Nainkin Not Neutral About Upset at Open

You’ve heard of Swiss Miss. But how about the Swiss mister who missed everything? They should have paid the guy off in stale chocolate bars.

That was how they felt in Switzerland about tennis player David Nainkin.

“My record was nothing and a lot,” said Nainkin, who tried to earn a living this summer playing for a club called the Zurich Grasshoppers.

A grasshopper would have been as recognizable as this perfect stranger at the U.S. Open when he got off a players’ bus at Flushing Meadow on Wednesday morning. But then he beat the only guy who could identify him, fellow South African Wayne Ferreira, 6-4, 6-4, 2-6, 7-5.

“David’s almost two years older, and he used to beat me a lot when we were kids,” Ferreira said. “But I’ve never seen him hit his forehand like today.”

It was one of those performances a lower-depths denizen lives for. The 208 lengths’ disparity in their rankings made it one of the more stunning first-round reversals in Open history.

Nainkin, 25, a striking 6-footer, was 0-5 in major matches, 4-7 overall this year, and winless in the Swiss league--”a competition watched by family and girlfriends,” said Zurich newspaperman Stefan Oswalt. “The money is very minor. Nainkin got lost trying to find Zurich, and might as well have stayed lost.”

Did he find himself Wednesday?

“I was overwhelmed when I won the first two sets,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do, and lost the third. But I found willpower I didn’t know I had. I had looked in the mirror when I got up and told myself I was going to do it. I went through a wall. What a thrill. Wayne is the best player South Africa ever had.”

But not Wednesday.

“I’ve played nine straight weeks,” Ferreira said. “I feel like I’ve played every day for five months and I couldn’t find the motivation, hard as I looked. My mind was chasing the ball, but my body didn’t want to follow.”

Ferreira said he also has had a problem with his right knee and had made an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon Friday.

Medical talk, in fact, was all over the place. When the Belgian Laurence Courtois felt her inflamed left knee was too severe for her to play Monica Seles, she was the 13th player to pull up lame.

Todd Martin rocketed 14 aces in beating Moroccan Younes El Ayanaoui, 6-3, 6-2, 4-6, 6-4.

Chris Woodruff, the Tennessean who beat Andre Agassi at the French Open, let three match points elude him as Jan Kroslak, served and swerved into the conclusive tie-breaker. Then the Slovak won going away, 2-6, 6-4, 3-6, 6-2, 7-6 (7-1).

Aussie Michael Tebbutt, getting 24 aces, stopped Richey Reneberg, 3-6, 6-1, 3-6, 7-5, 6-3. Michael Joyce had Paul Haarhuis in trouble but missed a set point in the second set tiebreaker and lost, 6-7 (5-7), 7-6 (8-6), 1-6, 6-2, 6-2.