OPEN NOTES
It’s not that Aussie Lleyton Hewitt needed any added incentive in the U.S. Open or didn’t respect fourth-round foe Dominik Hrbaty. Still, the thought of losing to a bloke wearing a hideous black-and-pink shirt with holes over the shoulder blades was just too much to take.
Hewitt, the third-seeded former champ, cruised into the quarterfinals for the sixth straight September with a 6-1, 6-4, 6-2 laugher against Dominik Hrbaty, who got far more grief over his fashion faux pas than his play.
“Hopefully I’m putting myself in position to have another crack of it. I’m really starting to enjoy it,” said Hewitt, who won here in 2001 and lost to Roger Federer in last year’s final. “I stepped up, got out of the blocks well. I went out there with the game plan . . . and executed it perfectly.”
After needing 3½ hours to outlast Taylor Dent in the third round, Hewitt looked spry in breaking the 15th-seeded Slovakian in the first set without even needing his trademark “C’mon!” And after falling behind 3-1 in the second, Hewitt used several of Hrbaty’s 49 unforced errors to storm back and take the set.
Against a man whose 27-12 hardcourt mark was the fourth-best in the world – behind Federer, Andre Agassi, and Andy Roddick, Hewitt rolled in the third set. Next he faces 24-year-old Jarkko Nieminen, with Federer a likely semifinal foe.
“Nine times out of 10 if you’re going to win the tournament you’re going to have to come up against Federer at some stage,” said Hewitt, who couldn’t help but notice his foe’s attire.
“I wouldn’t wear it. But it made it a lot easier for me to beat him,” Hewitt quipped. “I just couldn’t lose to a bloke wearing a shirt like that.”
*
The unseeded Nieminen, the 1999 U.S. Open boys’ champion, beat Spaniard Fernando Verdasco 6-2, 7-6 (6), 6-2 at Louis Armstrong Stadium, to become the first lefty in the quarters since 1997.
“He wasn’t mentally that strong during the first two sets,” Nieminen said of his foe, who had 66 unforced errors and eight double-faults. “He was a little hopeless.”
*
After years of the women’s draw being vastly more entertaining, John McEnroe said this year’s bracket hasn’t been exciting.
“Not at all. It’s been really disappointing. Billie Jean King came up to the booth and was . . . I don’t want to say embarrassed, but this is not what she envisioned,” McEnroe said. “It just doesn’t seem like it picked up any steam. It just seems like there’s been a lot of really close matches, storylines [on the men’s side]. Hopefully there’s much more excitement.”
