Game, Sunset, Match to Ferrero

The match started about 4 p.m. on Louis Armstrong Stadium Court with plenty of empty seats and a lazy, late-summer loginess to the game.

The humidity was high, the energy was low and there was no reason to expect that more than four hours later, under a full moon and a whooping, hollering crowd, Juan Carlos Ferrero and Tomas Zib would finish by playing rollicking, leg-cramping, body-tossing, knee-scraping tennis that would bring fans to their feet and send Ferrero to his knees in thanks at the end.

Ferrero was the winner of the 4-hour 29-minute first-round U.S. Open match Tuesday, 4-6, 7-5, 7-6 (6), 6-7 (4), 6-3. At one point in the fifth set both players were cramping. Zib was shaking his legs after every point, Ferrero was doing deep knee bends and each was leaving a puddle of sweat at his feet. A moment later, Zib was flinging his body in a full-length reach to drop a volley over the net and Ferrero was lunging and rolling to reach a crosscourt backhand.

These matches seem to happen at the U.S. Open more often than at other Grand Slams because a day session can spill over to the night session. The mood changes as the sun leaves.

“At the fifth set, the people were screaming a lot and very happy to watch the match,” Ferrero said. “I think they enjoy a lot and saw a very good match.”

There were other five-setters Tuesday. Tim Henman, seeded fifth, had come up lame Saturday with a sore back. He will turn 30 next week. That is a tennis age when a sore back can mean the end of a career. So Henman played three sets as if he were afraid to bend over.

His opponent, the 6-foot-10 Ivo Karlovic, didn’t bother to bend over. The tallest man on the pro circuit couldn’t unfurl himself enough to reach low balls or run fast enough to reach wide balls. So Karlovic served hard and hoped. He had 39 aces and it wasn’t until Henman loosened up in the heat that he found his game and won, 7-6 (3), 6-7 (7), 4-6, 6-4, 6-4.

Rafael Nadal, 18, had been penciled into a second-round match against defending champion Andy Roddick.

Roddick advanced easily. He hit a 152-mph serve, fastest in U.S. Open history, and shrugged.

His opponent was 17-year-old Scoville Jenkins from Atlanta, who qualified for the Open by winning the U.S. Tennis Assn. Boys Nationals in Kalamazoo, Mich., last week. Jenkins was the first African American winner of the tournament, which offers an automatic U.S. Open spot for the champion. The result Tuesday was as expected, a 6-0, 6-2, 6-2 win for Roddick and a standing ovation from the Arthur Ashe Stadium Court crowd when the teenager finally won a game.

Nadal took much longer and suffered far more. It took him nearly three hours to subdue Switzerland’s Ivo Heuberger, 6-0, 6-3, 4-6, 2-6, 6-3.

Marat Safin, the 2000 Open winner seeded 13th this year, wished he could have played five sets. Supremely talented and uncommonly temperamental, Safin said after his 7-6 (5), 6-4, 3-6, 6-3 loss to Thomas Enqvist that he lacked confidence.

Lindsay Davenport, the 1998 Open champion, is full of confidence after winning four straight tournaments this summer. She was one of 14 seeded women to move to the second round, beating Lubomira Kurhajcova of Slovakia, 6-4, 6-0. Venus Williams, seeded 11th, wasn’t quite as emphatic but did beat veteran Petra Mandula, 6-3, 7-6 (3).

And there was a tense three-setter for Wimbledon ingenue Maria Sharapova, the 17-year-old Russian who was a surprise winner of her first major title in July at the All England Club. It took Sharapova more than two hours to beat former Stanford star Laura Granville, 6-3, 5-7, 7-5, and she beat her hands on her heart after her final point.

“There’s the vibe, you know, the vibe you get here,” Sharapova said. “It’s a great feeling to have the people interact with what you’re doing. New York people enjoy tennis in a very different way.”

Ferrero, a 24-year-old Spaniard whose greatest accomplishment was a French Open title in 2003 and whose reputation is of a clay-court dirt baller who isn’t comfortable with the speed of the Open hard courts or the energy of an Open crowd, is seeded No. 7 but isn’t expected to make a difference even though he was a finalist here a year ago. He has struggled with injuries this season, which have kept him from finding a groove.

Zib is a nobody, a 28-year-old journeyman from the Czech Republic who has never won a major tournament match.

But it was the contrast in the fortunes of the men as much as in the tennis that grabbed at the hearts of the fans.

Ferrero is tennis royalty, a two-time Slam runner-up as well as a one-time winner. Zib is tennis fodder, a man who has a 15-39 career record, is ranked No. 141 in the world, who scrambled into this tournament by sneaking through qualifying, who travels alone and stays in cheap hotels.

And when Zib wouldn’t give up, when he wouldn’t let Ferrero serve out the match in the fourth set, when he ran down every ball and forced Ferrero to concoct shots more tricky and creative than a player seeded seventh should need in a first round, that’s when the day turned to night and the night turned unexpectedly special.

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At a Glance

Highlights from Tuesday at U.S. Open:

* KEY RESULTS: Men, first round: No. 2 Andy Roddick and eight other seeded players advanced. No. 11 Rainer Schuettler, No. 13 Marat Safin lost.

Women, first round: No. 1 Justine Henin-Hardenne, No. 5 Lindsay Davenport, No. 7 Maria Sharapova, No. 11 Venus Williams, 10 other seeded players won.

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TODAY’S FEATURED MATCHES

* Wayne Ferreira, South Africa, vs. Lleyton Hewitt (4), Australia

* Lindsay Lee-Waters, United States, vs. Serena Williams (3)

Roger Federer (1), Switzerland, vs. Marcos Baghdatis, Cyprus