NEW YORK -- Three times on Thursday, Lleyton Hewitt had match points against Lee Hyung-taik in their second-round match at the U.S. Open. Each time, Hewitt misfired, letting the tournament's only South Korean player back in the match.
The former Open champion had already dropped the first set to Lee. Now there was the danger that the match would stretch to a fifth set, a place Hewitt had no interest in going.
Was he frustrated?
"Yeah, for sure," he said. "It's hot enough out there. You want to get back in the locker room as soon as possible, especially when I played a good game to finally break at four-all. I felt like I played a pretty good game yet I wasn't in the locker room. He really stepped it up."
There was a time when Hewitt would have shrugged off Lee, a time when the youngest No. 1 player in the world, winner of the Open in 2001 and Wimbledon last year, breezed past opponents. That seems a lifetime ago.
He has been on a tennis roller-coaster lately, splitting with coach Jason Stoltenberg, engaged in a nasty lawsuit and counter-suit with the ATP and eliminated in the first round at Wimbledon by 6-foot-10 qualifier Ivo Karlovic, just the second defending champion in Wimbledon history to lose in the first round.
Hewitt was just 5-5 in his last 10 matches before the Open and came into this event seeded No. 6, enough of an enigma that Lee posed a legitimate threat.
Then came a fourth match point.
This time Hewitt didn't miss the opportunity to finish, winning the match 5-7, 6-2, 6-2, 6-4.
"He's a shot-maker," Hewitt said of Lee. "It felt like actually the better I played, the better he played. The best game of the match was obviously the last game. I would have liked to have went out a little bit easier. But you know, still happy to get through. You could have gotten down on yourself. I just had to hang in there. I had to put my head down and grind back.
"It was tough tennis."
Tougher, Hewitt figured, than it should have been. As he cooled off, he tried to analyze his form. He was critical of it.
"I didn't serve great today," Hewitt said. "I felt like my ball toss was all over the shop today. It's an area that I want to work on. There's some matches I feel I served great in the past. When I won here two years ago, toward the end of the tournament I probably served as well as I ever served. I do have times where I feel like my motion is good. Right at the moment, I don't feel comfortable with it. But I'm getting through matches."
Still 2001 seems so far away, a time when Hewitt's shots seemed to catch every line. Now, those same shots just miss the chalk.
"I still feel like I've got all the weapons and all the strengths I had back then," he said. "Right at the moment, I just feel like I'm not quite peaking. I feel like I'm hitting the ball as well as I ever hit it in practice. I've just got to try and take that over to the match court." I think one match can turn that all around."
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