FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — It was too much to ask. Three straight wins over skyscraping Russians in which she had to dig herself out from under one-set deficits. The sudden fame (and all the life-in-a-fishbowl media attention that comes with it). The pressure of playing her first night match at Ashe Stadium. All the expectations. In hindsight, asking for another win out of the wide-eyed 17-year-old kid from Marietta, Georgia seemed downright greedy.
Only moments before Melanie Oudin took the court against fellow teen Caroline Wozniacki, who, like Oudin, was appearing in her first career Slam quarterfinal, her coach, Brian De Villiers told Inside Tennis, “I’ve tried to tell her, it doesn’t matter how many times I tell you this or show you that, you have to experience it yourself on the court.”
On Wednesday night she got some experience, alright. Plenty of it. And it proved overwhelming, as the fresh-faced giant killer, who had provided tennis fans with the ’09 U.S. Open’s most compelling story, bowed out in a one-hour, 28-minute 6-2, 6-2 loss to the 19-year-old Dane Wozniacki, who will now face Belgian Yanina Wickmayer in the semis.
“It was a lot. These past two weeks have been really different for me,” said Oudin. “I’ve gone from being just a normal tennis player to almost everyone in the United States knowing who I am now.”
But she stopped short of hanging the loss on her overnight transformation from promising junior to The Next Great Thing.
“I don’t think that affected my tennis game tonight at all,” she insisted. “Because when I get on the court, I don’t think about anything but the ball.”
Like in her second-, third- and fourth-round upsets of Elena Dementieva, Maria Sharapova and Nadia Petrova, the 5-foot-6 Oudin fell behind early. But there would be no come-form-behind storyline this time around. It wasn’t necessarily a horrible night from the service stripe for the speedy baseliner (she landed 75 percent of her far-from-imposing first serves), but the No. 70-ranked Oudin’s usually reliable forehand was nowhere to be found. She wracked up 43 unforced errors, and a calmer, cooler Wozniacki simply out-steadied her younger foe.
“I had a great run here,” Oudin told an adoring New York crowd, who had embraced her Tracy Austin-like success.
“She’s had such a great run, such an amazing tournament,” reflected the No. 8-ranked Wozniacki, who converted 5 of 12 break-point opportunities in showing she’s ready to take the next step at the majors. “It’s always tough to play against a home favorite. And I knew how I was going to feel to be out there and the crowd, but I just used the energy and tried to covert it into some good tennis. I’m just so happy that I fought so well today and that I managed to pull the match out.”
Asked what she’ll remember most from her run in New York, Oudin said, “I can’t really pick any specific thing from it. The whole experience of being here has been a whirlwind. There’s been so many great things I’ve learned from here, and the experiences, the matches I’ve played, I’ll remember all of it.”
