Sunday, September 23, 2018

Brooksby, 17, narrowly loses in $100K Tiburon qualifying

Jenson Brooksby practices in May at the
Arden Hills Club & Spa in Sacramento.
Three months later, he won the USTA
boys 18 national title to earn a wild card
into the men's main draw of the U.S. Open.
Photo by Paul Bauman
   Teenager Jenson Brooksby put up a fight but lost in the second round of qualifying for the $100,000 Wells Fargo Tiburon Challenger in the San Francisco Bay Area.
   The 17-year-old wild card from the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael fell to second-seeded Cem Ilkel of Turkey 6-4, 4-6, 6-4 today at the Tiburon Peninsula Club. Affluent Tiburon is located across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.
   Brooksby won the USTA boys 18 national title in Kalamazoo, Mich., last month to earn an automatic wild card in the men's main draw of the recent U.S. Open and lost to John Millman of Australia 6-4, 6-2, 6-0 in the first round. Millman later stunned Roger Federer in the fourth round before losing to eventual champion Novak Djokovic in straight sets in the quarterfinals, and Brooksby reached the boys semifinals.
   The 23-year-old Ilkel, ranked No. 244, is scheduled to play Australia's Luke Saville, ranked No. 444 after reaching a career-high No. 152 in 2015, on Monday at 10 a.m. on Center Court for a berth in the main draw. 
   Saville, the boys champion at Wimbledon in 2011 and in the 2012 Australian Open, reached the quarterfinals of last week's $75,000 Columbus (Ohio) Challenger as a qualifier.
   In the first round of the main draw on Monday, No. 1 seed Marcel Granollers, 32, of Spain will meet Evan King, a 26-year-old left-hander from Chicago, for the first time not before 11:30 a.m. 
   Granollers attained career highs of No. 19 in singles in 2012 and No. 4 in doubles in 2013. He and countryman Marc Lopez reached the French Open and U.S. Open doubles finals in 2014.
   After the Granollers-King match, No. 8 seed Bjorn Fratangelo of Pittsburgh and Orlando, Fla., will play Pedja Krstin of Serbia.
   Fratangelo, who was named after Bjorn Borg, is one of only three Americans to win the French Open boys singles title in the Open era, which began 50 years ago. The others are John McEnroe (1977) and Tommy Paul (2015). Paul, a 21-year-old wild card, will take on No. 4 seed Henri Laaksonen of Switzerland on Tuesday in the first round in Tiburon.
   Following the Fratangelo-Krstin clash, No. 6 seed Noah Rubin of Long Island, N.Y., will face Thiemo de Bakker, a former top-40 player from the Netherlands, in a matchup of former Wimbledon boys singles champions. De Bakker won the crown in 2006, and Rubin, a product of McEnroe's academy in New York, triumphed in 2014.
   Here are the Tiburon singles qualifying and main draws and Monday's schedule. Matches will be streamed live.

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