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Sam Querrey’s late-night show at the U.S. Open is a hit, despite loss to Kevin Anderson

Sam Querrey hits a return to Kevin Anderson during their U.S. Open quarterfinal match on Sept. 5.
(Andrew Gombert / EPA)
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Tennis fans in the city that never sleeps put on a good show late Tuesday and into Wednesday morning when Santa Monica’s Sam Querrey faced Kevin Anderson of South Africa in a men’s quarterfinal match at the U.S. Open.

The fourth set alone took an hour and three minutes to play and it ended at 1:51 a.m., a battle of big hitters that was watched by a small but devoted crowd. Anderson, seeded 28th, became the first South African to advance to the U.S. Open men’s semifinals when he prevailed 7-6(5), 6-7(9), 6-3, 7-6(7), but Querrey later marveled at the surreal nature of the atmosphere.

“It’s fun. I mean, it’s so late,” Querrey said. “I know it’s tough for people to stay, but the people that stayed, they were in it. They were loud, they were fun to play in front of. You can’t expect a stadium to be full at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday.”

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Those fans were treated to a tight match between two big servers. Anderson, who will face Pablo Carreno Busta of Spain in the semifinals, hit 22 aces and had eight service winners against Querrey. Anderson’s first serve peaked at 136 mph and averaged 127 mph. Querrey had 20 aces and six service winners, along with a fastest first-serve speed of 137 mph and an average first-serve speed of 121 mph.

Querrey, who reached the semifinals at Wimbledon this year but lost to Marin Cilic, had hoped his victory in a wild second-set tiebreaker on Tuesday might be a launching pad for him to prevail. It didn’t happen. “He has such a big serve. It’s hard to get a lot of momentum,” Querrey said of Anderson. “Even though I won that set, he came out and just had three great service games, boom, boom, boom, and it kind of takes your momentum a little bit.”

Despite the loss, Querrey said he’s “pretty happy” after his personal-best showing at the U.S. Open. “At the beginning of the week, if you said I would have made the quarters, I probably would have signed up for that,” he said. “I know that bottom half of the draw was open, but you can’t say 63 guys blew an opportunity. Only one guy can go through, and Kevin’s pretty tough.”

Anderson, 31, will make his first Grand Slam semifinal appearance when he faces Carreno Busta. Anderson, a Florida resident, has a 2-0 career edge over Carreno Busta, another first-time U.S. Open semifinalist. “We are so accustomed to it, a decade of the same guys being there,” Anderson said, referring to the “Big Four” of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. That group was reduced to two when Djokovic cut his season short because of an elbow injury and Murray pulled out shortly before the Open began.

“To see a couple of them in the other half [of the draw], a couple of them unable to play this year, it gave some of the guys an opportunity to go deep in the tournament,” Anderson added.

helene.elliott@latimes.com

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@helenenothelen

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