Stan Wawrinka broke to love when Matteo Berrettini served for the first set on Monday, and the Grandstand rose the way it used to. He had a set point in the game after that a marathon Berrettini survived through four deuces. In the second set Wawrinka held seven break points, three of them for the set. He took none of them.
Berrettini won 7-6(4), 7-6(3), 6-0. Only the third set looked anything like the distance between a 41-year-old on a wild card and a former world No. 6, and by then the chances had gone. Wawrinka’s Grand Slam career, 21 years and 78 main draws, ended on a bagel. “It’s always more difficult when you win less matches to get the confidence to finish those sets,” he said afterwards.
The shape of it repeated their Wimbledon meeting in June, which also went to tiebreaks and also went to the Italian. A brief rain delay early in the second set was followed by a Wawrinka break, and again he could not hold the advantage. The third set opened with a game that ran 16 minutes, including an unsuccessful Berrettini challenge over a possible double hit, and once it went the other two followed.
He was not supposed to be here at all. The USTA gave its last men’s singles wild card to Patrick Kypson, ranked No. 115, and Wawrinka, who had already travelled to New York, went home to Switzerland. Kypson withdrew injured. On Wednesday Wawrinka learned the place was his, and he came back.
Days before the tournament, asked about reaching his 20th US Open, Novak Djokovic counted the men still standing from his own 2005 debut. Three or four, he thought, and named Wawrinka among them. Within 48 hours both were out in the first round, Djokovic beaten in five sets by Mariano Navone on Sunday night and Wawrinka on Monday afternoon. Only one of them was leaving for good.
Wawrinka finishes 46-17 at the US Open, with semi-finals in 2013 and 2015 and the title in 2016, when he beat Djokovic in the final for the third of his three majors. He made the main draw here 18 times. “One of the reasons I played until 41 was to live these moments,” he said during the on-court ceremony. Berrettini, a semi-finalist in New York in 2019, plays Navone in the second round.
