NEW YORK — At 1:55 in the morning, with Arthur Ashe Stadium still crackling with noise, Alexander Zverev served for his tournament life.
Lorenzo Sonego had taken the third set in a tiebreak, clawed back to within two points of victory in the fourth, and the world number one — the man supposed to steer a suddenly leaderless draw — was staring at a first-round exit that would have rewritten the US Open’s recent history.
He didn’t blink. He held serve, broke Sonego in the next game, and then cruised through a fifth set that felt like release of breath the crowd had been holding since midnight.
Zverev defeated Sonego 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (9-7), 7-5, 6-4 on Tuesday night in a match that lasted just under five hours, but the scoreline flatters the margin. For long stretches at Flushing Meadows, the night was trending toward something neither the draw nor the spectators had prepared for.
The 2026 US Open had already been fractured before a ball was struck. Novak Djokovic’s first-round exit — the Serb’s first such loss at a Grand Slam in twenty years — left the tournament without its most reliable narrative anchor. Jannik Sinner, whose knee injury had shadowed his tournament preparations, withdrew before his match could begin. The draw the committee had assembled — a conventional hierarchy of favorites — collapsed before Day 2 had ended.
That left Zverev as the last credible giant still standing. And on Tuesday, he nearly wasn’t.
Sonego arrived in New York without a seeding and without the weight of expectation, which can be its own kind of freedom. He played like it — attacking from the baseline, forcing Zverev into uncomfortable patterns the German typically controls. After dropping the first set, Sonego took the second and then stole a nervy third-set tiebreak 9-7. Sonego had the momentum. He had everything.
And then he had two match points.
In the fourth set, with Zverev serving and the tournament’s narrative suddenly in flux, Sonego came within two points of ending it. This would have been the first elimination of a No. 1 seed in the opening round at a Grand Slam since Lleyton Hewitt fell at Wimbledon in 2003. It didn’t happen, and the reason it didn’t happen is the story of the match.
Zverev held. He then broke Sonego immediately. The Italian, who had been so precise for much of the night, went wide on a forehand that had been his primary weapon. The fourth set closed 7-5. The fifth was never competitive.
According to Yahoo Sports, Zverev converted only 5 of 22 break point opportunities throughout the match, and committed 39 unforced errors to Sonego’s 43. The numbers read less like a clinical victory than a negotiated survival — the kind of match where the aggregate statistics belong to one player and the result belongs to the other.
What made it survivable was the crisis management. That fourth-set hold was not the only time Zverev was under duress on Tuesday night; it was simply the moment when the consequence of failure was clearest.
The match ended at 1:55 a.m. local time, a scheduling anomaly created by a night session that placed the most consequential match last. Arthur Ashe’s lights were still burning past 2 a.m.
What Zverev carries forward into the second round is the weight of a draw without a clear alternative favorite. Djokovic is gone. Sinner never arrived. Carlos Alcaraz, who entered the tournament nursing a wrist, remains a lurking presence in the opposite half. Zverev’s path to a second Grand Slam title — he won the 2021 US Open — has been cleared partly by misfortune and partly by one extraordinarily expensive five-hour night of tennis that he chose not to lose.
His second-round opponent is Quentin Halys of France, a capable professional who advanced without major drama. Halys is not equipped to take Zverev to five sets the way Sonego did. But Zverev converted break points at a 22 percent rate on Tuesday night, and that figure will need to climb if he intends to still be standing in the second week.
On Tuesday night, however, none of that mattered. What mattered was the hold, the immediate break, and the long, relieved walk to the net.
The number one seed is still in the tournament. For a few hours Tuesday night, it genuinely wasn’t clear he would be.
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