Shapovalov bows out, but leaves his mark on US Open
Denis Shapovalov's magic finally ran out on Sunday, but what stood out most about his three-tiebreak loss to Pablo Carreno Busta was that he almost got by without it.
Unlike so many of the rousing wins that had made him the youngest man to make the US Open fourth round in nearly 30 years, it never felt like Shapovalov was just riding a wave and playing above his head. He didn't smack improbable winners from compromised positions. He duffed a handful of makeable volleys, and landed just 60 percent of his first serves. His forehand ditched him for long stretches. He got tight on big points, converting just three of 13 break chances and blowing leads of 5-2 and 3-0 in the first and third sets. Unlike in some of the signature wins he's notched the past few weeks, his opponent Sunday played close to his best, dominating the longer rallies, controlling the baseline, and making Shapovalov work for everything.
But in spite of all this, and in spite of the fact he was playing his seventh match of the tournament (if you include qualifying), against a solid veteran ranked 19th in the world, the 18-year-old wunderkind played well enough, in the macro sense, to win. He won a higher percentage of receiving points than Carreno Busta, broke serve as many times as he was broken, and won just four fewer points overall. And, while the match may have exposed his lack of experience, it didn't diminish his moxie. Even as he struggled to find the court, making 46 unforced errors off the ground, he continued to hit out, and never stopped going for his shots.
"He just played three tiebreaks that were better than mine," Shapovalov pithily and accurately concluded after the match.
His run may be over, but the young Canadian left a lasting mark on the US Open. The tournament needed the injection of energy he gave it, after getting a badly depleted men's field that saw three of its past five champions and five of the sport's top 11 seeds withdraw due to injury. Three more top-10 seeds - one a recent US Open champ, another the winner of the most recent Masters event, and another who's been billed as the game's heir apparent - fell in the first week. In the top half of the draw, Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal slogged toward a potential semifinal meeting, one unconvincing win at a time. In the bottom half, well, it was best not to stare directly at the bottom half.
But US Open officials understood they had an ace in the hole: The flashy, fiery, athletic lefty with the deliberately ill-fitting hat and the sweet flow and sweeter one-handed backhand. Never mind that this was the same guy who'd been playing Challengers in Gatineau and Granby just a month earlier; Shapovalov got Arthur Ashe billing in three of his four matches, and betrayed no awestruck bewilderment at suddenly headlining sessions inside the largest tennis stadium in the world. Fans showed up for him, and went nuts for him, and as Federer and Nadal struggled, Shapovalov became the story of the men's tournament.
Of course, there's a difference between star power and staying power, and it's still too early to judge whether Shapovalov can achieve the latter. It's hard to imagine a more auspicious entrance onto the sport's biggest stage, but he certainly wouldn't be the first player to win over willfully gullible tennis fans with his panache and charisma, only to subsequently get stuck in the mud.
"I've been playing unbelievable tennis," Shapovalov said Sunday. "But it's not going to be like this every week."
It's easy to see why so many have fallen for his game - for his net-rushing derring-do, his demonstrative celebrations, his precocious feel for the geometry of the game, and the sheer force and gusto with which he throws himself into his groundstrokes - but comparisons to the likes of Nadal, Stan Wawrinka, and John McEnroe still feel premature. As high as he's already set the bar, we should always be wary of expecting too much, too soon. Progress is rarely linear, and one need only look back a few short weeks, to when Shapovalov's wild ride began, to recognize how quickly things can change in this game.
In the first round of the Rogers Cup in Montreal, he stared down four match points in a second-set tiebreaker against 64th-ranked journeyman Rogerio Dutra Silva. He saved all of them - two that Dutra Silva effectively gifted him, one in which he got a cross-court backhand to clip the sideline, and one in which he hit an obscene backhand drop-volley from his shoe-tops that probably goes into the net six times out of seven.
Dutra Silva could've converted any of those points and nobody would've batted an eyelash. Shapovalov had won all of two main-draw matches on the tour level at that point, and the thing he was probably best known for was defaulting a Davis Cup tie by inadvertently whacking a ball at an umpire's eye. But he saved the match points, and won the breaker, and then the deciding set. Then he beat Juan Martin del Potro, and then, most memorably, beat Nadal. Then he came to New York, qualified for the year's last major, demolished Jo-Wilfried Tsonga under the lights, and suddenly, he was the third betting favorite to win the freaking US Open. What is it they say about life, and the speed at which it comes at you?
"I did have that confidence that I could make it this far, but to be honest, this whole season has been going really quickly for me," Shapovalov told ESPN after beating Kyle Edmund in the third round. "My goal was to be inside the top 150 by the end of the year when I'd started, and now top 50 seems doable."
Doable is probably an understatement - Shapovalov is projected to rise to No. 51 in the world when the new rankings are rolled out after the fortnight in Flushing Meadows - but he's wise enough to know that in this sport, as in life, there are no guarantees.
"It's tennis," he said. "You don't know what's going to happen the next point."