Men's Tennis Falls in Heart-Breaking Fashion

It was all quite inhumane.

The players abused other players, the players abused the fans, but in the end, it was the Harvard men’s tennis team that took just slightly more abuse, losing 4-3 to Purdue yesterday at the Murr Tennis Center.

The defeat came in a match that featured so many heart-thumping rallies that by its conclusion, the fans felt as worn out as the players.

The match started out auspiciously for Harvard but proceeded with such riveting swings of momentum that the final turn—in Purdue’s favor—felt almost anticlimactic.

That swing came in the form of a missed backhand volley by No. 3 Junior Dan Nguyen with the score knotted at 10-10 in a third set tiebreaker. The volley did not stretch Nguyen much—four feet from the net, at a seemingly comfortable height—but Nguyen underestimated, punching the ball into the net and then hobbling away, with a cramped left quadriceps and a burning desire for a do-over.

“If I could only have that shot back,” Nguyen said, shaking his head. “Unbelievable.”

What Nguyen could not believe, the crowd could still not grasp. Just one point earlier, down a match point, 10-9, Nguyen had persevered carefully through a forty-shot rally that had the crowd breathless and soundless.

“It was that way the entire match—either someone was being broken or breaking right back,” Nguyen said. “We were pretty much used to it by then, desensitized to all the momentum shifts.”

For Nguyen, the 5-7, 6-2, 6-7 loss broke a four-match singles winning streak dating back to early January. And for the team, it meant heartbreak and a lot of conditioning, as it showed the Harvard team where its physical condition needed to be.

“We’ve got to work on our fitness,” senior co-captain Gideon Valkin said. “I don’t feel like as the match gets longer, we get more comfortable, which is how the fittest teams are.”

Though the Crimson was up 3-2 after winning the doubles point and splitting the first four singles matches in the first three and three-quarters hours of play, its prospects were unclear. On court three, Nguyen was in the midst of a hard-fought third set knotted at 4-4, while two courts over, No. 1 Chris Clayton had just lost his second set in a match that required the skills of football, baseball and tennis combined.

Clayton’s match had proceeded at a snail’s pace with stupendously long points that had the audience strung out and quivering with excitement and the players—especially Clayton’s opponent, Branko Kusmanovic—wheezing and gasping for breath.

Clayton had won the first set, 7-6, in as much time as it had taken most of the other matches to wrap up.

The points were electrifying and dazzlingly athletic, with one particularly long rally featuring Clayton leaning far enough to his right to put his left arm on the ground for support as he dug a forehand as a shortstop would a ground ball for a beautiful save, only to get up and play a handful more shots before winning the rally.

In another point, after being lobbed at the net, Clayton backpedaled like a cornerback and then sprinted for the bounce, again saving the point.

Unfortunately for both Clayton and Nguyen, all these long rallies took a toll, as Clayton ran out of steam in the second and third sets, relinquishing a 3-0 second set lead to fall, 7-6, and then 6-1 in the third.

“That guy had just run Chris out of legs, which is hard to do,” Harvard coach Dave Fish ’72 said, commending his team for playing exhausting matches with great gusto and devotion. “Without the legs, it’s like fighting with one arm behind your back. They’re going to get very discouraged and then get up and say, ‘I played a hell of a match.’ No one’s ever going to forget that match.”

The Crimson’s two singles wins came at No. 4 and No. 5, from a revitalized junior Ashwin Kumar who won, 6-3, 6-3, appearing to have shaken off his previous struggles, and from Valkin, who won, 4-6, 6-4, 6-1, running away with the match once he asserted his aggressiveness and tuned his footwork.

“When I’m not moving well, I’m not stepping in, that’s when I’m losing.” Valkin said. “As soon as I’m moving in, that’s a willing mentality.”

At No. 2, co-captain Scott Denenberg lost a tough match 7-6, 7-5, while No. 6 Michael Kalfayan lost 6-4, 6-3.

A doubles lineup reshuffled for the second time in two weeks took two out of its three matches to capture the doubles point, with No. 1 Kumar and Valkin and No. 2 junior Kieran Burke and Nguyen played crisply, each winning 8-2.

At No. 3, Denenberg and Clayton showed their unfamiliarity with playing together, losing 8-5.

NOTE: Friday’s match against Virginia was postponed until March 14.

—Staff writer Jonathan B. Steinman can be reached at steinman@fas.harvard.edu.