Football
20y

Fourth seeded Blake wins opening match

HOUSTON -- Fourth-seeded James Blake beat wild-card entry
Wayne Odesnik 6-4, 6-2 on Monday in the first round of the U.S.
Men's Clay Court Championships.

Top-seeded Andy Roddick, the winner two of the past three years,
will play Kenneth Carlsen of Denmark in the first round. Roddick
lost to Andre Agassi in the final last year.

Blake, a quarterfinalist the past two years, hit a high-bouncing
second serve over Odesnik's head to take the advantage in the fifth
game of the second set and then hit an overhead winner to hold
serve and take a 3-2 lead. Blake then broke Odesnik in the sixth
and eighth games to end the match.

Third-seeded Taylor Dent took a big early lead and then fell
apart, losing to Argentina's Franco Squillari 0-6, 7-5, 7-6 (5).

Dent, ranked 35th in the world, was ahead 4-1 in the second set
when the 130th-ranked Squillari rallied. Squillari never trailed in
the tiebreaker.

Dent lost in the first round of the Clay Court tournament for
the third straight year.

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