John Isner will play for his third consecutive BB&T Atlanta Open title, but getting there wasn’t easy.
Isner fought off Denis Kudla, playing in the first semifinal of his career, 4-6, 6-2, 7-5 on Saturday to reach his fifth Atlanta championship match since the tournament returned six years ago. Isner, an All-American at Georgia, improved to 19-3 in Atlanta will try to win his 10th ATP title against either Gilles Muller or Marcos Baghdatis on Sunday.
“Seven years ago, when I heard this tournament was going to come to Atlanta, I figured it was going to be a good thing for me,” Isner said. “But not this good.”
Kudla helped Isner in the final game with two unforced errors to seal the defeat. One he said was the result of someone in the crowd screaming as he went to hit his forehand. The noise caused him to hesitate and resulted in the game moving to Isner’s advantage. The match ended with Kudla sending a forehand wide.
Isner didn’t need much help.
After struggling with his second serve in the first set, he won 19 consecutive points on serve from his last game in the first set to his first game in the third set. He finished with 25 aces to reach 77 in the tournament.
Kudla said Isner was trying to hit spots in the first set, which slowed down his serve enough to be hit. Isner started flattening out his serve in the final two sets, enabling him to reach 140 mph.
“That’s when it started getting too tough,” Kudla said.
In the first doubles semifinal, Georgia Tech’s Christopher Eubanks and Atlanta’s Donald Young were beaten by the best doubles team in tennis history.
Bob and Mike Bryan won their 942nd match and are to the verge of their 107th title with a 6-2, 6-4 win over Eubanks and Young. The Bryans have never won a championship in five previous tournaments played in Atlanta.
“Any ATP final is special,” Bob Bryan said. “On finals day you have to be more aggressive because no one gives you a match in a final.”
In the city where they won their first match as a doubles team in 1996 — the same year Eubanks was born — they will face either Eric Butorac and Artem Sitak or Muller and Colin Fleming in Sunday’s finale.
If the Bryans were to win, it would be the 13th city in the U.S. and 32nd in the world in which they have won a title.
Eubanks, a sophomore at Tech, and Young, an Atlanta resident, were paired together for the first time, but won their first two matches to earn the right to take on the Bryans, who have finished No. 1 in 10 of the past 12 years. The difference in experience showed: Eubanks and Young won only five points against the Bryan’s 41 serves.
“They make you hit a lot of tough shots. That’s why they are No. 1 in the world,” Eubanks said.
Sunday’s championships will be hard-earned. Weather forecasts project temperatures in the mid-90s with 50-percent humidity.
“That sort of simplifies things for me,” Isner said. “I need to be aggressive in conditions like that.”
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