NEW YORK – For being the defending champion, Kim Clijsters certainly has been skirting the headlines at the US Open.
On Friday, the talk was all about Hurricane Earl’s impact on New York City, which at least during the day turned out to be all bluster and very few raindrops, but not enough to halt play for long on the hard courts of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.
An 18-year-old American, Ryan Harrison, had his Flushing Meadows run ended, 6-3 5-7 3-6 6-3 7-6 (6) by Sergiy Stakhovsky of the Ukraine, while Britain’s Andy Murray, one of the pretenders for the men’s crown, easily dispatched Jamaica’s Dustin Brown 7-5 6-3 6-0.
Meanwhile, the mom from New Jersey – that’s where Clijsters’s husband hails from – ran her winning streak in America’s premier tennis tournament to 17 straight matches. Clijsters lost the first three games before ripping through the next 12 to snare a spot in the fourth round of the year’s final Grand Slam tournament.
“That’s tennis,” Clijsters said. “And, until the set is over, you can still always come back and win.
“That’s what I tried to do, tried to be a little more aggressive and just go for the angles a little bit more.”
It worked to perfection for the tournament’s second seed.
“If you start to focus on how you’re hitting or feeling the ball, you might start worrying,” she said. “I was just trying to give it my best each point.”
In other early women’s matches, fifth-seeded Samantha Stosur of Australia beat Sara Errani of Italy 6-2 6-3; sixth-seeded Francesca Schiavone of Italy, the French Open champion, downed Alona Bondarenko of the Ukraine 6-1 7-5; 12th-seeded Elena Dementieva of Russia beat Daniela Hantuchova of Slovakia 7-5 6-2; 20th-seeded Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova of Russia defeated Argentina’s Gisela Dulko 6-1 6-2; and Serbia’s Ana Ivanovic ousted Virginie Razzano of France 7-5 6-0..
Beating the rain and winning their men’s second-round matches were 10th-seeded David Ferrer of Spain, 12th-seeded Mikhail Youzhny of Russia, 18th-seeded American John Isner, 23rd-seeded Feliciano Lopez of Spain, Tommy Robredo of Spain, Michael Llodra of France and Daniel Gimeno-Traver of Spain.
Robredo advanced to the third round when Julien Benneteau of France retired while trailing 6-4 6-6 (2-1). Ferrer beat Germany’s Benjamin Becker 6-3 6-4 6-4; Lopez outlasted Benoit Paire of France 6-4 6-7 (4) 5-7 7-6 (3) 6-2; Gimeno-Traver defeated Frenchman Jeremy Chardy 4-6 6-2 6-0 7-6 (2); Youzhny beat Dudi Sela of Israel 6-1 6-3 4-6 6-3; Isner stopped Marco Chiudinelli of Switzerland 6-3 3-6 7-6 (7) 6-4; and Llodra downed Victor Hanescu of Romania 7-6 (2) 6-4 6-2.
Last year Clijsters ended her two-year retirement during which she married American professional basketball player Brian Lynch and gave birth to their daughter, Jada. In her third tournament back on the tour, she won her second US Open.
While Clijsters’ victory was big news, some were still talking about how her semifinal foe, Serena Williams, lost the match on a point penalty assessed when she went off on a profanity-laced tirade at an official who had called a foot fault on her.
Even after Clijsters won her third-round match Friday, she was asked about Serena pulling out of this year’s Open because of foot surgery.
“Look, my tournaments are not based on what Serena does,” Clijsters said testily, answering a question in her post-match interview. “Obviously I try to focus on what I have to do best, and that’s trying to play good tennis and trying to see how far I can go. Whether she’s here or not, my attitude is always the same.”
Clijsters also won the US Open in 2005. The following year she was injured and could not defend her title. Then came her retirement, marriage and family. She and her husband have homes in both her native Belgium and New Jersey, where he grew up.
“They’re both home,” Clijsters said. “I think you create that home atmosphere. You know, I even try to create it in our hotel room.
“It’s obviously nice to go to a place that you’re familiar with and you can cook yourself and do everything kind of yourself. But, obviously, my childhood memories are in Belgium. I still live on the same street as my parents used to live, where I grew up. My grandparents live next door. That’s obviously what I go back to when I go back after the US Open.”
Right now her sight is set on yet another US Open victory. She has won three hard court titles his year, including a US Open warm-up event in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. There, she beat Ivanovic when the Serb retired from the match while trailing 2-1. The two will battle in the fourth round.
“She had some injuries when I played her in Cincinnati in the semifinals,” Clijsters said. “The first three games we played I think were pretty good tennis. We can kind of have a rematch here.”
