No love lost: Sharapova blanks Capra

In 2009, that kid was Melanie Oudin, who beat Sharapova en route to the quarterfinals.

In 2010, that kid was Beatrice Capra and, well, let's just say that Sharapova fared a little better this time around.

Overwhelmed by the stage, the circumstances, the 25 mph wind that knocked the neon lime visor off her head during a point, and — most of all — a solid Sharapova, the 18-year-old Capra didn't win a game, let alone the match. Instead, 2006 U.S. Open champion Sharapova set up a fourth-round showdown with No. 1-seeded Caroline Wozniacki by blanking the 371st-ranked Capra 6-0, 6-0 on Saturday in Arthur Ashe Stadium.

“This was a new day,” said Sharapova, the first woman to win love-and-love at the U.S. Open in the third round or later since Martina Navratilova did it in the 1989 quarterfinals. “And what happened last year — I didn't really want to go into the match thinking about it.”

On her very first serve of the afternoon, Capra nearly sailed the ball all the way to the opposite baseline. That might have been a result of nerves and the ever-swirling wind, which made the U.S. flag above the stadium flap loudly and caused four midpoint stoppages in play when debris rolled onto the court. Plenty of brown, concession-stand napkins and one plastic sandwich bag floated out of the stands; even two white towels made like tumbleweed.

“This is probably the toughest conditions we're going to get,” Sharapova said.

Actually, other than whiffing on one serve return, Sharapova handled the conditions rather well; others did not. Fourth-seeded Jelena Jankovic, the 2008 runner-up at Flushing Meadows, shanked one serve straight up in the air off the top of her racket frame and finished with 41 unforced errors in a 6-2, 7-6 (1) loss to No. 31 Kaia Kanepi of Estonia.

“You get frustrated with the wind,” Jankovic said, “because you want to hit balls in (a) certain direction, and they go everywhere except where you want them to go.”

Capra, who's from Ellicott City, Md., and trains at the Evert Academy in Florida, acknowledged struggling with the wind. She also acknowledged feeling jitters, and who could blame her, really? She won a U.S. Tennis Association playoff in August to earn a U.S. Open wild card; not only was this her first Grand Slam tournament — it was her first tour-level, main-draw event, period.

She became the lowest-ranked woman since 2002 to reach the U.S. Open's third round by beating 95th-ranked Karolina Sprem in the first round, then 18th-seeded Aravane Rezai in the second.

And now she found herself going up against the 23-year-old Sharapova, someone Capra said she looked up to “when I was younger.” They never had met until Saturday.

So what was that like?

“Before the match, she would just walk past me and kind of, like, give me a glare, which is kind of intimidating,” Capra said. “After the match, when we shook hands, she was really nice.”

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