MIDDLETON - It would be unfair to compare the Kansas City Explorers’ perseverance in their World TeamTennis victory last night to Roger Federer’s gutty Wimbledon win Sunday.
After all, all Federer had to do was defeat Andy Roddick in the longest match in Grand Slam history.
The Explorers missed their flight yesterday morning, leaving them scrambling.
They found a bus from Springfield to Boston, then hopped in a car for what should have been a half-hour ride to Ferncroft Country Club to play the Boston Lobsters.
Three-and-a-half hours later - a half-hour after the match’s start time - Kansas City finally arrived.
The Explorers did fast-forward calisthenics and started the match 20 minutes later.
Three hours after that, somehow, they left Ferncroft with a 21-20 win. How they pulled it off is almost as miraculous as their arrival.
Losing, 20-17, in the final event (the first to 21 points, in this scenario, would’ve won the match outright), the Explorers’ Mike Russell was losing badly to Jan-Michael Gambill in the men’s singles match. Russell was barely able to get his racquet on either of Gambill’s opening serves with the match at 19-17.
“[Gambill] was serving so big and I couldn’t catch up. I was very tight. I was missing a lot more,’’ Russell said. “Then we got to that last point and I had to scramble.’’
Russell said he had been cold. Because of the late start, the temperature dipped a few degrees during the women’s doubles match. He was walking around the arena during other matches, jogging and stretching, trying to get warm.
And, just when he needed it, he got hot.
He hit a winner at the end of a long rally to make it 20-18. Then, tied at 20-20 and with teammates rooting him on, Russell fired a forehand past a lunging Gambill for the victory.
Russell is playing his first year of World TeamTennis and said he’s still adapting to the heavy metal music and comedians who perform in-between points.
“It took a little while to get focused,’’ he said. “But at the end, it was just a lot of pressure.
“That kind of pressure gets you ready for the tour. But I was getting used to [the comedian]. I actually liked his comments.’’
In the end, the match featured eight lead changes. A serve wasn’t broken until the seventh set of mixed doubles, the first match in which Kansas City’s Kveta Peschke and Dusan Vemic gave the Explorers an early 5-3 lead.
Genie Bouchard, a 15-year-old alternate, won two points for the Explorers against Boston’s Raquel Kops-Jones, a 2008 US Open doubles quarterfinalist. Then Bouchard won four more with Peschke against Kops-Jones and Stephanie Foretz in women’s doubles. That left the match tied at 16-16 heading into the final event.
But Russell knew his team had an advantage.
“We knew we were a team after today,’’ he said. “Today was like that movie, ‘Planes, Trains & Automobiles.’ But the team still played great anyway.’’
It’s the first win of the season for the Explorers (1-2), who were 13-1 last year. The Lobsters dropped to 2-1.
“We’ve got another game tomorrow,’’ Lobsters coach Bud Schultz said. “We didn’t do as well as we wanted but we’ll work on it tomorrow. We can learn from it.’’
Explorers, 21-20
at Ferncroft CC, Middleton Kveta Psechke and Dusan Vemic, KC, def. Raquel Kops-Jones and James Auckland, 5-3; Kops-Jones, Bos., def. def. Eugenie Bouchard, 5-2; Vemic and Russell, KC, def. Auckland and Jan-Michael Gambill, 5-3; Kops-Jones and Stephanie Foretz, Bos., def. Bouchard and Peschke, 5-4; Russell, KC, def. Gambill, 5-4.
