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Teenager Nishikori making a name for himself at the Open

NEW YORK -- Kei Nishikori is making history with every swing of his racket, and that can be tiring.

After his latest triumph, a grueling five-set endurance test against 4th-seeded Spanish grinder David Ferrer, the slight 18-year-old limped into the interview room, grimaced as he sat down, ran one hand through his spiky hair and put his head down on the table for a moment to collect himself.
He spoke softly and slowly, pulling the words up from the bottom of a deep well of emotion.

"Right now I'm very happy,'' said Nishikori, who cramped so severely during the match that he required a near-full-body massage at one point. "Yeah, that's the only word I can say now. And, you know, I couldn't give up the fifth set … I tried to think, 'I am playing David, he's No. 4 in the world, and playing five sets with him.' I felt like kind of happy and [began to] think more positive. Yeah, that's why I think I could fight through everything.''

Nishikori's talent, aptitude, adaptability and spirit have made him a barrier-breaker in several ways. He is the first Japanese man to reach the round of 16 in a Grand Slam event since Shuzo Matsuoka did it in 1995 at Wimbledon, and the youngest man to advance this far at the U.S. Open in 10 years.

He and fourth-round opponent Juan Martin Del Potro of Argentina, who turns 20 later this month, are the first teenagers to go this deep in this tournament in tandem since two precocious kids named Andy Roddick and Tommy Robredo cracked the ceiling together in 2001. The Nishikori-Del Potro match is scheduled for early Monday evening to accommodate Japanese television, where his matches have been scoring monster ratings.

The upper echelons of men's tennis have largely been a grown man's world for the last few years. Only two men in the top 50 are under 20 years old -- towering 17th-seed Del Potro, who will put a 22-match win streak on the line against Nishikori, and No. 24 Marin Cilic of Croatia. Size, speed and muscle matter. Few teenagers have been able to run with the big dogs -- with the notable exception of Rafael Nadal, whose early physical maturity helped him win major tournaments before his 20th birthday.

At 5-foot-10 and a wiry 150 pounds, Nishikori has the opposite body type from the world No. 1, but he clearly has developed core strength along with his crowd-pleasing leaping forehand. He became a permanent resident at Nick Bollettieri's famous Bradenton, Fla., academy at age 13, recruited for his scrappy game and obvious potential and financially sponsored by Masaaki Morita, the tennis-mad retired CEO of the Sony Corporation whose foundation pays for top Japanese prospects to visit the academy every year.

Not all of them stick, but Gabriel Jaramillo, the academy's director of tennis, was confident that Nishikori would after auditioning him at age 12. "He had an atrocious serve, but I liked how fast and fit he was and how aggressively he played the points,'' Jaramillo said.

Nishikori, who grew up in Shimane, near Hiroshima, spoke no English when he arrived in the United States. He trained with a Japanese coach and other Japanese players for the first two years he was at the academy, and saw his parents only once or twice a year. In those days, it was homesickness, not dehydration, that turned his legs to jelly.

"I was so nervous. I was like scared of everything, all the American people,'' said Nishikori, who to this day is not crazy about American food.