Tennis / From out of the darkness, Dudi Sela found the light

On a chilly night in New York, during a torrential rain storm with the electricity cutting out, Dudi Sela found the light.

In a nearly hopeless situation, he succeeded in winning a qualifying match at the U.S. Open, and began to believe again that he had it in him, and put away any thought of retiring. After that came victories in Challenger events and his heroic performance in the Davis Cup, leading to his being placed in the 66th spot yesterday in the ATP singles rankings. From here, the Sela family is confident that Dudi will only being going up.

At that U.S. Open match, the wind was bothering him, the rain interrupted the match, and even the electricity could not hold up against the difficult conditions and went dark. At that moment, Sela was also not too far from calling it quits. Over the summer, Sela arrived at the U.S. Open with a lot of confidence he accrued from three successful tournaments in Russia, but in that late New York night, with a crowd made up of just the crazies, Israel's top male tennis player found himself trailing 4-1 in the decisive set to Nathan Healey of Australia.

"Dudi was not playing well, but he fought for every point," says Dudi's brother, Ofer, a former tennis player himself. "Up until then, he had already lost a lot of close matches, and it was clear that another loss would drop him to No. 150 and that would be it - from there he would keep dropping.

"Dudi managed to break [Healey's serve] twice and win [the match] in a tiebreaker. Suddenly, he felt like he won a war. All summer Dudi had worked hard just to advance from the qualification rounds, and after he won in the first round it was clear that he would continue to win his qualifying matches.

"He just didn't realize how much confidence that victory would give him. The dam broke. A few months later, when we were analyzing his progress, Dudi told me that victory made the difference that he was looking for."

It was indeed an incredible change. Last weekend he was not impressive, losing the final of the Challengers event in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, depositing only $4,240 in his bank account, but he picked up 32 more rankings points, which allowed him to continue his climb up the rankings. Yesterday, he found himself at No. 66 in the world.

"He arrived at the Australian Open from the area of No. 200 in the world, and did not even get into the qualification rounds of the biggest tournaments," says Ofer Sela. "We sat down around April, and I told him that even though he had been usually traveling around the United States during the summer, I thought that this time it would be better for him to give that up and instead appear at a lot of Challengers events because that would give him the confidence for the future.

"As far as drawing up his schedule, I believed that it would be the best thing for him. But really, I didn't think that it would push him up to No. 66 in the world."