A Hot Summer : Alex O’Brien Was Ranked No. 285 a Month Ago, but Now He’s on Roll Heading Into U.S. Open

Kerri Strug’s notwithstanding, perhaps the most amazing vault in the world of sports this summer has been made by Alex O’Brien.

O’Brien is a relatively unknown pro tennis player, meaning that he is both too little and too big to be carried anywhere by Bela Karolyi, even if the cameras were rolling.

These days, O’Brien needs no lift of any kind. He’s heading into the U.S. Open on Monday as a possible factor.

A month ago, O’Brien had no chance to be a factor in the U.S. Open. He had no chance to be in the U.S. open.

A month ago, O’Brien was just another former college star, now 26, who had been pretty well eaten up by the intense competition on the ATP Tour. He was carving out a comfortable, but mostly anonymous, life as a doubles player.

A month ago, a big deal for O’Brien was a quarterfinal finish in a Challenger tournament--tennis’ version of triple-A baseball. And, on July 26, that’s where O’Brien was, at a tournament in the Northern California city of Aptos. He had won two matches there before losing in the quarterfinals to Canadian Albert Chang.

For O’Brien, though, things were actually looking up. The two wins at Aptos were, well, two wins. He had had a few others in ’96 on the Challenger level, but six months into the season he had yet to win a regular ATP tournament match. So even the meager points acquired in Challenger tournaments would get him off rock bottom, which he had reached with the July 22 rankings. He was at a career-low No. 285.

Fast-forward to today, the day before the start of the U.S. Open.

For O’Brien, it is a month later. It is also more than $227,000 in prize money and about 220 ranking points later. He is in the U.S. Open’s main draw as a wild-card entry, even though his new ranking, likely to be somewhere in the mid-60s when the new weekly computerized list is released Monday, is good enough to get him in directly.

“The U.S. Open draw is set according to what the rankings are about six weeks before the tournament,” O’Brien said. “That’s why the wild card was my only chance.”

For tournament officials, giving O’Brien a wild-card entry was perhaps the easiest decision they will ever have to make. How’s that?

Starting with the tournament in Aptos, his record is 21-4.

That includes, in order:

--Three wins in a qualifying tournament in Los Angeles that got him into the main draw of the Infiniti Open at UCLA, where he won two more matches.

--Three more wins in a qualifying tournament in Cincinnati, followed by two more in the main Cincinnati draw (one when MaliVai Washington defaulted with an injury).

--Then, with a wild-card entry into the main draw of the Pilot Pen tournament at New Haven, Conn., a stunning six-match run to the title that included an upset of top-seeded Yevgeny Kafelnikov of Russia and a 7-6 (8-6), 6-4 victory over 10th-seeded Jan Siemerink of the Netherlands in the final. That was worth $150,000, or 65% of his entire earnings in 1995. His one-month singles run of $227,000 is $1,181 less than he made in both singles and doubles last year.

--Three more wins in last week’s du Maurier Open in Toronto, ending with a 6-4, 6-4 loss to Todd Martin in the quarterfinals, which ended his winning streak at nine matches.

And ahead, a destination not only unthinkable, but impossible just 30 days ago: a first-round match with clay-courter Nicolas Lapentti of Ecuador. In the U.S. Open.

“I guess you’d have to say this is an amazing game,” O’Brien said from Toronto.

The amazing part, actually, is not that O’Brien is in the U.S. Open. He has been there every year since 1992, although he has won only once, defeating Paul Haarhuis of the Netherlands in 1994 when, in O’Brien’s words, Haarhuis was “tired and down on his game.”

No, the amazing part is where he came from this year.

“I was at the bottom of the barrel,” O’Brien said. “There were days when I’d go out there and I couldn’t even hit the ball. I felt like I’d never played before.”

In reality, O’Brien had been playing since he was six years old, and with enormous success. As a youngster in Amarillo, Texas, he won the state title for Tascosa High, as did brother Blake and sister Katherine.

That landed him a spot on the tennis team at Stanford, the university steppingstone to stardom on the pro tour for John McEnroe and many others. It turned out O’Brien wasn’t simply another Stanford player, but the only collegiate player ever to win NCAA titles in singles, doubles and team in one season.

Also, O’Brien stayed at Stanford and graduated, making him one of only a few players on the ATP Tour with a college degree.

O’Brien won the NCAA triple crown in 1992--”It was a 10-day tournament. I got through it by spending my evenings in a tub full of ice,” he said--and his professional future seemed secure.

But while paying the bills quite nicely as a doubles player, O’Brien was struggling merely to slip into the top 100 in singles. He finished 1994 at No. 90, but the bottom dropped out in ‘95, when he ended the year at No. 210. And things kept getting worse in the early part of this season.

“The low point was playing in a qualifier for Lipton in March,” O’Brien said. “I was playing Karel Novacek and I had something like 12 match points. Yet I could never close the deal, and he ended up winning.

“Afterward, I sat around, feeling sorry for myself, and thinking about how this had been happening time and time again.”

That failure followed closely a match the previous week at the Grand Champions tournament in Indian Wells, when O’Brien, serving against Carlos Costa of Spain for the match at 5-4 of the second set, failed again and went on to lose.

“I gagged, tied a string around my neck,” he said.

O’Brien’s run, from Aptos to Flushing Meadow, included lots of help from his family, friends and coach Keith Dipraam. It also included more than a little extra effort on his part, such as a 4 a.m. wake-up call and early morning flight from Northern California to the L.A. qualifier, and a red-eye flight from L.A. to Cincinnati that got him there at 10 a.m., three hours before the start of his first match.

But now, at least for a while, everything seems to be first cabin for O’Brien. And having taken this long journey into the tennis doldrums, O’Brien appears to be well equipped to handle whatever might be ahead.

“I’m just so happy that I persevered,” he said. “It’s just nice to be playing good tennis again. I know this doesn’t mean I’m a great player. I watch guys like Kafelnikov and I see how smoothly he moves and hits the ball, and I am so impressed.

“But doing what I’ve done this last month is just a nice payoff for hanging in there, and by payoff, I don’t mean financial at all.”

Clearly, while success may go quickly to O’Brien’s pocketbook, it won’t go to his head.

“Mostly, when I’m out there,” he said, “I think about myself as kind of a scrub.”

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U.S. Open at a Glance

* SITE: Flushing Meadow, New York

* WHEN: Monday through Sept. 8

* SURFACE: Hard courts

* TV: Channel 2 and USA network

* DEFENDING CHAMPIONS: Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf

* PURSE: $13.1 million ($600,000 to men’s winner, $575,000 to women’s winner)