Much looked the same, from his smooth strokes to his sartorial boldness-today he wore kit by Hydrogen that featured stars on his shirt and vertical stripes on his pants. Sixteen years and twice as many hairstyles later, a 33-year-old Berdych was back on Court 13 at 11:00 on Monday morning. When Berdych upset Roger Federer at the Athens Olympics the following summer, it seemed that he had arrived as well.Īs we know now, the rest was not quite history. In his beautifully brute force, it seemed as if 21st-century tennis had arrived. I’ll never forget the crack-of-a-gunshot sound that his flat first serve made.

He dropped down and drove through both his ground strokes, and generated quiet, easy, effortless power. But the already-towering teen was around long enough to make me think, for a few minutes at least, that he was going to be the future of men’s tennis.Īt a time when the game was growing taller by the day, Berdych was the smoothest-hitting 6’5’’ player I’d ever seen. He entered the main draw as a lucky loser, and he exited it quickly, to Juan Ignacio Chela in the second round.

That was 2003, and he was a long-haired 17-year-old making his Grand Slam debut. NEW YORK-It had been 16 years since I first saw Tomas Berdych on Court 13 at the US Open.