two. The Japanese veteran, back in the game after a 12-year retirement, is looking good! Not so good for Virginia Ruano Pascual, though, who lost in three. Xavier Malisse fell short, as well. Malisse played Horacio Zeballos in a battle of the weird little pony-tails. Also, Zeballos is 76 in the world, despite not having won the only ATP-level match he's played in his career? That's a bit odd. Yeah, he's won four challengers and made three more finals in the last year, but ... come on, win a tour-level match.

I also got to see young Grigor Dimitrov, who showed flashes of brilliance but wasn't quite allowed to live up to his hype in this match, thanks to the excellent play of German Tobias Kamke. He should have a tougher match-up in the next round of quallies, against Brazilian top seed Tomasz Bellucci, whose match was moved to another court and was over before I realized that fact. He won 6-2, 6-0 against Giancarlo Petrazzuolo. Odd that Dimitrov would be unseeded in the quallies, with all the press he's been getting. But other than his wins against Berdych and Navarro and his tight matches against Nadal and Simon, he hasn't really had any results to speak of this year.

I saw Carsten Ball, as well - good to see him get a win, and hopefully the young Aussie can follow-up on his great run at Los Angeles.

I also saw Stefan Koubek, Somdev Devvarman, and I saw Ekatarina Bychkova have an easy go of it against Coco Vandeweghe. And what was Vaidasova doing in the quallies? And losing! Yikes.

I also saw a couple young collegiate players who were unfortunately outclassed, but still played hard and had some fun styles to watch. I'd really like to see Blake Strode and Ryan Lipman tighten up their games and go pro.

Tomorrow looks like it should be fun, too. I hope everyone else is looking forward to the Open!