NEW YORK (AP)—Defending champion Kim Clijsters briefly lost her footing on a windy day before recovering in time to win her 15th straight match at the U.S. Open.

The second-seeded Belgian beat Hungary’s Greta Arn 6-0, 7-5 in the first round Monday. She fell behind 4-0 in the second set, and the 104th-ranked Arn had a chance to serve out the set at 5-4. But Clijsters got the break, then did it again to clinch the straight-set victory.

Clijsters said she wasn’t aggressive enough playing with the wind, waiting for the ball instead of moving up for it.
 
“She kind of put me under pressure a little bit where it should have been the other way around,” she said.

A year ago, Clijsters was a wild-card entry in only her third tournament back after 2 1/2 years away from the sport. Now she’s one of the favorites to win the Open.

“Other players kind of didn’t really know what to expect,” Clijsters said.

Melanie Oudin and Francesca Schiavone also know how quickly perceptions can change. Oudin struggled with higher expectations since her crowd-pleasing run to the U.S. Open quarterfinals last year. So did Schiavone after her breakthrough French Open title in June.

But neither showed any signs of the pressure in cruising to dominant first-round wins.

Oudin, 18, needed just 56 minutes to beat Olga Savchuk of Ukraine 6-3, 6-0. Schiavone, the Italian who won her first Grand Slam weeks before her 30th birthday, dispatched Ayumi Morita of Japan 6-1, 6-0 in 58 minutes.

If anything, Schiavone seems to be having fun in the spotlight. Asked why she’s a fan favorite, she playfully replied, “I attract them because I’m beautiful.”

Schiavone acknowledged that maybe she’s a bit more motivated at a Grand Slam than at other tournaments. Schiavone, seeded No. 6, had been just 3-6 since winning at Roland Garros. She lost in the first round at Wimbledon and dropped her opening match at three other tournaments.

She was pleased that her first-round match was in the grandstand—a year ago, she was relegated to an outer court.

“I like to do it, because adrenaline is coming up and I enjoy much more than play in faraway court,” she said with a laugh. “Maybe because I am 30 years old and now I want to enjoy with people.”

Venus Williams, a two-time champion in New York, and Roger Federer, who counts five U.S. Opens among his record 16 Grand Slam titles, were scheduled to play in the night session.

The ninth-seeded Roddick celebrated his 28th birthday by beating Stephane Robert of France 6-3, 6-2, 6-2.

Roddick, who recently discovered he had a mild case of mononucleosis, was under doctor’s orders to limit his physical activity, but he said he feels a lot better now than he did a month or so ago.

“It’s going the right way,” he said. “To be honest, once you decide to play, I think you throw all the excuses and everything else out the window. If I decide to play, then it’s up to me to give 100 percent of what I have. So it’s not something I really want to discuss too much from this point forward.”

Two-time French Open runner-up Robin Soderling was pushed to five sets by a qualifier ranked 214th in the world. The No. 5-seeded Swede beat Andreas Haider-Maurer of Austria 7-5, 6-3, 6-7 (2), 5-7, 6-4.

Other winners included No. 6 Nikolay Davydenko of Russia, No. 11 Marin Cilic of Croatia, No. 13 Jurgen Melzer of Austria, No. 17 Frenchman Gael Monfils and No. 22 Juan Carlos Ferrero of Spain, while No. 27 Fernando Gonzalez Chile quit in the third set of his match against Croatia’s Ivan Dodig because of a knee injury.

Women moving into the second round included French Open runner-up Sam Stosur of Australia, two-time major finalist Elena Dementieva of Russia, Belarusian No. 10 Victoria Azarenka, No. 13 Marion Bartoli of France, No. 16 Shahar Peer of Isreal, and No. 24 Daniela Hantuchova of Slovakia, who beat Russian former No. 1 Dinara Safina 6-3, 6-4.

NEW YORK (AP)—A year after Melanie Oudin’s surprising run to the U.S. Open quarterfinals captivated fans, there’s plenty about her that’s the same.

She’s still a bubbly teen from Marietta, Ga., prone to sprinkling sentences with the word “like,” as in, “I wasn’t, like, freaking out,” which is how she described her reaction to starting the 2010 U.S. Open with Monday’s first match in 23,000-seat Arthur Ashe Stadium.

She still pumps a clenched fist and screams, “Come on!” after winning points, whether it’s thanks to her own terrific shot or an opponent’s error. She still scurries her 5-foot-6 frame around the court with abandon in brightly colored sneakers that carry an inspirational word written on the side, although her current ones read, “Courage,” instead of 2009’s motto, “Believe.”
 
