Federer keeps winning ugly, survives Youzhny in 5 grimy sets

Roger Federer is rarely, if ever, associated with ugliness. His game is endlessly lauded as the most aesthetically pleasing the world has seen. His gliding footwork and snapping groundstrokes inspire flowery prose. He is perpetually composed, put-together, well-dressed, with nary a lock of hair out of place or a sweat splotch in sight.

But Federer's tennis so far at this US Open has been decidedly unsightly. The revamped backhand that's brought him so much success in 2017 has devolved into a fluttering, wayward mess. His movement has been labored, his footwork choppy. His serve hasn't had its usual zip. And the fact that the Arthur Ashe court has been playing so slow hasn't helped, as he hasn't been able to take time away, or hit through his opponents, as effectively as he typically does. Federer is 36, and has been nursing a back injury - but everything about his game in Flushing Meadows has just felt a bit off, a bit imprecise.

In the first round, he needed five sets to beat raw 19-year-old Frances Tiafoe. It was a strange, wobbly performance, but an understandable one; Federer was playing his first match since tweaking his back in Montreal two weeks earlier, and seemed to be feeling out his body as he played his way back into form. He was facing an explosive athlete who'd given him trouble in the past, and who came out playing extremely well.

In the second round on Thursday, though, Federer was playing 101st-ranked Mikhail Youzhny, who's just a year his junior, came into the US Open with an 8-18 record on the year (and a six-match losing streak in main-draw play), and had never beaten Federer in 16 previous head-to-head matches. On paper, the match looked very much like the walk in the park Federer seemed to be approaching it as.

It looked that way in the first set, too, which Federer ran off with in just 26 minutes. But things started to fall apart in the second set, when he lost the range on his groundstrokes, stopped landing first serves, and grew tentative on his returns. Those trends bled into the third, and suddenly Federer found himself in a dogfight.

The troubling thing is that Youzhny wasn't even playing particularly well. His strokes were far from clean, and he hit more than twice as many unforced errors as winners. His volleys were ineffectual, and he won barely more than half his points at net. He had nothing behind his serves, with even his firsts routinely clocking in below 100 mph, and he double-faulted eight times compared to just five aces. By the end of the match, he seemed the more hobbled player, having needed a visit from the trainer even before appearing to pull a hamstring in the fifth set. But Federer gave him a fighting chance anyway, mainly by moving gingerly, attacking tentatively, and spraying 68 unforced errors. His backhand remained particularly ghastly, producing 35 of those errors and just seven winners off the ground.

Federer struggled to punch through on his break chances in the deciding set, but eventually Youzhny gift-wrapped it for him by double-faulting on break point at 2-3. A couple games later, Youzhny shanked a routine backhand on Federer's second match point, the horror show mercifully ended, and Federer beat Youzhny for a 17th straight time. In a way, those two points told the story of the match: it wasn't about who was better, so much as who was less bad. And due credit to Federer; when his back was against the wall and the points mattered most, he was defiantly less bad. We've always known he can win pretty, but his first two matches in New York have affirmed that he's just as capable of winning ugly.

This is the first time Federer has played consecutive five-setters to begin a Slam, not exactly an ideal start as he tries to keep his aging body as fresh as possible. But Federer, as is his custom, is embracing the challenge, and finding silver linings, rather than fretting over his form.

"These five-set battles are actually quite a lot of fun," he said in his on-court interview after the match. "I feel quite warmed up by now."

He also continued to insist that, contrary to what the eye test suggests, his back is not the cause of his struggles.

"This match wasn't about the back, which is good," he said later in press. "This is more just a grind. I felt different (from the first round), completely different, the way it played and everything. But I'm really, really happy I got through."

With most of his usual foils out of the picture, and Rafa Nadal looking shaky in his own right, Federer likely doesn't have to play his best to win the US Open. But with stiffer competition on the way, he'll have to be a whole lot better than he's been so far.

"Maybe I struggled more than I would have liked to," he said. "But I'm still in the draw, which gives me a chance."

(Photos courtesy: Action Images)