This was supposed to be the night everyone who cares about professional men’s tennis couldn’t wait to arrive. It was to pit Novak Djokovic, the best player of the past five years, against Roger Federer, arguably the best player of all time, in a U.S. Open quarterfinal under the lights at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
It was supposed to be the first really big match of the Open – must-see TV, one of those matches sure to momentarily displace football in chat rooms and on talk radio for at least an hour or so on Thursday in advance of the start of real NFL action.
Alas, some journeyman pro from Australia, some remarkably skilled 29-year-old answering to John Millman, ran a flustered, fatigued, fragile Federer out of the Open in the round of 16 as Monday night gave way to Tuesday morning, the world No. 2 supposedly done in as much by stifling heat and humidity as the machine-like Millman.
“I couldn’t get air,” an exhausted Federer said afterward. “I just struggled in the conditions. It’s one of the first times it’s happened to me.”
At this U.S. Open, beset by unseasonably high temperatures and humidity from the start, Federer was not the first to succumb to such double trouble. Nor was he the last. The big-serving American and former Georgia Bulldog John Isner melted against Juan Martin del Potro on Tuesday afternoon. Much as Federer had before him, Isner fell in four sets, looking far more listless in the final two sets than the first two.