Roger Federer's win sets mark

• Recommend0
• Tweet0
• Comments0
• Email
• Print

PARIS -- Roger Federer dropped a set before earning his record-breaking 234th Grand Slam match victory to reach the French Open's third round.

Federer eliminated 92nd-ranked Adrian Ungur of Romania 6-3, 6-2, 6-7 (6), 6-3 Wednesday to break a tie with Jimmy Connors for most career wins at major tournaments in the Open era, which began in 1968.

The 16-time Grand Slam champion is now 234-35 in tennis' top four tournaments, an .870 winning percentage.

Ungur, meanwhile, is 1-1; the French Open was his Grand Slam debut.

Seeded third this year at Roland Garros, where he won the 2009 title, Federer is on course for a semifinal showdown against No. 1 Novak Djokovic, who beat Blaz Kavcic of Slovenia 6-0, 6-4, 6-4.

The top-ranked Djokovic has won the past three Grand Slam singles titles, but has never won the French Open. Last year, he lost to Federer in the semifinals, ending a 43-match winning streak.

Djokovic was broken once by Kavcic, but otherwise had little trouble on Court Suzanne Lenglen. He did, however, finish the match with 34 unforced errors, almost twice as many as Kavcic's 21.

"I gave him the opportunity to come back to the match after a perfect first set, first seven games," Djokovic said. "But, look, this is tennis."

Federer had an easy run in his first two sets, but wasted two match points in the third.

"Instead of being aggressive, I let him show me what he could do," Federer said of the tiebreaker. "He played two beautiful shots, and then I started not playing very well."

No. 9 Juan Martin del Potro beat Edouard Roger-Vasselin of France 6-7 (5), 7-6 (3), 6-4, 6-4.

No. 7 Tomas Berdych of the Czech Republic and No. 14 Fernando Verdasco of Spain also made it into the third round.

American Brian Baker, playing in his first Grand Slam tournament in 6½ years after a series of surgeries forced him off the tour, fought back from a two-set deficit to force a fifth before losing to No. 11 Gilles Simon of France.

Using an effective drop shot and success at the net to pile up points, Baker made things interesting on an overcast afternoon. But Simon, an Australian Open quarterfinalist in 2009, regained control down the stretch.

In the men's doubles tournament, the second-seeded Bob and Mike Bryan beat Mikhail Youzhny of Russia and Sergiy Stakhovsky of Ukraine 7-5, 6-3.

"It's always nice to get out of the first round because that's when the nerves are probably at their highest," Bob Bryan said.

The American twins won the French Open in 2003.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

• Recommend0
• Tweet0
• Comments0
• Email
• Print
• Subscribe