Ryan Harrison pulls off win of career, moves into third round of Grand Slam for first time

NEW YORK—The man with the green baseball hat and the deep tan squinted down at the court, then up at the scoreboard, then back down at the court again. Finally, he was convinced that the name in lights and the red-haired player below were one and the same.

“Yep, that’s Ryan Harrison,” he told his wife.

It was a little hard to believe. Seeing Harrison on the new Grandstand on Thursday, competing tooth and nail with world No. 6 Milos Raonic, was like seeing a ghost from U.S. tennis’ recent past. Harrison’s last celebrated appearance at Flushing Meadows, an epic five-set loss on the old Grandstand in 2010, felt like another era entirely. Back then, it was assumed that the 18-year-old Harrison was going to be the future of the American game.

That year he had upset Ivan Ljubicic in the first round with a heady brand of all-court play. Even after losing his next match, Harrison had been confident enough to say, “My ranking is 220 in the world right now, and I’m trying, hopefully, to get to the Top 10 ... I’ve always wanted to be at the top, to win Grand Slams.”

Somehow the teenage Harrison, who seems to have been born speaking in full paragraphs, made it sound like getting to No. 1 was just going to be a simple matter of sticking to his master plan.

Now, at 24, Harrison was back in the same round, playing on a court with the same name. This time, though, he understood better than most just how rocky the ATP climb can be, and how far it can veer off course. Harrison came into this tournament ranked No. 120. Rather than contending for titles at majors, he has spent much of the last five years suffering through a series of tough early-round draws at them. The nadir at the Open may have come in 2014, when Harrison, after going down two sets to love to Grigor Dimitrov, watched much of the crowd file out of Louis Armstrong Stadium.

"Those people don’t have too much faith in me,” he said at the time.

But Harrison has also grown up during that time. The former firebrand got engaged this spring to Lauren McHale (Christina’s sister), and after spending two months on the sidelines in 2015 with ligament tears, he began to feel some new momentum in his game and his results this spring. The racquet-smashing tantrums of old had (mostly) been replaced by a levelheaded sense of purpose.

“I’ve won a lot of matches recently,” Harrison told TENNIS.com's Kamakshi Tandon in March. “I feel like right now I’m starting to pick up a big confidence high.”

Harrison’s confidence grew some more this summer when he won main-draw matches in D.C. and Toronto; at the latter event, he beat John Isner and pushed Tomas Berdych to a third set.

Still, the crowd on Thursday wasn’t quite ready to share that confidence. In 2010, a packed house—which included John Breaux, a former U.S. senator from his home state of Louisiana—had roared for Harrison from the opening point. This time the audience took a wait-and-see attitude as they fanned themselves in the New York humidity. What were the chances that he was going to beat the Wimbledon runner-up, anyway? When Harrison gave back an early break in the first set, and double-faulted on set point in the tiebreaker, it seemed they had been right to stay skeptical.

After that double fault, I fully expected Harrison to demolish his racquet on his way to the sideline. But I waited for it in vain; all he did was walk to his chair, sit down and change shirts. Wow, I thought, what did this composed young man do with Ryan Harrison? But as the match progressed, that sense of composure never went away. Harrison double-faulted in big moments, squandered set points in the second, was pushed behind the baseline by Raonic and raged at himself, but he never lost control of his emotions.

“I was just really focusing on [giving back the early break]," Harrison said, "not becoming a tipping point in the match where, all of a sudden, next [thing] you know he’s reeling off four, five games in a row.”

Harrison’s sense of calm helped again in the pivotal third set. After he let a 5-2 lead become 5-5, and lost six set points along the way, the crowd grew quiet again—Was he going to let another set slip? But Harrison bounced back right away and, in the match’s most crucial passage of play, won the next two games. He finished the set with three straight brilliant running forehand passes.

Raonic’s serve was broken, and so was his body. The Canadian, flushed and exhausted, began to cramp, and Harrison, slowly but surely, pulled out a 6-7 (4), 7-5, 7-5, 6-1 win in three hours and 37 minutes.

Afterward, Raonic said that the pressure he put on himself to perform well after reaching the Wimbledon final—and skipping the Olympics—had taken a toll.

“I don’t think hydration was an issue,” Raonic said. “Probably just stress and nerves, a mental sort of over-exuberance ... I didn’t serve well to start this tournament. That’s normally my go-to ... I think that just, sort of, caught up to me throughout the match.”

Credit Raonic, who could barely stand by the end, for sticking it out and never complaining about his fate.

For Harrison, the most satisfying aspect of this win was that he didn’t have to play out of his mind to make it happen. It was something he first felt after losing to Berdych in Toronto.

“I was looking back at that match this summer,” Harrison said, “and was saying, ‘I don’t need to do anything [more] than I’m capable of doing.’ I just need to do what I’m capable of and trust that it gives me opportunities.”

Six years after a strutting, teenaged Harrison lost in his first big chance on a Grandstand court, an older, calmer version made the most of his second chance. His career hasn’t gone according to plan, but that’s the good thing about starting early—you can start over early, too.

By the fourth set, as the red-haired American player sprinted down the homestretch, the man with the green hat and the deep tan was chanting for “Ry-an!” along with 10,000 others. Harrison had faith in himself, and after a long afternoon, he made the Open crowd have faith in him, too.