Photograph by Miya Tanner for Texas Student Media
Second-seeded Duarte Vale used grit, determination and exceptional fitness on Friday to rally past fourth-seeded Max Basing, 3-6, 6-2, 6-3, and reach the semifinals of the Greenview Development & Majestic Realty Men’s Pro Tennis Open at the Texas Tennis Center.
Next for the Portuguese player, pictured above, will be No. 8 Pierre-Yves Bailly, who stayed on track for his title defense by defeating No. 4 Patrick Maloney, 6-2, 7-5. The Longhorn senior raced out to a 5-0 lead before finally putting the first set away. In the second set, Maloney, a 24-year-old from Oyster Bay, N.Y., had a game point for a 6-5 but double-faulted and missed a forehand that gave Bailly the opportunity to serve for the match.
Sixth-seeded Stefan Dostanic, Bailly’s doubles partner at this event, was a 6-2, 6-2 winner over Evan Burnett, a Longhorn redshirt. Dostanic, who starred at USC, faces No. 3 Alastair Gray of Britain, who was a 7-5, 6-0 winner over Romain Gales, a Frenchman who plays for Clemson. The singles semifinals start at 10 a.m. on Saturday.
By mid-afternoon the air temperature was in the mid-70s but felt like the 90’s on the sun-scorched hardcourts. The Vale-Basing match lasted 2 hours 40 minutes in what seemed like brutal conditions for late November. Basing, a 22-year Brit and Stanford alum, started the match in dominant form, quickly racing to a 5-1 lead in the opening set. However, Vale showed his first glimpse of resilience, closing the gap to 5-3 before Basing finally held.
The momentum shift was evident as the 25-year-old Vale began to pressure Basing’s serve, forcing longer rallies and drawing errors. Still, the second set was closer than the 6-2 score indicated. Almost all the games went deep, including the last one in which Vale broke Basing to take the set.
Both seemed to be going through a very exhaustive third set, but a focused Vale was clearly the fresher of the two players.
“I could see that he was getting more tired than I was,” said Vale, who played his college ball for Florida. “I kind of convinced myself that if the match kept going like this, I could trust my fitness.”
He added: “It worked, and I could see he was getting more tired than I was, and I tried to keep playing a physical game style.”
A Basing double fault allowed Vale to serve for the match at 5-3. And as he had done all afternoon, Vale showed his fighting spirit, coming back from 0-30 to win the final game – which, of course, went to deuce before he finished off Basing on his fourth match point.
Dostanic said he played well “in the big moments” against Burnett. “I think I played very solid. “Didn’t give him too many unforced errors … So pretty happy to wrap it up pretty quick.” He won in 1 hour 18 minutes.
He and Bailly also advanced to the doubles final with a 6-1, 6-4 victory over 18-year-old Rohan Belday and 16-year-old James Quattro from Austin. In Saturday’s championship match – to be played after the singles semifinals – Dostanic and Bailly will face the top-seeded but unrelated pair of Patrick Harper and Cleeve Harper, the former Longhorn star. They defeated third-seeded Ty Gentry and Ilgiz Valiev, 6-4, 7-5. — Omar Saeed