Alexander Zverev, one of tennis’s great young talents, went from baffled and bad to first-time Grand Slam finalist all in one match.
In a remarkable turnaround, Zverev, the No. 5 seed, came back to defeat Pablo Carreño Busta 3-6, 2-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-3 in the semifinals of the United States Open on Friday.
It was the first time in Zverev’s relatively short career that he had won a match after losing the first two sets. But what mattered most to Zverev was taking one more giant step toward a major title.
He has long been pegged for tennis superstardom with his potent blend of power, reach and athleticism. Though he is only 23, it is taking longer than he expected, but the door has been flung wide open to change at this U.S. Open.
It was an unusual event to begin with: staged in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic with no fans in the stands and players forbidden from traveling to their usual playgrounds in Manhattan from the tournament site in Queens. It also began without Roger Federer and the reigning champion Rafael Nadal, two of the three men who have dominated the men’s game for the last 16 years.
The third is Novak Djokovic, and though he did make the trip to New York, he knocked himself out of the tournament in the fourth round against Carreño Busta when he struck a ball in frustration and inadvertently hit a line judge in the throat. He was defaulted for unsportsmanlike conduct, which guaranteed that someone would win their first Grand Slam singles title.
It could still be Zverev, who will face either No. 2 seed Dominic Thiem or No. 3 Daniil Medvedev on Sunday. Thiem and Medvedev were to face off in Friday’s second semifinal.
Those three young men and Stefanos Tsitsipas, all in their 20s, have rightly been considered the most likely candidates to succeed the Big Three of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic. But Zverev looked anything but likely to win on Friday in the early going as he mistimed groundstrokes, struggled to win quick points with his heavy serve, double faulted into the net and spread his long arms wide and looked imploringly at his fitness trainer Jez Green and the other members of his team in the sparsely populated stands of Arthur Ashe Stadium.
“I was actually looking at the scoreboard when I was down two sets to love,” Zverev said. “I was like, I can’t believe it. I’m playing in a semifinal where I’m supposed to be the favorite, and I am down two sets to love, and I have no chance, I’m playing that bad.
“So I knew I had to come up with better tennis and knew I had to be more stable.”
Easier thought than done, but Zverev is used to working his way out of trouble and though he had never come all the way back before from two sets down, he has proved himself in five-set matches.
He is now 14-6 in them: a tribute to his resiliency but also a tribute to the long-term work he has done with Green, once Andy Murray’s fitness trainer, who was hired when Zverev was a rail-thin teenager to help him prepare for the long term.
Zverev’s career has been a family project. His parents, Alexander Sr. and Irina, were leading professional players in the former Soviet Union who married young in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi. They later immigrated to Germany, like so many Russian athletes, who sought stability and economic opportunities abroad after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Both of the Zverevs’ sons also became tennis professionals representing Germany. Mischa, 33, was ranked as high as No. 25 in singles in 2017. Alexander, nicknamed Sascha, got to No. 3 in 2018, the same year he won the ATP Finals, widely considered the most prestigious title in the men’s game behind the four Grand Slam tournaments.
He has beaten Djokovic and Nadal and holds a winning 4-3 record against Federer, but he has struggled until this year to translate all his firepower into Grand Slam success. But after reaching his first Grand Slam semifinal in January at the Australian Open, where he donated a big chunk of his prize money to bushfire relief, he has taken it one step further by reaching his first Grand Slam final.
It has been a bumpy road. In the lead-in event at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, he was defeated by Andy Murray in his opening match at the Western & Southern Open. At the U.S. Open, he has dropped at least a set in five of his six matches, but though Friday’s victory will win no prizes for repeat watchability, it certainly meant a great deal to Zverev, the first German man to reach a major singles final since Rainer Schüttler at the 2003 Australian Open.
Zverev finished with 24 aces and eight double faults, and won 78 percent of the points when he put his powerful first serve in play. But he will clearly need to play a much more complete match if he is to pose a serious threat in the final.
“I couldn’t be happier,” Zverev said of his big comeback. “But there’s still one step to go for me.”
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