Two young African-American tennis players, Frances Tiafoe and Ben Shelton, will play a second-week match at the US Open on Tuesday out of the past, a kind of match the biggest names we’ve had in American men’s tennis used to play, just not lately. They will play a match like this inside the stadium named after Arthur Ashe, two more young guys trying to bring American men’s tennis all the way back, after all the years when the only American tennis champions worth talking about, really, were named Serena and Venus.
“This is the biggest match like this in a long time,” Patrick McEnroe, who was on the tour when Ben Shelton’s dad was trying to make a name for himself, said on Monday.
Then Patrick paused and said, “A very long time.”
Of course only Tiafoe has come close to winning a major so far, making it all the way to the semifinals of the Open last September, rocking Ashe Stadium with Carlos Alcatraz across five dazzling sets. Alcaraz finally won, a couple of days before winning it all. The deepest Shelton has gone in a major before making it to this quarterfinal match was at the ’23 Australian Open. But now they have made themselves players to watch, especially at this Open. They have made this a match to care about, at an Open where so much noise has been generated by both American men and American women.
The kid, Coco Gauff, might win her first major at 19. Madison Keys, a finalist six years ago, beat another American, Jessica Pagula, the No. 3 seed, on Monday afternoon, at the same time Jessica Stearns, out of the University of Texas, was going toe-to-toe with the Wimbledon champ, Marketa Vondrousova, before losing in three sets. On Sunday, Shelton played his way into the quarters beating another talented young American, Tommy Paul. And Taylor Fritz, the highest-ranked American male at the moment, gets his shot at Novak Djokovic on Tuesday.
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But the second week match to talk about is the one between Tiafoe and Shelton. Tiafoe’s parents came here to escape war-torn Sierra Leone, then proceeded to make their immigrant story into an origin story for their superhero son. Shelton is a kid who looks like a power forward and has the kind of power game that Andy Roddick did when he was the last American man to win a major 20 years ago, exactly, at the Open.
Jimmy Connors played second-week matches like this once, when he was making his run to the semis in 1991 at the age of 39. Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi would play a rousing quarterfinal match in the second week of the 2001 US Open, a Wednesday night match that Pete finally won 6-7, 7-6, 7-6, 7-6, as spectacular as any Open match ever played that didn’t go the distance has ever seen.
And then there was the quarterfinal match between James Blake, now doing commentary for ESPN at this Open the same as Patrick McEnroe is, and Agassi in 2005. Agassi didn’t win that one, 7-6 in the fifth, until it was 1:15 at the Open.
I asked Blake on Monday if he could remember a comparable second-week moment between American men since he and Agassi got after each other 18 years ago.
“Not since then,” James Blake said. “Before that it was Pete and Andre.”
Now Tiafoe and Shelton get a moment on Tuesday and, for a few hours, make the 2023 Open about them. If you saw Shelton against Tommy Paul, you saw him serve two balls at 149 mph in the same game. He is big and strong and fast and the son of Bryan Shelton, who became the tennis coach at the University of Florida before devoting himself to coach his son, a lefthanded player who another lefty, John McEnroe, says, “has more upside than any other American.”
Then there is Frances Tiafoe, 25 now, someone who has brought the Open crowds to him in such a big way over the past couple of years. His father worked at the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Md. When Constant Tiafoe got here from Sierra Leone, Frances and his brother lived with him at the center, before Frances began to show enough promise to begin training there.
Now he is back in the second week, the next year after making the semis and beating Rafael Nadal along the way to get there. Here is against Ben Shelton, the youngest American man to make the quarters of the Open since Roddick won the thing in ’03, at this Open when we have three American men in the quarters for the first time since it was Agassi and James Blake and Robby Ginepri in ’05.
At this country’s national championship in tennis, Tiafoe and Shelton and Taylor Fritz are trying to write their own American story. So are Coco Gauff and Madison Keys in the women’s draw. But before them, for such a long time in women’s tennis, you know we had Serena, the greatest women’s champ with 23 majors, and her sister Venus, who won seven majors of her own. We had Sloane Stephens win the Open in ’17, beating Keys.
It is different with the men. We have waited a long time for an Open like this from American men, a second week like this, a couple of up-and-comers like Tiafoe and Ben Shelton getting a moment like this at Ashe, together.
“People ask me all the time if one of these young American guys is going to be the first since Andy to win a major,” Patrick McEnroe said. “And what I tell them is this: We’re finally getting closer.”
We get big-game New York on Tuesday, a tennis match at the Open between two American men, African-American men, at Ashe. Who knows what kind of match they’ll deliver. You never know. Just know that they’re here.