On Friday night, Tiafoe was the better player in the first set. The tour’s summer hard-court swing has always brought out the best in him. The joke was that in late summer he became August Foe, not merely a charismatic shotmaker but suddenly one of the best tennis players in the world. There was something to it: the lights of New York, the alchemical mixture of his abundant charisma, and the energy of the crowd. He’d announced himself at Arthur Ashe Stadium in 2017, pushing Roger Federer to five sets, showing off his appealing creativity and astonishing speed. But almost a decade later he is no longer a prodigy, no longer just an inspiring story. During last year’s off-season, he decided to overhaul his approach and commit to a more professional routine—to “make every day feel the same,” as he put it after the quarterfinals, so that summer success would come to seem more like an expectation than an intermittent miracle.
He nearly lost this past Tuesday, in the quarterfinals, to another young American, Alex Michelsen. But after Michelsen let him back into the match with a few ill-timed double faults, Tiafoe rediscovered his game, and squeaked by with a victory in a tense fifth set. He was steady enough afterward to support his disconsolate opponent, who sobbed on his shoulder.
Tiafoe, the eleventh seed, was a slight underdog against Shelton, who came into the match as the eighth seed, but he had almost a full season of good habits and solid wins to rely on, and was poised to break into the top ten in the rankings. In the match’s early going, he was placing his serve, and his forehand—as wonky in technique as ever—was working well, particularly down the line; the short backswing and vicious cuts had certain advantages when the timing landed, especially paired with his blazing footspeed. It let him press forward.
Shelton, meanwhile, looked a little nervous, spraying errors. He double-faulted to give up a service break, and dropped the first set before he began to settle. Then his serve started clicking. The serve has always been his biggest weapon—perhaps, at the moment, the biggest weapon on the tour. He can spin the ball into the service box with such a ferocious kick that it explodes off the court high around the returner’s shoulders, or skid it along a line and send it swerving out of reach, or simply crush it at nearly a hundred and fifty miles per hour. By the end of the match, he had twenty aces. Tiafoe had three.
After the first set, Shelton started to hold games easily, which put pressure on Tiafoe’s service games, and his steadying ground game applied even more, particularly to Tiafoe’s weaker second serve. He took the second set and went up a break in the third. With Tiafoe serving, down 3–5, he threatened to break again, which would have allowed him to start the fourth set with the advantage, on his own serve. His father watched from the box with his usual calm half smile, looking more like a proud parent than Shelton’s coach, which he’s said is the intention. Occasionally, Shelton’s father offered some insight or suggestion. He has said that he prefers to ask his son questions rather than give instructions, so that Shelton can come to his own understanding. “Problem-solving has been the name of the game here,” Shelton said after the match, no doubt echoing his father. The problem he faced at the end of the third set of the match was urgent. Tiafoe was battling.
And there it was, finally, at the center of Arthur Ashe Stadium, the largest tennis stadium on earth: tennis. During the first two weeks of the U.S. Open, the focus had been on seemingly anything but—on TikTokers and Honey Deuce-fuelled finance bros and chicken nuggets that cost a hundred dollars. Partway through the tournament, the U.S. Open announced a Kalshi partnership. The matches themselves, as thrilling as they were, had seemed beside the point. Then Shelton upset Carlos Alcaraz, the defending champion who came into the quarterfinals with an eighteen-match winning streak at the Grand Slams, in a thriller, and now two players at the top of their form were trying to become the first American man in more than two decades to win the U.S. Open. Tiafoe and Shelton had everyone’s attention.
