Kei Nishikori, often dubbed ‘The King of Memphis’, opened successfully against the home crowd favorite Ryan Harrison. Another Japanese player, Yoshihito Nishioka, upset Illya Marchenko. Mikhail Kukushkin and Sam Querrey won their matches in straight sets.
The three time Memphis Open champion, Kei Nishikori faced Ryan Harrison in a ‘blockbuster’ match of the day. 
Nishikori outplayed Harrison through out their match, getting Harrison running out wide, dismantling him with the angles. The crowd showed their love for both players equally, which isn’t something that usually happens when you have a player playing at home. Although if it were to happen somewhere, it would be the U.S. Nishikori showed great game on serve, when he won 81% after first serve, and managed to dictate the whole match, although Harrison managed to push Nishikori a bit in the end, when he was down 3-5 and managed to push and lose the set 5-7. The final scoreline after an hour and 21 minutes was 6-2 7-5 for Nishikori.
It was a good day for Japan in Memphis, when the qualifier Yoshihito Nishioka got through to the quarterfinals again,
defending his points from last year. Nishioka swiped the Ukranian Illya Marchenko, in an hour and 11 minutes 6-1 6-3. Nishioka’s run has some parallels to last year, when he also beat a hard-hitting player, much taller than himself (2015- Matosevic) who upset a player with a huge serve the round before (2015- Isner). Nishioka also won in easy straight sets in both cases. In this match, Nishioka showed an incredible serving performance, winning 86% of points after first serve and 74% after second serve. Marchenko was the highest ranked player Nishioka beat this year.
Other two singles matches of second round played on Day 3, were Sam Querrey beating the Swiss qualifier Henri Laaksonen 6-3 6-4 and Mikhail Kukushkin 
upsetting the fifth seed Denis Kudla 6-1 7-5. Querrey outplayed Laaksonen thoroughly, especially on serve and in big points. Querrey broke Laaksonen 3 times from 3 break points, while having his own serve in danger only twice, having great statistics of winning 83% of his first serves. Querrey also took two thirds (10 out of 15) of the big points. Serve was a big player also in the other match, where Kukushkin faced only 2 break points, but was broken once. Kukushkin is currently playing Top 50 tennis, way over his ranking so it was not the biggest surprise that he managed to beat Kudla.
