Aussies advance at adidas tennis
Sydney teenager Todd Reid followed the lead of Lleyton Hewitt to join his illustrious countryman in the second round of the adidas International at Olympic Park.
While the seventh-seeded Hewitt was untroubled in posting a 6-4 6-2 win over Armenian Sargis Sargsian, his young Davis Cup hitting partner needed to show all the fighting qualities of the former world No.1 to advance.
Reid, enjoying the best form of his brief senior career, recovered from 4-0 down in the deciding set to triumph 7-6 (7-5) 2-6 6-4 over Chile's sixth seed and world No.12 Nicolas Massu.
Massu, the first seed to tumble out of the Australian Open lead-up event, was Reid's biggest scalp to date and extended the 19-year-old's impressive summer record to 21 wins from his past 23 matches, including second-tier Challenger tournament results.
The Australian wild card's run of success has catapulted him from 243rd to 172nd in the rankings.
The 2002 junior Wimbledon champion, fresh from his quarter-final appearance at the AAPT Championships in Adelaide, gave himself a fabulous opportunity to make the last eight in back-to-back weeks with a steely display straight out of the Hewitt textbook.
Trailing by a double-break of serve in the third set, Reid reeled off six straight games to take the match in stunning fashion and set up a second-round clash with either fellow former child prodigy Richard Gasquet of France or Spain's Felix Mantilla.
Reid admitted his burning desire to one day play Davis Cup had been the trigger for his Hewitt-like comeback.
"I saw (Australian Davis Cup coach) Wally Masur up in the stands and I thought 'how are you going to play Davis Cup if you can't even come back from four-love down?'" he said.
Earlier, Hewitt took little more than an hour to progress to a second-round match against either Slovak Karol Kucera - who he beat at the Hopman Cup last week - or Spaniard Feliciano Lopez.
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