For many tennis fans, the quarter-finals between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic had already been set – but on Tuesday night everything went differently in Flushing Meadows.
When the drawing ceremony for the US Open main field was over a week and a half ago, the popular speculative machinery in the tennis circus was once again set in motion. And one projection was pretty much clear to all the experts: on the second Wednesday of the tournament, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic would have a big quarter-final showdown, a spectacular night show under the floodlights of Arthur Ashe Stadium – with all the pomp and roar.
For a long time everything went according to plan at the last Grand Slam Festival of the 2018 season, even on Tuesday afternoon, when Djokovic had to be treated twice by the tournament doctors in the jungle heat of New York. But still managed to win in three sets against the Portuguese Joao Sousa. But in the late night performance of this eighth day of the competition, suddenly nothing was normal, Federer, the Titan, swayed and swayed against the Australian Nobody John Millman. He took the early lead, he could have steered everything into order with a 6:3, 5:4, 40:15 lead – but when he left the biggest Centre Court in the world at 1 am, still in oppressive sultriness, everything was over for him after a 6:3, 5:7, 6:7 (7:9), 6:7 (3:7) lost tennis rollercoaster ride.
No showdown with Djokovic, no happy end of the Grand Slam season, no title win ten years after the last main prize in the Big Apple. “At some point I thought, “It’s good when it’s over,” Federer said, “it’s been extremely hard out there. You sweat and sweat, lose energy, feel like you can’t breathe.” There was also no use in Federer’s extra intensive preparation for possible weather conditions in New York during the Masters tournament in the hot and humid Cincinnati. “According to Federer, the conditions were “enormously difficult”, “my body simply no longer played along.”
Temperatures well above 30 degrees Celsius, plus humidity around 75 percent – this equator weather made it so difficult for Federer that he finally left all his usual strengths. In the end, the Swiss looked like Superman in the open-air sauna without his tonic kryptonite. “Since there has been a roof over the court, there has been virtually no air circulation. The heat just stands,” Federer said, “it’s just brutal.” When asked why he served so badly in this memorable match, the 37-year-old answered dryly: “It was hot.
Federer’s sinister hopes for a title coup in New York, in the late autumn of his career, melted slowly but relentlessly in this oven. With every minute of play the number of his mistakes increased, the first serve left him almost completely. And his usual strength, the gripping attitude at the Big Points, turned into the opposite – the maestro, the rock in the surf, the star with the cool nerves, became a fluttering man. Two missed set points in set two were followed by a left set point in the tiebreak of the third round at 6:5, and even the last chance to give the whole thing another turn for the better was wasted with the missed 4:2 lead in the fourth act of the drama.
The last tie-break illustrated the maladic condition in which the 37-year-old Swiss was on the home stretch of this match in the last sixteen. All seven points for Millman came from Federer’s slight mistakes, the 20-time Grand Slam champion even served two of his ten double mistakes for 1:3 and 1:4. “If you don’t feel well, everything is out of your game,” Federer said at his nightly press conference. For the first time ever at the US Open and for the second time in his entire Grand Slam career (127-2) he had now lost against a rival who was placed outside the top 50 – against Millman, who five years ago had almost retired from the tennis circus disillusioned and briefly signed on to a financial consulting agency.
Before the grass season, Grand Master Federer generously invited the Aussie, a man from the middle class of the tour, to a training week in Switzerland. “We were looking for someone who could work hard. And he’s looking for a spot after retiring at the French Open,” said Federer. Well, a good three months later, the hired sparring partner beat the star – and not entirely without a good bit of embarrassment. “I’m almost a little ashamed that I hit him the day he didn’t feel so good,” Millman said, “he’s still my hero to look up to.”