Ivanisevic Takes Place on Sideline

The parade of top men’s singles players to the exits of the U.S. Open was joined Friday by Goran Ivanisevic of Croatia, the 11th-seeded player, who was ousted by a combination of Carlos Costa and temporary insanity.

Costa, a Spanish clay-court specialist, sent Ivanisevic away, possibly to a padded room somewhere, with a 6-3, 7-6 (7-4), 7-6 (7-5) victory in one of the stranger matches of the year.

Ivanisevic, one of the bigger servers ever to play the game and a finalist at Wimbledon in 1992 for that very reason, approached the net only 27 times in the 2-hour 5-minute match. He also made 50 unforced errors and said afterward, “I played from the (backcourt) like an idiot.”

Costa, who leaves the clay courts of Europe with much trepidation, said that he expected to be blown away by the big serve-and-volley game of Ivanisevic on the faster hard courts. But he went to the net 35 times. He also served 16 aces, same as Ivanisevic.

The topper was the third-set tiebreaker. Ivanisevic took a 5-0 lead, then lost seven consecutive points.

Throughout, Ivanisevic cranked away from the backcourt and Costa kept coming in. At 5-5, Costa got to match point with a diving volley. On match point, the two traded eight or nine baseline shots and most of Costa’s landed well short. But Ivanisevic never moved off the baseline and eventually slapped an inside-out forehand wide of Costa’s deuce court for the match.

“He give me lot of short balls and I didn’t come in,” Ivanisevic said. “On the last point, I mean, I could finish the point 10 times to come in, but I don’t.”

And why was that?

“I don’t know why was that,” he said. “I just didn’t do anything.”

The only explanation was demons, perhaps the same demons that made Ivanisevic say a few years ago at the Indian Wells tournament that he didn’t like Palm Springs because all the people were so old and he was afraid, when he went out to a restaurant, that somebody was going to die.

Or the same demons that made him talk, during a recent interview on the wars in his homeland, about getting some Serbs in the cross hairs of a rifle.

Talking about the match, Ivanisevic said, “I don’t know what I’m lacking?”

A few screws, perhaps?