No shirt? no shoes? (Big) service: The Frank Dancevic (winning) saga continues

Frank Dancevic’s excellent Nottingham adventure continued Tuesday with a dramatic 4-6, 7-6 (4), 7-6 (2) second-round victory over No. 15 seed Mikhail Kukushkin of Kazakhstan.

The 31-year-old from Niagara Falls, Ont. has had a drama-filled stay in the English town, an epic saga of bad luck turned into maximized opportunity.

If he keeps this up, Nottingham will name him sheriff or something (even if the original sheriff was a bad guy).

It began, as chronicled earlier this week on Eh Game, when Dancevic arrived for the qualifying at his first ATP-level tournament in nearly a year last Friday only to find his luggage was still in Brussels, Belgium because of a baggage handler’s strike.

He found himself shoeless, shorts-less and shirtless, with his first-round match scheduled for the following morning.

The shoes, in particular, were the issue as special soles are required on the grass. So Dancevic headed to the pro shop at the Nottingham site.

They didn’t have any.

With the help of the tournament stringer, he scoured every available Internet site in the U.K. to try to order a pair, and finally found a pair around 1 p.m. Dancevic knew they wouldn’t arrive in time for his first-round match but hey, thought the eternal optimist, he’d have them for the next one.

Three hours later, he received an e-mail cancelling his order. Out of stock in his size. “Isn't it ironic that you can't buy or order (grass-court) shoes anywhere in England?” he laughed as he retold the story to Eh Game.

That’s when Dancevic borrowed a pair from his friend and fellow player Malek Jaziri and went out and won his first-round match. But when the shoes were unavailable Sunday for his next match because Jaziri needed them for practice, he borrowed Jaziri’s coach’s shoes. He then went out and beat the big-serving Sam Groth to make the main draw.

After cobbling together a motley collection of T-shirt and socks from a local sports shop, shorts (from the Russian player Teymuraz Gabashvili), and the borrowed shoes, Dancevic defeated British wild card Alexander Ward in the first round of the main draw.

By now, he’d bought the Mizunos off Jaziri’s coach’s feet. “They are actually super comfy,” he said.

He wore Asics clothes for that win over Ward, which are what he usually wears. The T-shirt, he bought. The shorts he pilfered from fellow Canadian Daniel Nestor, who is completing in the doubles draw in Nottingham.

Late Monday night, Dancevic’s luggage finally arrived.

That created a bit of a dilemma: do you change a winning game, or stay with the status quo?

“Maybe I shouldn't open it,” he told Eh Game Monday night. “I’ll just keep backpacking it on court every day.”

The decision was to go back to the regular gear, including his racquets, strung with a different brand than the one in the two sticks he had to buy off the rack upon arrival in Nottingham.

The result? Dancevic dropped the first set to Kukushkin.

No problem.

He went back to the replacement models and won the next two sets in tiebreakers.

“The stats are overwhelmingly better second and third sets, can’t even compare,” Dancevic said, attributing that to the strings.

The numbers bear that out. In the first set, Dancevic had just one ace and won barely half the points on his serve, first- and second-serves combined. In the second set, he had five aces and won about two-thirds of the points on his serve. By the third set, which was a dogfight until the final tiebreak, the Canadian had six aces, won 18-of-19 points with his first serve, and 11-of-14 points with his second serve.

His next opponent, No. 4 seed Alexandr Dolgopolov of Ukraine, will be the biggest challenge yet; the two met at Indian Wells in 2015 after Dancevic had qualified, and Dolgopolov won 6-2, 7-5.

Then again, the last time Dancevic faced Kukushkin was two years ago in the second round at Wimbledon. And he was dismissed in three straight sets as his back acted up.

The Canadian, who came into Nottingham having earned $10,250 US in singles and $440 in doubles this season, has already added 10,000 Euros to that total by reaching the third round. He has jumped more than 25 spots in the rankings after starting the tournament at No. 292.

Dancevic’s good karma clearly translated into good fortune for long-time Davis Cup teammates Nestor and Vasek Pospisil, who both also were victorious in Nottingham Tuesday.

Pospisil fired seven aces and lost just eight total points on serve in a 6-1, 6-4 victory over Damir Dzumhur of Bosnia, after Dzumhur had to finish off a tough three-setter earlier in the day following a rain-hampered day on Monday.

Teamed with Dominic Inglot of Great Britain, the 43-year-old Nestor defeated Jonathan Erlich of Israel and Colin Fleming of Great Britain 7-6, 6-1 to advance to the quarterfinals.

Elsewhere in England, Spanish-Canadian Steven Diez fell 5-7, 6-3, 6-3 to Gerald Melzer of Austria in the first round of Wimbledon qualifying. Diez was the only even remotely Canadian player in either the men’s or women’s qualifying draws. There are a lot of Canadian players in action this week; click on this link to see the updated results.

In Eastbourne, Bouchard also is catching some positive Dancevician karma as she has put together two impressive performances in a row. Click here to see what she had to say about it.

For Dancevic, whose ranking was so down and out he could have had to have fully half the 128-player Wimbledon qualifying draw get food poisoning and STILL not make the cut, this Nottingham adventure is turning out a whole lot better.

But in true Sheriff of Nottingham fashion, he remains unfazed.

“I have stories like this every week. This is normal for me. No joke!” he said.