KEY BISCAYNE, Fla., — Mardy Fish is on the verge of becoming the top-ranked tennis player in the United States.
That’s a long way from a guy who once couldn’t even get his name in the paper.
With his 7-5, 7-6 (5), win Tuesday over Juan Martin del Potro at the Sony Ericsson Open, Fish is into the quarterfinals at this event and is one match victory away from guaranteeing that he will leap frog Andy Roddick as the highest-ranking American player in the ATP World Tour rankings (close to cracking the Top 10.) Fish, ranked No. 15 this week, will face David Ferrer in Wednesday’s quarterfinals. Roddick, the defending Sony Ericsson Open champion, ranked No. 8 entering this year’s event, lost in the opening round this year to Pablo Cuevas.
I first met Mardy back in 1998 at the USTA National Boy’s 18s Championships at Kalamazoo, Mich., while I was the USTA’s Player Development press officer. The then 18-year-old Fish was just starting to show his potential to become a top professional and reached the semifinals of the tournament, a high-water mark achievement at the time for the Vero Beach, Fla. resident.
While standing at the well-known tower overlooking the courts at Kalamazoo College, I was approached by Sally Fish, Mardy’s mother, who had heard that a USTA national PR official was present at the event. She asked if I could help their hometown paper – the Vero Beach Press Journal – to at least acknowledge that Mardy was one of the nation’s best junior tennis players and garner at least a fraction of the coverage of high school baseball, basketball, football and soccer. A very fair request and certainly within the mission statement of the USTA of promoting the growth and development of tennis. Mardy Fish, rising tennis talent, was non-existent in the town – at least according to the newspaper.
Getting Mardy more publicity in his hometown paper immediately became one of my personal USTA publicity goals. I soon garnered a contact with the Press Journal – a writer named Steve Megargee – who began to report and write about on Mardy as his career began to take flight. Phone interviews were step up with Mardy when he served as a practice partner for Captain John McEnroe and the U.S. Davis Cup team in 2000, his US Open main draw debut also in 2000 and his Davis Cup debut as a player in 2002. Soon, after each Davis Cup appearance or US Open match victory or other note-worth result, it became a matter of routine for me to come up to Mardy with a cell phone with Megargee on the other line ready to write up another front page sports article on Vero Beach’s “First Man of Tennis.” The pinnacle of these interviews came at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, when Mardy achieved probably the biggest result of his career by reaching the gold-medal match in men’s singles, losing a five-set heart-breaker to Nicolas Massu.
These days, whenever I see Sally and her husband Tom (two of the best people you will ever meet, friends and now fellow residents of Vero Beach with our family’s now condo purchase there), we still laugh about the days when no one knew about Mardy and his tennis doings and all the “Megargee interviews.”
He has certainly come a long way.