WITTEN BELONGS

Seven months after he nearly gave up the game and two weeks after he was dropped by his clothing sponsor, American Jesse Witten gave the world's fourth-best player a huge scare at the U.S. Open on Saturday.

The 26-year-old, who needed a wildcard to even get into the Open's qualifying event, served for a two-sets-to-one lead in their third-round encounter before the Serb finally scraped through 4-6 6-3 7-5 6-4.

In his on-court speech, Djokovic admitted it must have been hard to distinguish which one of them was the world number four, while the 276th-ranked Witten said his $48,000 paycheck would allow him to compete more.

"It makes me want to keep playing," Witten said. "It gives me some money to keep playing. So now I can afford to keep playing for the rest of the year, at least."

At the start of the year, Witten was struggling on the Futures circuit - two levels below the main tour - and considering hanging up his rackets.

To add insult to injury, the day before the qualifying event was due to begin at Flushing Meadows, Witten was dropped by his clothing sponsor.

But he battled through three matches to qualify for the main draw and his two wins - over Igor Andreev and Maximo Gonzalez - will take him up around 100 places when the new rankings are released after the U.S. Open.

"I don't want to deal with being ranked 200, 300 anymore," he said. "It would be nice to be able to use this. It helps to see where I am, playing with some guys that are in the top 100 and top 10."

Once he had settled down, Witten was far from overawed against Djokovic as he hit back from 5-2 down to win the first set and served for the third set before eventually bowing out.

"The biggest thing for me usually is I feel like I don't belong," Witten said. "I never really said it or tell people that.

"Just in my mind, I don't know how good I am, so it's good to kind of see that I can play with these guys and I kind of belong a little bit here."

While the likes of world number one Roger Federer live it up in a $3,075 per night hotel suite in New York, Witten has been enjoying the more simple things in life at the Open.

"I don't have to worry about conserving one shirt," he said. "I can just go through them and just throw them in the laundry bag.

"You get chauffeured around with the cars. Everything is nice here. This is the best tournament in the world. You can't beat this."

REUTERS