TENNIS / EASTER BOWL JUNIOR TOURNAMENT : Garden Grove’s Jackson Takes Control, Then Bows Out

From watching the first four games of the boys’ 14s semifinal at the Easter Bowl Junior Tennis Tournament, it seemed hard to believe Cody Jackson was playing in his second national tournament or that he was playing the top-seeded player.

It looked as if, Jackson, relaxed and confident, or the 60-mile-per-hour winds swirling in the main stadium of the Riviera Resort and Racquet Club would blow little Dustin Friedman of Owings Mills, Md., right off the court. Jackson, a 6-foot-1 eighth-grader at Bell Intermediate in Garden Grove, served and volleyed to perfection and hit rocket service returns and passing shots past the confused Friedman.

But Jackson’s serve was broken the next game, and suddenly the confident, relaxed 14-year-old, looked tentative and intimidated. Before the wind could die down, Jackson had lost 11 of the next 12 games and the match, 6-3, 6-1.

“I wasn’t concentrating,” Jackson said. “I wasn’t focused on the match. I wasn’t moving my feet and I was just spraying the ball everywhere.”

Although he reached the quarterfinals of the Cooper Bowl Tournament in Tucson three months ago, Jackson was unseeded at the Easter Bowl but he knocked off three seeded players in reaching the semifinals.

“I’ve been playing in Southern California for two or three years and done pretty well there, but we’re trying the national tournaments for the first time and I guess we’re doing pretty good,” he said.

The we is Jackson and his coach, Frank McCabe of Seal Beach. McCabe said he was proud of Jackson’s performance Thursday and throughout the week.

“He did the most important thing, he broke the guy’s serve,” McCabe said. “He’s got a great serve and great extension, now we need to start working on the other things.”

Fullerton’s Kevin Kim doesn’t need to work on much if he keeps playing tennis like he has this week in Palm Springs. Kim has yet to drop a set in four matches and with his 6-1, 6-4 victory over Kelly Gullett of Whittier, he is in today’s boys’ 18s semifinals against Michael Russell of Bloomfield, Mich.

Kim played a flawless first set, then fell behind, 4-2, in the second.

“I couldn’t have played a better first set, but the wind got to my serve in the second set,” said Kim, who served two double faults early in the second set.

But Kim didn’t panic. Despite having a break point against him, Kim held his serve and then broke Gullett’s serve the next game by hitting low returns at Gullett’s feet.

“I was practicing my returns before the match because I know he likes to come in,” he said.

Kim then held his serve and broke Gullett’s to win the match. A year ago, Kim said, he might have fallen apart under similar circumstances.

“I had trouble with getting mad at myself,” he said. “I really had to calm down because I was getting a lot of penalty points and I could have been suspended from tournaments for that. Now, I’ve realized you have to concentrate on the next point.”

Kim will concentrate at 1:30 p.m. today on Russell, who attends the Saddlebrook Academy, located 15 miles south of Kim’s Palmer Academy in Tampa, Fla.

“It seems like we played each other in the finals of every big tournament last year,” he said. “We’re kind of like rivals.”

Ryan Wolters, Kim’s roommate at Palmer and the division’s top-seeded player, plays Brandon Kramer of Reno in the other semifinal.