DELICIOSO

Delic got into the main draw in Key Biscayne as a qualifier and beat France's Julien Benneteau in the first round and a seeded player, 37th-ranked Jose Acasuso of Argentina, in the second. Today, he beat the #4 player in the world, Nikolay Davydenko.Amer Delic will face Juan Ignacio Chela for the right to go to the quarterfinals.

Delic's improbable odyssey has hinged on a few serendipitous events.

When he and his family left war-scarred Bosnia in 1996, they could have been sent anywhere in the United States. It was simply good fortune that they already had a cousin in Jacksonville, Fla., where there were plenty of tennis courts and sunshine year-round.

Delic, his parents and older sister, Lejla, arrived in Florida with $1,000 in cash and four suitcases, managing to find room for a pair of tennis rackets that belonged to 13-year-old Amer. They moved in with their relatives, seven people sharing a two-bedroom apartment. Lejla, the only English-speaker, translated when their parents went on job interviews.

He eventually played his way into a scholarship slot at the University of Illinois, where he spent three years. A few months after he won the NCAA singles title in 2003, his long-standing application to become a U.S. citizen was approved.

But luck and natural talent only get you so far. Delic, 6-foot-5 with a broad wingspan and a big but erratic serve, struggled with the transition to the professional ranks, and considered going back to Illinois to finish his degree, but his parents talked him into giving it a shot for a few more weeks.

Luck had nothing to do with Delic's decision last May to start working on his game almost from scratch. "Just absolute basic stuff, which I never used to do," he said. He hired Amelia Island, Fla.-based coach Paul Pisani and started going out to practice serves with a blue-collar bucket of balls. Work, not luck, earned Delic a series of good performances. Pisani grinned as he confirmed that Delic needed work on his work ethic.

But Pisani sees Delic taking more steps forward than backward these days.

Delic did need one more piece of luck to advance Monday. Davydenko was serving for the first set at 5-4, ad in, when, on his second set point, he lashed a forehand down the line that was called good. Delic challenged as Davydenko started to walk back to his chair, and the call was overruled by the Hawk-eye system. Delic eventually would break the Russian and win a tiebreak.

Had he been on any other court, the electronic line-calling system wouldn't have been available.