Hewitt: 'It wasn't a racial comment'

By Greg Garber
ESPN.com

NEW YORK -- James Blake, a 21-year-old American, nearly scored the first major upset of this U.S. Open before falling Friday to No. 4-seeded Australian Lleyton Hewitt 6-4, 3-6, 2-6, 6-3, 6-0 in a match overshadowed by controversy.
After getting called for a second foot fault in the third set, Hewitt was overheard wondering aloud to the umpire if it was a coincidence that Blake and the linesman in question were both African Americans.

"Look at him," Hewitt said, pointing to the linesman.
"Look at him," Hewitt said, referring to Blake. "You tell me what the similarity is."
"It's in the middle of a tennis match," Hewitt explained later. "I'm a very passionate player as it is when I get out there. I get foot-faulted at one end two times on big points, not up the other end, something is not balanced there. I went to the umpire with my argument. He said, 'We'll change him.'
"They moved him, put him in a different position."

"My reaction was to try to win the match," Blake said. "I didn't want anything to cloud my judgment, cloud my thought process."
Hewitt, 20, refused to repeat precisely what he said and on-court microphones didn't catch the entire conversation.
"He said that there was a similarity between the line judge and myself," Blake said afterward. "He made a comment in the heat of the moment on the court to the umpire. Probably didn't even occur to him that I heard it."

"That was between me and the umpire," Hewitt said. "I come from a multi-cultured country. I'm not racial in any way. You can all think what you want at the end of the day, but I wasn't making a racial comment. I didn't say it in that way. If people took it in the wrong way, I apologize but the way I said it wasn't racial."

"I just hope it wasn't," Blake said. "I'm generally a positive thinker. I give people the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes maybe too much, but I definitely am going to give him the benefit of the doubt this time because it's in competition. If you feel like you have a couple bad calls or something, it can really frustrate you. You probably don't mean it. Maybe whatever he meant by it, maybe he does feel bad about it now. You know, you move on from that."

On the court, it was also a gut-wrenching affair -- literally. Midway through the fourth set, Blake lost his lunch entirely. Recalling Pete Sampras' celebrated hurly-burly moment against Alex Corretja at the 1996 Open. Blake seemed to have the match under control before he grew visibly weaker in the oppressive heat and humidity; he won only one game after getting sick.
The match consumed three hours and six minutes -- and untold gallons of fluid. Afterward, Blake received several IV units to replenish fluids before playing mixed doubles.

While some of the other young Americans like Andy Roddick, Jan-Michael Gambill and hard-hitting Taylor Dent have received more attention, there is no better story than Blake, who captivated the crowd at the jam-packed Louis Armstrong Stadium.
Blake was born in nearby Yonkers, N.Y. His father picked up the game of tennis in the U.S. Army after watching Arthur Ashe win Wimbledon in 1975. Blake and younger brother Thomas learned the game in the Harlem Junior Tennis League and eventually he won the NCAA singles title playing for Harvard University.

On Tuesday, Blake recorded the first Grand Slam victory of his young career, a straight-sets rout of David Sanchez.
Blake's ranking is so low (No. 112 in the ATP Champions Race), he had to get a wild-card berth from the United States Tennis Association, which likes to promote its young stars. Wild cards generally go quietly in the first round or, sometimes, make it to the second before disappearing. That was the fate of fellow American wild cards Taylor Dent, Robby Ginepri, Mardy Fish, Bob Bryan, Levar Harper-Griffith, Hugo Armando, and Alex Bogomolov, Jr.

Now, heading into the third round, the only American men left in the draw are named Sampras and Agassi with one young addition -- Andy Roddick.

Blake plays the game with a certain flair. Sometimes he gets more than three feet in the air when he leaps for an overhead. At one point against Hewitt, he hit a behind-the-back shot that actually cleared the net before Hewitt put it away.
Hewitt won the first set, but Blake struck back in the second and third, riding his big serve and forehand. Then, after the fifth game in the fourth set, Blake called for the trainer during the changeover. He promptly threw up three times.

Eventually, Blake wobbled out to the court, but you got the idea that if he didn't end things in the fourth set he'd have no chance in the fifth. And that's just what happened. Blake missed a forehand volley on game point and Hewitt broke him when Blake netted a another forehand. Blake broke back with gusto and had two game points at 3-4, but couldn't convert. Hewitt won the last eight points of the match as Blake seemed to grow weaker and weaker.

A routine forehand volley ended it but as Hewitt waited for Blake at the net, head down with both hands on net, he looked tired.
Did Hewitt, in the heat of battle, cross a line?

"Sure there's a line," Blake said. "I'm still young. Maybe I'll learn it when I get older."

Greg Garber is a senior writer for ESPN.com.