First-round action gets eclipsed

Eugenie Bouchard had just finished her pre-match warm-ups and was walking through the tunnel to Stadium Court for her firstround Connecticut Open match with Lauren Davis when she spotted a fan wearing eclipse glasses.

“Hey, give me those,” she said to the unsuspecting fan. “I need to see this, because this is a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Her coach, Thomas Hogstedt, wasn’t pleased.

“Dude, it’s an eclipse!” she said to Hogstedt. “I need to see it!”

So she grabbed the glasses and took a quick glance at the solar eclipse.

“I was like, ‘Wow, this is cool,’” she said. NOTEBOOK » PAGE 3

Bouchard’s match against Lauren Davis transpired right during the peak time of Monday’s eclipse. During that match, while serving, Bouchard tried as hard as she could to avert her eyes from the sun.

“This is so weird,” she remembers thinking.

Other players couldn’t help taking a peak at the sun on Monday. During her 7-5, 7-5 win over Kristina Mladenovic, right before the start of Bouchard’s match, Timea Babos admitted she looked. She had to.

“I know they say you shouldn’t look,” Babos said. “As a tennis player, every second game, you have to look, for your serves.”

She said there were some “funny moments” Monday playing during the eclipse, seeing the moon in front of the sun as she looked up.

When Bouchard’s match was over, another fan gave her his eclipse glasses and told her to look up to the sky.

“It was very nice of him,” Bouchard said. “I’ll keep them for the next one.”

Seeds Down

They were born four days apart, former doubles partners, so maybe a match with a couple of close sets between Babos and Mladenovic was logical Monday.

Those close sets didn’t go the way the seeds suggested, though. Babos, ranked 66th in the world, knocked off her fourthseeded former partner.

“It’s not easy, or easy, depending on the day,” said Babos, 24. “You know the other girl so well.”

Babos will face Daria Gavrilova, who beat Kristyna Pliskova in three sets Monday, in the second round.

Mladenovic’s departure followed fifth-seeded Elena Vesnina’s loss in the previous match, falling 7-5, 7-5 to Romanian qualifier Ana Bogdan, who at 127th was the lowest-ranked player in the main draw.

A third seed fell later in the day as Daria Kasatkina knocked off seventh-seeded Barbora Strycova 7-5, 6-3.

Bogdan lost to Vesnina in straight sets in the first round of this year’s Australian Open, but now she has two top-20 wins in the past month. She beat Anastasija Sevastova, then ranked 17th, in last month’s Bucharest Open.

She’ll meet fellow qualifier Kirsten Flipkens in Round 2 after Flipkens dispatched Lesia Tsurenko 6-2, 6-3.

Goodbye, American Women

In a lengthy, late-afternoon match, Russia’s Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova topped Christine McHale, 3-6, 6-2. 6-4, She’ll play the winner of Tuesday’s Carla Suarez Navarro-Jane Cepelova match.

McHale’s loss, coupled with Davis’s loss to Bouchard earlier in the day, means there are also no more American women in the singles field. Davis had been the lone American in the draw. McHale earned a berth as a lucky loser.