Plan B Forum

17-year-old Victoria Duval upsets former champ Samantha Stosur

Victoria Duval, a 17-year-old American who had never before won a match at a Grand Slam, defeated 2011 U.S. Open champion Samantha Stosur in three sets Tuesday night, 5-7, 6-4, 6-4.

Duval, a Florida native with a harrowing personal history, never looked like an unseeded qualifier playing the No. 11 seed in the U.S. Open's second-biggest stadium. She's small in stature and smaller in voice -- she sounded like a giddy preteen in her post-match interview -- but played a superb all-around game against one of the hardest hitters on the women's tour.

WIMBLEDON - Out on Court 10, where the backhands stray and the back stories are so much better, Victoria Duval was slamming her way into the junior girls' quarterfinals with a 6-3, 6-2 victory that left her the very last American player in any Wimbledon singles draw.

Duval, wearing funky sunglasses, had no coach, no support group monitoring her victory.

"We're working on that," she said. She is a strong-willed survivor from Bradenton, Fla., a 15-year-old girl who has been through more than anyone should endure, who still smiles and revels in the interview process. Born in Miami, she's been held hostage by robbers and her father was rescued near death from the earthquake rubble in Haiti, so a few break points are unlikely to rattle.

You start with the armed robbery at her aunt's house back in Port-au-Prince, when Victoria, 7, and her cousins were held for hours by gun-wielding thieves. Generally in Haiti, this is a death sentence for the occupants. In this instance, the children were freed. "It was pretty terrifying," Duval said.

Victoria's mother, Nadine, a physician, thought this was not what she wanted for her family. She moved back to South Florida with Victoria and two boys, giving up her own neonatal practice and leaving her doctor husband, Jean-Maurice, behind in Haiti to continue the gynecology and obstetrics practice he had built along with a Port-au-Prince clinic.

"My family made a lot of sacrifices, but my mom's pretty good about not putting it all on my head," Victoria said. "If she did, I wouldn't want to play tennis."

By this time, Victoria had given up her first love, ballet, and was moving up the junior ranks through her work at the Bollettieri Academy.

Nadine moved with her to Atlanta, where the young player worked with Melanie Oudin's coach, Brian de Villiers, at the Racquet Club of the South. It was during this period, in January 2010, when the devastating earthquake struck Haiti and Jean-Maurice was buried alive, pinned by collapsing walls outside his house.

The father dug himself out after regaining consciousness, but he was in desperate straits - his legs broken, his left arm shattered and doomed to paralysis, his seven fractured ribs puncturing his lung and infections spreading. An Atlanta family connected with the tennis club, the Kitchens, donated a large amount of money to airlift the gravely ill man to a Fort Lauderdale hospital. The feat could only be accomplished after Jean-Maurice's passport was found in the rubble of the family home.

"They lost a lot of patients in that earthquake and we lost a lot of family," Victoria said. "But what I want to know from my father is, 'Why are you still in Haiti when you could be here?'"

Victoria knows the answer, really. Her father went back, despite his paralyzed left arm, to continue the good medical work that is so necessary down there. She speaks to him by Skype, and he will be back in Florida visiting when she returns. He has ordered her to bring home a metal trophy.

So she is not alone out there on the courts, not really. Her mother is in London, though Victoria doesn't want Nadine watching by Court 10 because it makes the player nervous. And her unofficial coach, Nick Bollettieri, offered a few tips last week before returning to Florida himself.

"It's not easy not having a coach here, but I'm so used to it," she said. "I've done a good job pushing myself."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more- ... z2dGDQvDkA

RayThom wrote:Bobby Riggs:


Billy Jean King:


MGM:



I think they were separated at birth. The resemblance is uncanny.