With the Fairy Tale Over, Miracle Melanie Needs to Focus on Tennis

NEW YORK -- No Miracle Melanie. No fairy tale run. Melanie Oudin lost in the U.S. Open on Wednesday to Alona Bondarenko, the 29th seed. It was 6-2, 7-5, just the second round, and the crowd at Armstrong Stadium was pleading with her to let them live history again.

Not this time. She walked off the court, went to her coach and said: "I let everyone down.''

Funny thing is, her worst moment actually freed her. She has not built on her quarterfinal run last year, when she became the teen sensation. She wasn't good enough, honestly, to keep going up, up, up. She wasn't old enough to figure out how to handle instant celebrity, success, expectations, demands, love.

That U.S. Open run last year had become a burden to her.

"Now, it's like, over,'' she said. "I guess I'm a little tiny bit relieved now. I can kind of start over.''

It has not been a good year for Oudin. She has gone to tournaments around the world, always answering questions about her Open run, being introduced everywhere as a U.S. Open quarterfinalist. And then her play hasn't lived up to it.

In some ways, she was trapped by that run.

"People keep forgetting she's 18 years old,'' her coach, Brian de Villiers, said. "No 18-year-old kid has gotten themselves into a situation like that and known how to deal with it for a whole year.

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"She is playing for everyone else. You could see it (Wednesday). She couldn't breathe, couldn't move.''

Oudin said she was excited to get back to the Open, but nervous, too. She was never nervous during last year's Open, not until the quarterfinals.

That's what separated her from everyone else last year: She was relentless while other players were falling apart all around her.

On Wednesday, 10th seed Victoria Azarenka collapsed on court earlier in the day and had to retire from her match with a concussion. It opened up the draw perfectly for Oudin.

If she could play anything at all like she did last year, she had a great shot at repeating last year.

So expectations only grew on the grounds at Flushing Meadows. And she hasn't handled expectations right all year.

"Even the second I walked out there, people expected me to win again like last year."
-- Melanie Oudin "Even the second I walked out there,'' she said, "people expected me to win again like last year.''

She has had just one amazing tournament in her career now, and it happened to be the one Americans watch.

The problem, though, hasn't been in the expectations. Tennis players have to obsess over themselves, but Oudin has worried about what others thought.

Maybe that's just the nature of a teenager. But it's not the nature of a star tennis player.

She'll learn, de Villiers said. And now, she'll have the breathing room to do it.

She can let go of her best moment now, and maybe that will be good for her.

What are reasonable expectations for Oudin? Well, she's ranked No. 43, but that's going to drop now, probably to somewhere around 75. You keep your computer ranking points for 12 months, meaning she will now lose the points from her great run.

The problem is that she's just 5-foot-6, and the game is filled with larger, stronger players. Oudin is going to have to win by attitude, the same attitude she had at last year's Open. But under the pressure of what she did last year, she hasn't been able to keep that up.

Now, maybe she can go back to being herself, continue to improve. She isn't likely to be a top-10 player, but someone who will be able to get on a roll again at a major.

"At least now, coming into next year, no one will really expect that much from me,'' she said. "So I guess that's good.''

The silver lining.

E-mail me at gregcouch09@aol.com. Follow me on Twitter @gregcouch