Brandon Nakashima broke serve in the second game on the Grandstand on Wednesday afternoon and led 2-0. He did not lead again.Alex Michelsen beat the No. 16 seed 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 to reach the third round of the US Open for the first time, an all-American second round between two Southern Californians who had never met on tour.
The match turned on a serve Michelsen had decided to take away before he walked on court. Watching one of Nakashima’s matches earlier in the summer, he said afterwards, he had noticed that on the big points in the ad court Nakashima kept going back to the same location — the serve he trusts. Michelsen set up to cover it and made him hit something else. The two practise together often, and Michelsen said practice is where a player’s tendencies become visible.
Nakashima recovered the early break and served at 3-5 in the opening set holding two set points against him. He saved both, then lost the set on consecutive forced errors, pushed off the baseline by a taller man hitting through him. Michelsen broke again in the eighth game of the second set for 5-3 and served it out to love. After that the returning simply stopped: Nakashima did not earn a break point in either the second set or the third.
During the entire match Michelsen faced three break points and saved two. At the other end he made seven and converted four. He is playing his fourth consecutive US Open main draw and had never been past the second round here; the win is his second in ten attempts against a top-20 opponent this season, and it comes with an oblique injury that shortened his grass-court season behind him.
Nakashima, 25 and ranked No. 17, arrived in New York on the best hard-court form of his career: a final in Montreal, semi-finals in Washington and Cincinnati, 23 hard-court wins on the season. Michelsen, 22 and ranked No. 46, is the lower-ranked man by 29 places.
“That wasn’t close to the level that I can play at,” Nakashima said, while crediting Michelsen’s performance and pointing to the summer as a positive. What makes the result matter beyond the scoreline is where it happened in the draw. This is the section Novak Djokovic vacated on the opening night, losing to Mariano Navone in five sets, and Nakashima had inherited the clearest path to a quarter-final of anyone left in it. He lasted four days.
The quarter emptied further the same afternoon. Andrey Rublev, the No. 23 seed and the highest seed remaining in that half of the section, lost to Spain’s Daniel Merida 6-7(3), 6-2, 6-4, 6-4. Merida is Michelsen’s next opponent. Of the men still standing in the quarter, only Rublev and Matteo Berrettini had ever reached this stage of the US Open before, and both of those names are now down to one.
Nakashima had spent the summer answering questions about the attention that came with beating higher-ranked players. He said the added pressure and media demands were new experiences he was trying to absorb rather than resist. On Wednesday the noise was somebody else’s problem as Michelsen had watched him, found the pattern, and removed it.
