The world was turned upsidedown for the Australian teenager Jelena Dokic on the opening day of the US Open yesterday, just two months after she caused the most almighty upset at Wimbledon when she dumped the world's number one, Martina Hingis of Switzerland, out of the tournament in the first round 6-2, 6-0.
With hurricane Dennis whirling its way up the Eastern seaboard and nudging towards New York, there was a decidedly autumn nip in the air as the winds steadily increased.
At first the 16-year-old Dokic appeared the more comfortable in the difficult conditions, taking a 4-1 lead against Spain's Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario in the first set, but thereafter her game fell apart dramatically.
This tournament is famed for its brashness and noise, but there was a notably low-key feeling to its opening session with the vast Arthur Ashe stadium, which holds more than 23,000, virtually empty as Sanchez-Vicario and Dokic began their first-round match.
In honesty there was little in the programme for New Yorkers to get excited about. Pete Sampras was not playing, while Andre Agassi had been reserved for the first night session.
As this city's newspapers see it, the men's tournament can only be won by either one or the other, so the fans had no great incentive to fight the early- morning traffic in order to get to Flushing Meadows.
Since reaching the semi-finals of the French Open, when she lost to Hingis, Sanchez-Vicario has had an extremely thin time on the women's circuit but her record in the US Open, certainly as regards consistency, is one of the best.
She won the title in 1994 and since her first visit in 1987, when she was only 15-years-old and went out in the first round, she has never failed to get at least to the last 16.
Dokic began as if she had plucked a little part of hurricane Dennis out of the skies and added its strength to her ground strokes. Sanchez-Vicario, no slouch about court, found herself chasing lost causes, having initially broken the Australian in a nervous opening service game.
Dokic broke back immediately and then began to dominate, reviving memories of that extraordinary match against Hingis which eventually propelled Dokic to the Wimbledon quarter-finals.
Sanchez-Vicario gave the youngster many a quizzical glance as forehands and double-fisted backhands thundered past her left and right. At the change-overs the Spaniard rubbed her face hard with a towel, as if trying to erase what was happening from her mind.
Dokic, eager to close out the first set, suddenly began to discover that getting the ball past her opponent was as difficult as getting chewing gum off the sole of a shoe. Sanchez-Vicario prolonged almost every point while gradually finding her own range and hitting the lines with metronomic regularity.
Given the swirling, capricious wind the drop shot was not the most sensible of shots for Dokic to pursue persistently in the face of adversity. Many of them landed limply in the net, while most of the others were so telegraphed that the ever alert Sanchez-Vicario ran them down with ease and duly reached the second round with a 7-5,6-1 win.
The first seed to fall was South Africa's Amanda Coetzer, three times a quarter-finalist here, who lost 6-1, 7-5 to Romania's enigmatic Irina Spirlea.
