WIMBLEDON, England - The pity of it all for Sloane Stephens is that for one seemingly momentum-changing game, she played like a fierce survivor. Dangling on the edge of elimination, she saved five match points against Maria Kirilenko to force a second-set tiebreaker, where she proceeded to hold a set point.
Her inspiration was fleeting. Before it could really begin, Stephens's Wimbledon was ending. She became the tournament's first American casualty, though it would have been a bit of a stretch to call Kirikenko's 6-2, 7-6 (6) victory over the 18th-seeded Stephens that much of an upset.
The luck of the draw was not with Stephens, a Wimbledon quarterfinalist last year. Kirilenko, a 27-year-old Russian, was ranked No. 10 a year ago before an injury-induced slide. She is a steady ball-striker, patient in long exchanges but potent when her opponent makes the slightest mistake.
Strangely listless to begin the match, Stephens picked a bad time to make way too many errors on Court 18.
'She's a good grass-court player,' Stephens said, crediting Kirilenko more than blaming herself. 'She just played really consistent. Tough day for me.'
For Andy Murray, the defending men's champion, it was homecoming day as he returned to Centre Court - where he broke a 77-year drought for British men last year -- to a standing ovation. With his new coach, Amélie Mauresmo, watching from the player's box, Murray made relatively short work of Belgium's David Goffin, 6-1, 6-4, 7-5.
In other first-round men's matches, 18th-seeded Fernando Verdasco was taken out by Marinko Matosevic of Australia, 6-4, 4-6, 6-4, 6-2; Sergiy Stakhovsky of Ukraine, who last year stunned Roger Federer in the second round, advanced with a 6-3, 6-3, 6-3 victory over Carlos Berlocq of Argentina.
On the women's slide, 17th-seeded Samantha Stosur, a former United States Open winner, fell to Yanina Wickmayer of Belgium, 6-4, 6-3. Victoria Azarenka of Belarus, the No. 8 seed who recently returned to the tour after a three-month absence with a foot injury, defeated Mirjana Lucic-Baroni of Croatia, 6-3, 7-5.
Stephens's early departure was surprising because she has saved her best tennis for premier events, raising the notion that perhaps she was not very far away from winning one of them. In 2013, she reached the Australian Open semifinals, defeating Serena Williams in the quarterfinals. Until Monday, she had a streak of six straight Grand Slam events in which she made the fourth round or better.
'I'm sad my streak is broken,' she said. 'But obviously there's nothing I can do. It feels like the end of the world now but, fortunately, it's not.'
Stephens's losing in the first round was a blow to an American tennis community hopeful that a crop of young women's players would make a we-got-next pronouncement, foretelling potential successors to the top-seeded Serena Williams.
While her career remains young and her game open for improvement, Stephens, 21, may be fading some as the front-runner of a group that includes, among others, Madison Keys and Taylor Townsend. Two American wannabes, Keys and Coco Vandeweghe, won pre-Wimbledon tournaments, prompting Stephens to say, with a wry smile, 'Add them to the list of people who have won a tournament before me.'
That has been the mystery around Stephens, her inability to win a title at any tournament despite consistently lasting into the second week at the Grand Slam events.
'It was never, I'm just going to focus doing well at the Grand Slams,' she said. 'That's why I never had a real reason for why I had so much success. It just happened that way. Maybe in the next tournament that I play, I'll win it. Then I'll be, like, remember when we were talking at Wimbledon?'
Stephens has a charming air, an easy way with words. Asked if she could excuse the 35-minute one-sided first set due to a late-night date with her television to watch the United States' World Cup match with Portugal on Sunday night, she said: 'I wasn't. Someone scored in the last three seconds and it wasn't the U.S., so that's what I do know.'
She also knew she had blown a glorious chance to turn her match around after saving those five match points to hold serve and force the tiebreaker. One was fought off with an ace, another with a gorgeous backhand pick-up from the baseline.
'I was just thinking, I have to fight for every point, really dig in,' she said.
Stephens earned an early mini break in the tiebreaker with a forehand winner and stretched it out to a 6-4 lead. On that set point, she smacked a first serve into Kirilenko's body and the Russian could only fight it off to send back a sitter for Stephens a few feet from the net.
'I hit a forehand cross court and she was standing right there,' Stephens said.
Anywhere else, the set would have been over, the match would have gone on. Instead, Kirilenko lobbed the ball back and won the point with a forehand pass. Before Stephens could recover, she had sent a backhand wide, missed a forehand volley after being drawn in and was on her way to a lengthy break until hardcourt season.
Before departing, she talked about adversity. 'So many things that happen that you have to just kind of deal with, learn to deal with, how to approach it,' she said. 'I could name you a whole bunch of things but you wouldn't have enough time.'
She was smiling, putting the best possible face on her bitter disappointment, her first-round failure and bad luck of the draw. Here at Wimbledon, it will be left to her young American compatriots to say something, anything, about the future beyond Serena.
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