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Nadal downs banana, Mathieu

By TIMES WIRES
Published June 4, 2006

PARIS - Rafael Nadal was terrified.

Not because he was in the throes of a possible upset Saturday, a nearly 5-hour match against an unheralded Frenchman playing brilliantly and backed by 15,000 rowdy countrymen in the stands. Nope, much scarier than that: The defending French Open champion thought he was choking on a piece of banana, right there on center court. In the middle of a game. When he was serving for the third set.

So Nadal put the ball in his pocket, walked over to sit in his changeover chair, and told the chair umpire he needed help. It was the oddest of pauses, the sort of thing you might expect to see in a public park, not at a Grand Slam tournament.

Nadal managed to clear his throat and get past the 29th-seeded Paul-Henri Mathieu, outlasting him 5-7, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4 to reach the fourth round and improve to 10-0 at Roland Garros.

"I was getting pretty nervous and a little frightened. It wasn't that I couldn't breathe, but I felt something strange," said Nadal, who turned 20 on Saturday. "So I said, "Wow, I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop so that nothing happens, and we don't have a tragedy here.' And if it looked bad, I didn't care."

The interruption only added to the theatrical nature of the match, which included an epic first set that lasted 1 hour, 33 minutes, a game in which Mathieu saved nine break points, and rally after rally of more than 20 strokes, with both players making remarkable retrievals.

Mathieu finally succumbed at 4-4 in the fourth set, when he double-faulted and made three consecutive unforced errors to get broken. Nadal then served it out, somehow summoning the strength to smack an ace at 128 mph to reach match point.

"I could see," said Nadal's coach and uncle, Toni, "he was wiped out."

Still, Nadal stretched his record winning streak on clay to 56 matches, and if that's to become 57, he'll have to beat two-time major champion Lleyton Hewitt for the first time. They meet in the fourth round Monday, because Hewitt beat No. 22 Dominik Hrbaty 7-6 (5), 6-2, 6-2.

Tampa resident James Blake, the only American man left, and No. 25 Gael Monfils had split the first two sets when play was suspended because of darkness. Action will resume today.

Four men reached the round of 16 at a Grand Slam tournament for the first time: Julien Ramirez Hidalgo and Alberto Martin of Spain, Novak Djokovic of Serbia-Montenegro and Julien Benneteau of France - all unseeded, all toppled seeded opponents. Two women also are this far for the first time: Israel's Shahar Peer and Anna-Lena Groenefeld of Germany. But Shenay Perry lost to No. 32 Gisela Dulko 6-1, 6-1, leaving Venus Williams as the only U.S. woman still around.

[Last modified June 4, 2006, 01:17:19]