Donald Young’s expletive-filled outburst at the USTA on Twitter was in response to him not receiving a wild card into Roland Garros prior to the organization holding a tournament for it, TENNIS.com has learned.
After Young won the Tallahassee Challenger last Sunday, a member of his camp e-mailed the USTA and requested that he be given the organization's wild card, even though the USTA had its wild-card playoff set to start in Boca Raton from Tuesday-Friday, with six players already entered. The USTA denied his request, and Young subsequently fell 6-7 (4), 6-4, 6-3, 6-2 to Tim Smyczek in the final. After his loss, Young then tweeted:
"F* USTA! Their full of s*! They have screwed me for the last time!"
Young then tweeted: "That tweet was out of character. ive never been like that before. but im tired of it. sry about the language, but not the thought behind it."
A little while later Young shut down his Twitter page.
Even though Young won Tallahassee and cracked the Top 100, at No. 98, he missed the rankings cut-off for the French Open the week prior, when he failed to qualify for Houston. Young had his best tournament ever in March at Indian Wells when qualified and upset Andy Murray in the second round. But he fell to Dennis Istomin in the first round of Miami the following week and failed to make enough rankings headway.
Young’s response was surprising, given that the ruling body of American tennis has provided him with free coaching and training throughout different periods of his career, and he recently credited the USTA for helping get him into shape and more focused on his game. He has used USTA coaches at almost every tournament he has entered in 2011 and has also used them at USTA training centers in Florida and California.
While the 21-year-old has been using USTA coaching, he is also still coached by his parents, Donald Sr. and Illona, and was working with his mother at the Houston tournament. The USTA has said in the past that it is willing to work with his parents, but they want him to spend some time alone with its coaches, which he did last winter in California, when he was working out with fellow players Sam Querrey and Mardy Fish, and right after the Australian Open in Florida, when he was working with USTA coach Jay Berger.
It is unclear why Young thought the USTA would cancel its pre-established wild card playoff when fellow players Smyczek, Denis Kudla, Andrea Collarini, Alexios Halebian and Jordan Cox had already been invited to play and were on site at the Boca West Country Club.
Neither Young nor his representatives responded to requests for comments.
American teenager Ryan Harrison, who has won USTA wild card play-offs before, declined to play the Boca tournament, saying that he wanted to earn his way into the Grand Slams the hard way by qualifying on site.
The USTA and the French Tennis Federation have a reciprocal agreement in which men’s and women’s singles main draw wild cards into the 2011 French Open and the 2011 U.S. Open are exchanged.—Matthew Cronin