The primary change for the Oudin who beat 143rd-ranked qualifier Olga Savchuk of Ukraine 6-3, 6-0 Monday—reeling off 20 consecutive points in one stretch, and the last nine games—is now she is someone who people figure will win such matches.

“It’s a lot different this year, especially going into, like, Grand Slams,” Oudin said. “Last year, no one expected anything from me, and this year there are pretty high expectations for me.”

When Oudin—it’s pronounced oo-DAN—arrived at Flushing Meadows in 2009, she was 17, ranked 70th, never had won a U.S. Open match and was relatively anonymous. No one figured she’d go as far as she did; her hotel reservation in New York wasn’t for long enough, so Oudin needed to switch places.

She upset four opponents in a row, including three-time major champion Maria Sharapova and 2008 Beijing Olympic gold medalist Elena Dementieva, to become the tournament’s youngest quarterfinalist since Serena Williams in 1999.

Along the way, Oudin’s on-court spirit and off-court personality earned her plenty of adoration and attention—“a bit of a zoo,” is the way her coach, Brian de Villiers, described it.

“Everyone has one Cinderella story, and mine was last year. Now it’s like everyone just expects me to do that because I did it last year,” Oudin said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to happen.”

Indeed, there have been some rough patches. She went 1-3 at this year’s first three Grand Slam tournaments, including first-round losses at the Australian Open and French Open. She entered Monday with a 17-20 record in 2010, a four-match losing streak, and only four victories in her previous 17 matches.

The worst part? The sorts of things she sometimes has heard from spectators.

Recounted Oudin: “You hear them say stuff, and it’s not like, ‘All right!’ (or) like, ‘Come on! You’re so close!’ (or) like, ‘You can do it!”’

She said those phrases with encouragement in her voice. Then, to illustrate the point, Oudin scrunched up her face and drenched her voice with disappointment.

“It’s more like, ‘Melanie, come on! What are you doing?’ I hear that, like, kind of a lot,” she said. “It’s just really different from, like, last year, when everyone was so pumped for me. … I’m, like, ‘I’m trying as hard as I can, you know?’ It’s not going to happen all the time. Like, you never play your best tennis all the time.”

Against Savchuk, Oudin felt some jitters early as she returned to the scene of her breakthrough. Oudin even said her stomach felt queasy. But after erasing two break points while serving at 3-all, she didn’t lose a game the rest of the way and took 28 of the final 30 points.

“I knew she was going to be nervous at the start because of a lot of expectations from the fans,” Savchuk said. “But in the second set, she played very confident, very aggressive. I didn’t really have a chance.”

Oudin is currently ranked 43rd, down from a career-best 31st in April, but consider: She was 177th at the end of 2008. She and de Villiers say Oudin’s serve is much improved from 12 months ago.

“The main thing I’m trying to get into her is to play for herself and not for what other people think or say,” de Villiers said. “I still don’t like her reading the press or blogs or any of that. People can be brutal out there.”

When Oudin left the locker room after Monday’s victory, she was greeted by a hug and words of encouragement from her grandmother, who used to take a 7-year-old Melanie and twin sister Katherine—now a freshman at Furman—to hit tennis balls out of a bucket.

Oudin’s mother, Leslie, was waiting in the hallway, too, right in the spot she stood a year ago to greet her daughter after each stunning victory.

“She’s been working hard and has had a lot of pressure on her. I’m just so pleased she started off on the right foot. She needed this. She really needed it. Just to feel good, just to feel good about herself,” Mom said. “To me, she’s not reached her peak, and she’s just got to be patient.

“And so does everybody else.”

NEW YORK (AP)—Andy Roddick celebrated his 28th birthday with a 6-3, 6-2, 6-2 win over Stephane Robert of France in the first round of the U.S. Open.

The ninth-seeded American had eight aces. He has reached the second round five straight years.

The 2003 U.S. Open champion had been slowed by a mild case of mononucleosis this summer.

NEW YORK (AP)—Two-time French Open runner-up Robin Soderling reached the second round of the U.S. Open by holding off a strong challenge from a qualifier who’s 214th in the rankings.

The No. 5-seeded Swede hurt himself with 13 double-faults while edging Andreas Haider-Maurer of Austria 7-5, 6-3, 6-7 (2), 5-7, 6-4 Monday. Haider-Maurer hit 34 aces—26 more than Soderling.

The 23-year-old Haider-Maurer was making his Grand Slam debut and facing a top-10 opponent for the first time. Soderling appeared headed to an easy victory, taking the opening two sets and then holding four match points in the third.

