Garin takes big stride with victory
Perhaps it shouldn’t have taken Christian Garin nearly six years after he won a junior Grand Slam championship at Roland Garros to break through on the big-boy ATP World Tour. Maybe he has underachieved since that day in Paris.
But he can’t change the past. All the 22-year-old Chilean can do is figure things out going forward and he took a huge step in that direction Sunday, fighting his way past the 20-year-old Norwegian Casper Ruud 7-6 (4), 4-6, 6-3 for his first six-figure paycheck — $100,600, to be exact — and, far more important, his first ATP World Tour title in the Fayez Sarofim & Co. U.S. Men’s Clay Court Championship at River Oaks Country Club.
Which, Garin said, not long after he’d taken the obligatory champion’s plunge into the club’s pool — with a bunch of the ball kids — becomes his best tennis venue on the planet.
Garin’s long drought
Understandably, of course. He made a memory for himself here, in his debut, that will be indelible. His has been a long, frustrating slog. Until the ATP tournament in Buenos Aires in February, he hadn’t won a tour match of any kind since 2013, the year of his French Open triumph, which, arguably making matters worse, he had scored at the expense of a player, Alexander Zeverev, who happens to be No. 3 in the world.
Garin? It appears he’ll be as high as No. 46 when the list comes out. On the long flight back to Santiago on Sunday night, however, it was going to feel a lot more like four-point-six.
“I had an amazing week,” he said. “From the first day, I loved the conditions. I think this club, this tournament, is amazing. The people are so friendly. For sure, I’m coming back next year.”
But he added — because, yes, there are bigger fish to fry and a million miles to travel before he sleeps — “I have to keep working hard. I will take maybe one day off.”
Garin used a bathroom break at the end of the second set, a set in which he admitted his nerves started getting the better of him, to settle down and focus. He stopped thinking about how he’d lost his so-long-in-coming first ATP final in Sao Paolo only last month, falling 7-5, 6-3 to Guido Pella, and started thinking about what he needed to do, particularly in terms of neutralizing Ruud’s formidable forehand.
“In the third set,” Garin said, “I played more aggressive than I did in the second, for sure.”
He had to hold Ruud at bay in the fifth game, staving off two break points, but that buoyed his confidence and he scored the decisive break in the next game. Unleashing a blistering forehand approach shot, Garin coaxed Ruud into popping up a backhand volley that he easily put away for a 4-2 lead.
He then served out, after which he texted his family, his coaches and probably his 100 closest friends.
“Casper’s a really solid player,” Garin said. “His forehand is getting better every day. It was a really intense match. What I did well today was to keep playing my game. I think I am playing my best tennis right now.”
Ruud, the youngest finalist here since Andy Roddick won a second consecutive title at 19 in 2002, was also making his debut in North America’s only men’s clay-court tournament, although Ruud’s father, also named Christian, has happy history at the River Oaks venue, having won the club’s invitational exhibition event in 1996, then reaching the final in 2001.
Until his son did it, the senior Ruud, who returned as Casper’s coach and got to see his name on the River Oaks Invitational champions plaque beneath the north grandstands, was the last Norwegian to reach an ATP World Tour final, in the 1995 Swedish Open. He remains the highest-ranked player from Norway, at 39th.
Casper, who was the first top-100 Norwegian since his father in 2000 when he arrived in Houston, will crack the top 70 in the rankings for the first time after making his first career ATP-level final.
Milestone for Chile
Garin, who had also beaten Ruud 6-4, 6-4 in the Sao Paolo semifinals last month in their only previous meeting, ended a long Chilean drought as well, becoming the first player from Chile to win on the ATP Tour since Fernando Gonzalez in Vina del Mar, Chile, in 2009.
Garin said the loss to Pella weighed heavily on him and he admitted being “a little bit nervous” before this match began.
“But when I got onto the court I tried to enjoy myself,” he said.
He has won more ATP-level matches in 2019 — 12 — than he had in a career mostly on the Challenger circuit.
Ruud had lost his serve three times in four previous matches but was broken in his first two games by Garin and, although he also broke the Chilean the first time he served, he never gained the upper hand. He led early in the first-set tiebreaker, but Garin finished strong, winning four of the last five points, closing it out with a needle-threading, crosscourt backhand passing shot followed by a service winner.
Ruud stays upbeat
“I’m disappointed because it was a very close match and one break in the last set went his way,” Ruud said. “I had some chances at 2-all. I tried to stay aggressive and play my game. I made a couple of unforced errors, but I can’t be too disappointed because I went for winners and it was a great match overall.”
This was the first final between two unseeded players in the tournament since American Mardy Fish beat Jurgen Meltzer at Westside Tennis Club in 2006. It was the fourth consecutive final to go three sets with Steve Johnson winning the last two and Argentina’s Juan Monaco the previous one. Players from the U.S., South America or Spain have won the past 12 titles.
Ruud conceded that Garin, who grew up on the red dirt in Chile, probably had the psychological advantage going in, not to mention two additional years worth of tour experience, albeit mostly the hard-knocks kind.
“This, of course,” Ruud said, “is his best surface.”
And favorite, too.