NEW YORK -- A long, stirring slog of a match that wore on through the Tuesday dinner hour came garnished with a most unusual soundtrack.
It featured the repeated, guttural yells of one Roger Federer, the Swiss maestro long given to silent dominance and dominant silence. It had Federer as a sort of mini-Connors impersonating a jackhammer and vibrating his body in a double fist pump after a pivotal break of service in a fifth set. And it had the reminder through Federer's primal screams that among all tennis majors, the U.S. Open most often strays from tennis toward something more akin to wrestling.
In the rowdy wrestling ring they call Arthur Ashe Stadium, it finally had Federer grinding through his newfound imperfections and his 60 unforced errors in a hairy fourth round, wriggling out of 3 hours 32 minutes with the excellent Russian Igor Andreev by 6-7 (5), 7-6 (5), 6-3, 3-6, 6-3.
Then, it had Federer, winner of the last four titles here, crediting the crowd with supplying "you know, that feeling of going crazy," and admitting that the joys of operating from No. 2 in the world can trump the cold business of No. 1. "Maybe for a while it was quite, always the same for me, go on the court, you win all the time, so maybe you don't take it for granted all that much anymore," he said.
You especially don't take it for granted in the tennis wrestling that carried a frantic Tuesday in Flushing Meadow.
A fine melee unfolded over in Louis Armstrong Stadium concurrent with Federer-Andreev, and it sent a Luxembourgian qualifier ranked No. 130, Gilles Muller, opposite Federer in the quarterfinals. Muller chased off two-time semifinalist and No. 5-ranked Nikolay Davydenko by 6-4, 4-6, 6-3, 7-6 (10) in 3 hours 7 minutes during which Muller warded off seven set points in the fourth set, Davydenko broke four rackets and the two staged a carnival of a fourth-set tiebreaker that Muller, 25, called "the most exciting tiebreaker that I've ever played in my entire life."
In the midday sun before even all of that, No. 3 Novak Djokovic grappled 3 hours 44 minutes with No. 15 Tommy Robredo, winning, 4-6, 6-2, 6-3, 5-7, 6-3, and citing injuries to seemingly most parts of his body, which Robredo found melodramatic, saying, "After every time he was asking for a trainer, he was running like hell and he was making the shot. . . . So did I trust him? No. No."