But Haider-Maurer charged back, thanks mainly to his big serves, which reached up to 134 mph.

by Pete Bodo

NEW YORK—Let’s get right down to business on Day One of the U.S. Open, shall we? Andy Roddick and Kim Clijsters, two players who have won the U.S. Open but no other major, are featured on today’s day card here at the National Tennis Center. And while Roddick’s condition is more perilous, both players are in a do or die situation, insofar as that ever obtains in a sport where each of the four Grand Slams played annually offers potential for redemption and re-invention—as well as horror and desperation.

But let’s face it, Roddick has been knocking at the door of two majors, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, since he won his lone Grand Slam win here in 2003—a feat that catapulted the raw-boned, fresh-faced, just-turned-21 kid into a star.

The following year, Roddick lost a tough five-set quarterfinal to Joachim Johansson, but then flamed out in the first round in 2005 to Gilles Muller. That wiped out a lot of Roddick’s U.S. Open capital, and he spent years rebuilding it.

Roddick lost back-to-back matches to eventual champion Roger Federer after that loss to Muller (one of them in Roddick’s second final on Arthur Ashe stadium), and in 2008 he was laid low by Novak Djokovic—no shame in that. But last year’s third-round loss to countryman John Isner had to be a bitter blow salved only slighty by the sense of kinship between the men.

Now Roddick is the No. 9 seed, and the graphic portait of his ranking history is one of those “worth a thousand words” tableaux. Twice in recent years, Roddick has re-energized a slipping game with the help of a coach; first, Jimmy Connors, then most recently Larry Stefanki. You get the sense that banging the reset button works for a guy like Roddick, who’s always been willing to turn over every stone in what is a very demanding quest, given the limitations of his game: keeping himself in the mix near the top. His real hole cards in that regard have been his proficiency at Wimbledon and his history at the U.S. Open.

But Roddick was staggered at Wimbledon this year in the fourth round by Yen-Hsun Lu of Taipei, losing in the most unexpected way—9-7 in the fifth. So while he doesn’t have a great 2009 finish to defend here (nor the cartload of ranking points), an indifferent performance will leave people wondering if he isn’t on that inevitable downward slide. And given the diligence with which Roddick has worked on his game and fitness, you have to wonder where he could go from here. Remember, Connors and Stefanki didn’t engineer surges by Roddick simply by force of their persuasive personalities. They did hard, targeted work. But what’s there left to work on in Roddick?

As long as Roddick has that big serve, he’ll be a potential factor on any medium to fast court, particularly if the bounce is low and the ball goes through quickly. But if he doesn’t have a good tournament here, he’ll find himself in a position where he has to work harder to achieve less, unless he makes a drastic decision to target a relatively small number of tournaments—rankings be danged.

You might assume that Clijsters is much younger than Roddick, but there’s barely a year difference (Roddick is 28, Clijsters 27). And she’s been to the final of the last three U.S. Opens in which she’s played, and won the last two (she beat Mary Pierce in 2005, and came back from an extended break to win the tournament last year).

When Clijsters won here last year, in just the third tournament of her comeback, it seemed that she might present a consistent challenge to Serena Williams and perhaps even dominate the WTA tour. But while the women’s game is more wide-open than ever, Clijsters hasn’t been able to capitalize on the chaos.

Now that Justine Henin has called it quits for 2010, and the day-to-day impact of the Williams sisters seems to be diminishing, the stage is set for Clijsters do do what her fans have been hoping for and expecting since she first joined the tour: emerge as the dominant star.

Clijsters has all the earmarks of an old-school style prolific champion. She’s focused on a mangeable combination of her young family and tennis. She has no desire to be a movie star or rock musician. She doesn’t run with a fast crowd. She’s works hard, and has also worked through the personal issues that turned her against tennis, a significant victory for a woman who turned pro at 14 and was in the Top 5 by the age of 18. We sometimes forget that Clijsters played an awful lot of tennis (a decade, to be precise) before she pulled the plug in the spring of 2007, while ranked No. 4 in the world. She’d already been to a dozen semifinals or better at majors, and had appeared in five finals (winning just one, here in New York).

Since her surprising victory here a year ago, the question, “just how good is she?” has been approaching critical mass. Is she the same old Kim, pleasant, fun, happy-go-lucky, filthy rich and not quite cut from great champion cloth? Or is she bent on earning a place in the company of Martina Navratilovas and Serena Williamses and Justine Henins of the game?

This is not Roddick’s tournament’s to win, but it is Clijsters’. How she fares will go a long way toward answering that question.

P.S.—While Roddick and Clijster are big names, I plan to focus on the lesser players during this first week at the Open.

