Qualla: 2009 Gerry Weber Open

2009 Gerry Weber Open: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tommy Haas had not won a tournament since February 2007. He was 31 years old, ranked 39th, and had only entered the 2009 Gerry Weber Open because the tournament gave him a wildcard. On Sunday, June 14, on the grass courts of a stadium in a Westphalian town of fewer than 23,000 people, he beat the No. 4 player in the world - Novak Djokovic - in three sets. The score was 6-3, 6-7(4-7), 6-1. It was his twelfth career title and his first in twenty-eight months. The man who was supposed to play that final, Roger Federer, had withdrawn before his first match, exhausted from winning the French Open a week earlier - the title that finally completed his career Grand Slam.

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2009 Gerry Weber Open: Federer's Empty Slot

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Federer was the top seed at Halle in 2009. The week before he had played one of the longest finals in French Open history, beating Robin Söderling on Sunday in Paris to claim the only major missing from his collection. Halle had been his Wimbledon warm-up since 2003 - the place w...

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2009 Gerry Weber Open: Djokovic on Grass

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Novak Djokovic in June 2009 was 22 years old, already a Grand Slam champion (2008 Australian Open), and well into the long apprenticeship that would eventually make him the most successful tennis player in history. He had reached the finals at Miami, Monte Carlo and Rome that spr...

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2009 Gerry Weber Open: What a Wildcard Looks Like

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Wildcard winners are unusual at any tournament. They are nearly extinct at events where every seeded player is a top-30 fixture. Haas had been a top-five player a decade earlier, before multiple shoulder surgeries and a devastating 2002 motorcycle accident that left both parents ...

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2009 Gerry Weber Open: The Doubles, the Quiet German Win

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The doubles final delivered another local story. Christopher Kas and Philipp Kohlschreiber - the unseeded German pair - beat the wildcard pairing of Andreas Beck (German) and Marco Chiudinelli (Swiss) in straight sets, 6-3, 6-4. They had walked into the draw with no seeding and w...

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