Paes, Bhupathi to play mixed doubles

Besides their team-up in the doubles event of the ongoing U S Open, Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi will also figure in the mixed doubles event.

Paes walks out with his steady partner, Lisa Raymond of the USA, the world's number one ranked women's doubles player, while Bhupathi, with his penchant for Japanese partners, will pair Ai Sugiyama.

The Bhupathi-Sugiyama pair are seeded 5th, and are the defending champions, while Paes-Raymond are unseeded. It is a 5-round 32-draw mixed doubles event.

The Paes-Raymond combo are in the bottom quarter of the upper half and have 4th seeds Anna Kournikova/Max Mirnyi and 6th seeds Barbara Schett/Joshua Eagle as the seeded opponents. The upper quarter has top seeds Rennae Stubbs/Todd Woodbridge and 8th seeds Paola Suarez/Jaime Oncins. Paes-Raymond will face sixth seed Barbara Schett/Joshua Eagle in the first round.

Bhupathi-Sugiyama are in the bottom quarter of the lower half and have the 2nd seeded Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario/Jared Palmer in their quarter. The lower half also has 7th seeds Martina Hingis/Jan-Michael Gambill and 3rd seeds Elena Likhovtseva/Paul Haarhuis. Bhupathi-Sugiyama will face unseeded Karina Habsudova/David Rikl in the first round match.

Some unseeded but interesting pairs are: Martina Navratilova/Rick Leach and Kimberly Po/Donald Johnson. Overall, it's a wide open draw as the Williams sisters are not playing mixed doubles this year.

Neither Paes nor Bhupathi is playing doubles or mixed doubles on Wednesday.

The new ATP rankings released this week shows Leander ranked 154. He is currently No 3 in Asia behind Paradorn Srichaphan of Thailand, who is ranked 85 and Takao Suzuki of Japan, who is ranked 136. But soon, he will go down to fourth place with Hyung-Taik Lee of Korea replacing him as number 3. Hyung-Taik Lee advanced to the second round with a win over Jeff Tarango. 24 year old Lee has been in a great form lately. He was in the final of the Bronx challenger a couple of weeks back, and has come through the qualifiers at the US Open. He is currently ranked 182, but the points earned here will push him inside the top-140.

In doubles rankings this week, Leander moved up a few spots from 63 to 54 with the 75 entry points from the Hamlet Cup, Long Island semifinal. Mahesh, who had 55 points to defend at Long Island, stayed at 31. Vishal Uppal and Mustafa Ghouse moved up about 15 spots each to 421 and 441 in doubles. Rishi Sridhar and Manoj Mahadevan moved up 70 and 120 spots to 743 and 840 respectively, becuase of the 6 points they got from the doubles semifinals at the Jordan F1 futures two weeks back.