A tennis player’s career isn’t a sprint or a marathon; it’s one long roller coaster. We usually measure success by looking at their seasons as a whole—we talk about Laver’s 1969, McEnroe’s 1984, Federer’s 2005 (Or do we talk about his ’06? ’04? ’07? Take your pick). What’s forgotten is that with very few exceptions, each season contains its own slumps and hot streaks, its phases and story arcs, its various ups and downs, which may come and go in a matter of weeks. Consider Andy Murray’s 2010. In the course of nine months, he’s reached the sport’s summit, a Grand Slam final in Melbourne, only to tumble off that mountaintop and get lost in a deep valley of mediocrity for the rest of the spring. By the time I saw him in Paris, he looked tentative and haggard, seemingly unsure of how much effort the whole thing was worth.

At that point a consensus began to coalesce around the idea that Murray didn’t have the stomach—or, at a more technical level, the forehand—to win a Slam, that his steady, reactive game would never get it done over two weeks of three out of five. And while his straight-set loss to Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon didn’t do anything to change those opinions, the tournament still served as a new beginning for Murray, a base of confidence, proof to himself that good things could still happen on a tennis court. Very good things: Despite splitting with his coach, Miles Maclagan, and blowing a lead in the L.A. final to Sam Querrey, Murray settled in comfortably in Toronto and took care of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer back to back, in straight, non-tiebreaker sets, for the title. Suddenly, two months after his Slam obituary had been written and edited, Murray was back on the very short list—like, three people—of favorites for the U.S. Open.

That’s where he stood when I talked with him Saturday at the National Tennis Center. The low-key, rarely smiling, at times flat out grim-looking Scot had just finished a practice session with Novak Djokovic. Even on the brink of the last Slam of the year, the one he likes best and one he’s just short of being the favorite to win, Murray was studiously even keel and big picture.

***

How big of a boost was Toronto for your confidence?

That was great, obviously, but it was Wimbledon really that helped me get it back. I’d played pretty poorly for a while before that, especially during the clay season. Getting to the semis at Wimbledon was a big help in getting over that and clearing my head. Toronto was sort of the next step after, and I felt really good there that week. It’s obviously pretty special to get wins for Roger and Rafa. So yeah, I enjoyed it [slight sarcastic understatement detected in that last sentence].

Right now you’re playing without a coach. Do you have a different mindset on court in that situation?

No, there’s no real difference on the court. Even with a coach, you can’t get any help; you get used to being lonely out there. The difference is in the build up for a tournament. When you’ve been with a coach for a long time, it’s nice to have that freedom for a while, and it can help you relax as you prepare and as the tournament goes on. But I don’t want to go for two years without a coach or something.

You’re among the top seeds again here and a favorite to win it. Did you learn anything from the Australian Open final [Murray lost to Federer in straight sets]?

You learn from the whole tournament. You might look at it, look at just the final, and say it was a disappointing result, but it was a very good two weeks for me. Before that, I hadn’t really learned how to peak for the Slams, the training that went into it and the scheduling. I was in Miami for a solid month leading up to Australia just training and practicing, and that’s what led to me getting to the final.

I also learned a lot right after that. I should have taken some more time off, like Roger did, because I was pretty tired from the whole lead-in and then the tournament. Getting to a Slam final or winning one is a longer process than people realize.

Do you look to Roger as model for that kind of thing?

Well, you do watch what he and Rafa do because of their success. But you also learn that everybody is different. Roger doesn’t play as many events as somebody like Djokovic, say, and I’m somewhere in the middle. Over time you figure out what you can handle, but when it comes to the Slams you do keep an eye on someone like Roger and how he approaches things.

Have you done anything new with your equipment, your racquet or strings, this year?

Last year, after Wimbledon I went to a heavier racquet [Head YouTek Radical Pro] for a little more weight of shot. It’s helped with pace and depth.

We’ve been hearing that the strings have helped change the game by allowing players to get more spin on the ball. Do you think they’ve been a big factor?

I’m not sure how big the effect of strings alone has been. The game has definitely evolved from when we used wood racquets, but there are factors like slower courts, too. I think it evolves because players try new shots, they learn new things they can do with the ball consistently. The strings have helped with spin, yeah, but you can’t just chalk it up to them. There’s more to shot-making.

You were more aggressive earlier in points against Nadal and Federer in Toronto. Will you try to do that at the Open as well?

Against Roger and Rafa you need to keep the ball deep and take a few more chances, or they’ll get on top of you. But every match is different. I know what I’m comfortable doing, and if I try to be more aggressive than that all the time I can end up making rash decisions. I’m not going to come into a tournament like this with a blanket idea of being more aggressive, but knowing that it worked well against those guys makes me feel good about my attacking game.

You said you’ve learned how to peak for a Slam. Do you think you’re doing that now?

I’ve played well after having a break from tournaments in the past, and that’s happened again this summer. Yeah, I feel good.