By Art Spander
The Sports Xchange/CBSSports.com NEW YORK -- Skill triumphed over dreams, experience over enthusiasm. Melanie Oudin's magic simply couldn't compare to Caroline Wozniacki's game.
It was great while it lasted, a Munchkin of an athlete, coming back from deficits again and again in her national tennis tournament, winning when she was expected to lose, thrilling a country that loves an underdog, especially an American underdog.
But Wozniacki, the great Dane, ruined the fairytale, defeating Oudin 6-2, 6-2 Wednesday night in their U.S. Open quarterfinal, and other than advancing to the semis seemed to feel as bad as the majority of the 23,000 fans at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
"I'm sorry I won against Melanie," said Wozniacki, who well understood how New York in particular and the United States in general had taken to the 5-6 teenager.
"I know you guys wanted her to win," Wozniacki, a teenager herself who at 19 is two years older than Oudin, told the crowd. "Hopefully I won your guys' hearts."
Oudin, in her four previous matches, definitely did win those hearts. That's because she also won the matches, all of which were over Russians, including in the second round against the No. 4 seed Elena Dementieva.
Each of Melanie's opponents got rattled by the way the kid from the Atlanta suburbs kept ripping shots at them.
Wozniacki, the first Scandinavian woman to get to the quarters -- and now to the semifinals -- of a Grand Slam tournament, did not.
She is the daughter of a father who was a soccer star in Poland, then Denmark, and a mother who was an excellent volleyball player. Caroline has an athlete's mentality, not to mention wonderful hand-eye coordination. She is the only Western European among the top 20 in the women's rankings.
And she never gave Oudin a chance.
"Caroline played a really good match," Oudin said. "I started off slow. I wasn't able to come back. She's such a strong player. She doesn't give you anything for free."
Wozniacki forced Oudin to play as Oudin had forced Dementieva, Maria Sharapova and Nadia Petrova to play, getting the ball back until the person across the net could not.
"She plays incredible defense," Oudin said of Wozniacki. "Makes me hit a thousand balls. I don't know what else I could have done. I could have been more consistent and been more patient, but she really made me think out there and made me have to hit a winner to win the point."
But Oudin didn't hit winners. She whacked balls into the net. Or wide. Or long. Suddenly, broken in the second game of the first set, Oudin was down 3-0. And the first of the plaintive cries from fans still settling into their seats, "Come on, Melanie," pierced the haunting silence.
Because Melanie couldn't get going, the fans, who had made her their darling, America's sweetheart, couldn't get cheering. They gasped. And murmured. But not until Oudin had a chance to break in the third game of the second set, a chance she squandered, was there an explosion of the noise that had been her companion.
Oudin's performance to get as far as she did was headline stuff in the tabloids, where she was sharing the back pages with Derek Jeter as he chased Lou Gehrig's Yankees hits record. But the result of the match against Wozniacki temporarily dimmed the amazing march for someone 55th in the world.
"I'm a perfectionist," Oudin said. "So losing today was a disappointment. I mean, I wanted to win. Losing isn't good enough for me."
Her defeat left only one American, man or woman, in America's 129-year-old tennis championships: Serena Williams is to meet Kim Clijsters in a women's semifinal. Wozniacki will play surprising Yanina Wickmayer, who like Clijsters is from Belgium, in the other semi.
Oudin showed up at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center each round with "Believe" imprinted on her pink-and-purple sneakers and a remarkable ability to track down shots at the far corners of a court. Until the quarterfinal.
"I've always been strong mentally," Oudin said. "Today I was a little bit fragile. But Caroline made me like that. She made me frustrated [so] that I had to hit a winner on her. I got some free points from the other girls because they went [at the ball] more. Caroline was extremely consistent."
Wozniacki, a 5-9 beauty who has taken as much advantage of her looks as her shots, models for Stella McCartney's line of tennis clothes from adidas. Her play has been spectacular the last few months -- she has won three tournaments.
Yet she knew how Oudin had captured the hearts and minds.
"Normally I don't like to think about the match, the person I'm playing," Wozniacki said, "but every time I turned on the TV today, there she was, Melanie. I was a little nervous."
But only a little. "I went into my own bubble," Wozniacki said.
For Oudin the bubble burst.
"These past two weeks have been a lot different for me," Oudin said. "I've gone from being just a normal tennis player to everyone in the United States knowing who I am."
Someone who, despite being outplayed by Caroline Wozniacki, they won't forget.
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http://www.cbssports.com/tennis/story/12181192© 2009 CBS Interactive. All rights reserved.
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