 Just to keep everything interesting, a
few new players enter the city tennis
tournament every year and play havoc
with the seedings.
All of a sudden, there are brackets with
first and second seeds missing before the
semifinals start. The Ann Arbor area
attracts new amateur stars every season.
So seeding isn't an easy job. Tournament
director Dale Greiner doesn't have an
ATP computer to look at when someone
moves here. In the top singles divisions
and the brackets for players 40 and older,
the same players stand out year after
year.
Greiner has been perfect in more than
one division. Men's 40-and-over singles
quarterfinals featured the four top seeds
defeating the four placed players. The
top four seeds all reached the semifinals
in Women's A Doubles and Men's AA
Singles.
But the new stars have come to the
forefront in other divisions.
Philip Emeagwali, a University of
Michigan graduate student, may have
come the farthest, both in distance and in
victories so far in the tournament.
Playing in the Men's B Singles division,
Emeagwali earned a place in the
semifinals with a 6-3, 2-6, 6-2 victory
over Greg Huszczo on Friday.
Emeagwali will play top seed Rod Beer
this morning.
"I knew he was in good shape," said
Emeagwali. "I knew he liked to wear
people out in the third set. I just had to
use consistency."
Weather helped break a pattern of sorts
for Huszczo. Each of his four matches in
the tournament has gone to a third set.
But Wednesday's downpour interrupted
his quarterfinal match after one set. After
winning the first set Friday, he lost his
service two straight times to drop the
match.
Both players tried to wear each other out,
which amounted to a match time of
almost four hours. There were close to
10 deuces in the seventh game of the
third set alone. Emeagwali finally won
that game, which essentially clinched the
match.
"I played a lot of racquetball this winter,"
said Huszczo. "That improved my
conditioning. My strategy is to wear
down an opponent in the first two sets,
then come on strong in the third."
Emeagwali, a civil engineering student
originally from Nigeria, was confident
that strategy wouldn't work.
"With consistency, I try to bring out the
worst in the other player," he said. "I
want to make them make mistakes."
Another new player to the tournament
isn't quite as new as Emeagwali. He's
Greg Hansen, a former Pioneer student
who now plays for Oberlin College.
Hansen, in his first Ann Arbor adult
tournament, defeated top seed Jeff
Holman 1-6, 6-1, 6-4 in a Men's A
Singles quarterfinal Friday.
"I was having trouble getting organized in
the first set," said Hansen, "But he broke
a string at the end of the first set, and had
trouble getting used to a new racket."
Hansen broke serve in the first game of
the third set (Holman had three
double-faults in the game). Each player
held the rest of the match.
"I let him back into the match," said
Holman, who played for Huron, then
EMU in the 1970s.
Reported by Jim Gindin in the Ann Arbor News on July 22, 1989.
Click on this
icon to
Click on emeagwali.com for more information.
| 