The quest for the 2023 Miami Open Men’s Main Draw Begins

Qualifying starts this Monday featuring well-known players from the ATP Tour

by Daniel Perisse

Miami Gardens, FL (March 19, 2023) – Benoit Paire, Christian Garin, Nikoloz Basilashvili and Jan-Lennard Struff are some of the players who will take part in the 2023 Miami Open Men’s Qualifying, that begins on March 20 at Hard Rock Stadium and grants 12 spots into the tournament’s main draw.

Frenchman Paire was granted a wild card. He has reached the third round three times in Miami (2016, 2017 and 2018), which includes defeating Novak Djokovic, at that time ranked World No. 12, in the second round in 2018. Currently ranked 209 in the ATP Rankings, he will play against Gijs Brouwer, from the Netherlands, in the first round.

A former World No. 17 in 2021 and holder of five ATP-Tour titles, all on clay, Chilean Christian Garin has been recovering ground after fighting shoulder and wrist injuries and is at No. 97 now. The Santiago native has Japanese Kaichi Uchida as his first-round opponent and might have to face his fellow countryman Alejandro Tabilo for a place into the main draw.

A five-time ATP title winner, Nikoloz Basilashvili’s last trophy playing a hard-court tournament was back in 2021, when he won in Doha defeating Roger Federer in the quarterfinals and Roberto Bautista Agut in the final. The Georgian player, who was World No. 16 in 2019 and is currently ranked at No. 118, plays Felipe Meligeni Alves, from Brazil.

Thirty-two-year-old Jan-Lennard Struff had his best Miami Open run in 2017, when he reached the third round, and three years later he was ranked World No. 29, his career best. The German also has a 10-31 record against top ten players. Wild card Learner Tien, from Irvine, Calif., will be his first opponent.

Besides Tien, seven other American players are in the qualifying draw: 24-year-old Brandon Holt, a four-time All-American at University of Southern California from 2017-20; Poway, Calif. native Bradley Klahn; 19-year-old Martin Damm, a Bradenton, Fla. native; Wild Card Nicolas Moreno de Alboran, from New York; Aleksandar Kovacevic, also born in New York, and Atlanta native Christopher Eubanks.

The last – but not least – name on the American player list is 33-year-old Steve Johnson, who reached a World No. 21 ranking in 2016 and has won four ATP-Tour titles between 2016 and 2018.

Johnson will play against Nuno Borges, from Portugal, who won last Saturday the Arizona Challenger after defeating in the final Alexander Shevchenko, who is also in the Miami Open qualifying draw. Radu Albot, who won the Delray Beach Open in 2019 and became the only player from Moldova to win an ATP-Tour title in history, has Elias Ymer, from Sweden, as his first-round opponent.

All the first-round men’s qualifying matches will be played tomorrow, March 20, starting at 11:00, on court Butch Buchholz and courts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. Men’s Main Draw first-round action is scheduled to start on March 22. You can find the full qualifying draw here.

Download the order of play for tomorrow and get your tickets here.