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by Pete Bodo
**NEW YORK—It was 11:32, just thirty-two minutes into the 2011 U.S. Open and about an hour before an earthquake set the blue struts that support the massive, concrete upper deck of Arthur Ashe stadium swaying, as if it were all part of some grotesque opening ceremony. From halfway up the aluminum bleachers beside Court 7, tennis coach Carlos Maldonado looked down at Gail Brodsky, the 20-year-old whom he'd supported and helped for a number of years now.
Brodsky, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and attired in a flattering, black-and-purple top over a white dress trimmed with lace, looked the part of a glamorous, tanned tennis pro. But now and then, she flashed Maldonado a smoldering, covert glance. A look which he received stoically, as if he understood and suffered along with her.
Brodsky was on the wrong end of a savage beatdown, trailing Canada's Stephanie Dubois, the No. 3 seed in the women's qualifying tournament, 6-0, 1-0. Maldanado was thinking that this wasn't the girl he knew, the aggressive baseliner with the atomic forehand, powerful backhand, and smooth service motion. "The person I saw wasn't Gail," he would tell me later. "The person I saw was someone very tentative and nervous."
Tentative, nervous, and helpless—and on track to earn the painful distinction of being the first player to lose at this year's U.S. Open.
You do realize that the tournament is underway, don't you? Someone who played at Flushing Meadows today could, but probably won't, win the tournament. This, though, is certain: Nobody who isn't in the qualifying draw or automatically entered in the main draw (which will be determined on Thursday) is going to hoist either of those singles trophies come the weekend of September 11th.
It seems an impossibly long way off, doesn't it? And it willl seem even more remote to those fine tennis players who lose in the qualilfying event—players like, to name a few familiars, Arnaud Clement, Jesse Witten, Amer Delic, Urszula Radwanska and Frank Dancevic. Put yourselves in their shoes, in Brodsky's neat, spotless white tennis shoes, for a moment.
It's 11:40, she's trailing 6-0, 4-0. Dubois is playing like a woman possessed, smacking winners left and right, and Brodsky has lost her game as completely as if it were a set of car keys dropped over the side of a bridge. Should Brodsky lose, she will be out of the tournament before it properly begins, and more entitled to feel cheated or depressed than someone who never even had a chance to play.
Brodsky's dilemma was particularly poignant because it wasn't so long ago—August 2008, to be exact—that she was an "it" girl at the U.S. Open. As the headline in New York's tabloid Daily News put it, Coney Island Teen Gail Brodsky Courts Success at the U.S. Open. . .
In this self-infatuated city, Brodsky was a tailor-made story (you can read Tom Perrotta's excellent backgrounder here). Her parents were immigrants from the Ukraine who settled in Brooklyn—her father, Eduard Brodsky, claimed that he arrived in the U.S. with just $100 in his pocket. Eduard, who had no knowledge of tennis going in, developed Gail's game on the hard courts of the public parks, and told stories of how other rec players cursed him, and once even called the police. "They were very upset that I brought more than three balls on the court," he told the Daily News. And there she was, a wild card into the main draw of the U.S. Open at the tender age of 17.
Things didn't go exactly as hoped, though. Brodsky lost her main-draw U.S. Open debut to Agnes Szavay. Although Brodsky improved in the ensuing months, it wasn't quickly enough, or so dramatically that she made a quantum leap. At the end of 2008, she was ranked in the mid-400s. She slipped 100 places by the end of 2009, but rebounded and got another wild card into the U.S. Open main draw in 2010. She lost in the first round again, this time to Anabel Medina Garrigues.
But Brodsky persevered, and improved. By this summer, her ranking was up to No. 236—good enough to get her into the qualifying for this year's tournament on merit. "I was proud that I got into qualifying without having to get a wild card for the first time in my career," she told me.
At 11:50 and 34 seconds, Brodsky's U.S. Open was over—fifty-some-odd minutes after the event started. She was the first person to lose in qualifying, by the nightmarish score of 6-0, 6-0.
When the final score was called, Brodsky jogged up to the net and the two girls pecked each other on both cheeks. They're friends. The beating one inflicted on the other wasn't going to change that, not for Brodsky anyway: "I wish her all the best, she's a very pleasant person. Obviously I did my best. I hope she goes on to win the tournament."
It was a classy attitude, all things considered. I then asked her, "What happened out there?"
"The whole atmosphere made me more nervous than I wanted to be," she said, "and Stephanie is a really good player. I didn't play the match I wanted. I tried not to be nervous before the match, and I wasn't. But I made up for it during the match. I didn't have those pre-match jitters, but once it started I was shaking."
Things have changed for the Coney Island kid since that summer of 2008. If her parents, who had been dog groomers—they once trimmed Jay Berger's Wheaton terrier down on Key Biscayne, absurd as that sounds—were at the match today, they were well concealed. The situation is complicated, or maybe not—whatever the case, Brodsky doesn't like to talk about it. She lives in her own apartment in Philadelphia now and makes her own decisions; she gets help from Maldonado but has no coach, although she may begin working with the USTA Player Development staff.
In her quest to improve, Brodsky has traveled so widely that she seems to have developed a Canadian accent (her inflection is such that you expect her to end each sentence with a rising "eh?"), and freely sprinkles her conversation with Australian slang. Last week, Brodsky played in the U.S. Open Wild Card playoffs in College Park, Md. She lost a very close semifinal to Madison Keys, whereupon she hopped on the Amtrak and arrived in New York two nights ago, on Sunday. She was in the qualifying on merit, which is a genuine honor. And now she will have to experience the U.S. Open the same way a fan does; from the sofa.
"I'm not sure what I'll do," Brodsky said. "I may hang around for a few days."
I asked Maldonado if he was disappointed by the shellacking Brodsky had absorbed. "Not at all," he replied, emphatically adding, "Not by any stretch of the imagination. For a player to get into this venue speaks volumes for their hard work over the years. Coming in, you epxect the worst because that's the easiest, then you hope for the best."
The best was not to be today, but who knows? There's always tomorrow, there's always another tournament where glory beckons, even if the next three weeks will be quiet ones for the Coney Island kid.