This column comes special to SPORT from The Morning After by Mark Whicker. Please consider subscribing to his newsletter on his Substack.
He was clocked at 146 mph at 3:33 a.m. Wednesday, near a confluence of highways in Queens. He was not booked or charged, however, because it’s about time a male American tennis player was in a hurry.
Ben Shelton’s final blast left Carlos Alcaraz defeated but smiling. How else could you react to a five-set match so violent, unpredictable and dramatic that 24,000 tennis fans showed up at Arthur Ashe Stadium, knowing they likely wouldn’t get to bed until last call? A few of them would catch commuter trains to work in just a couple of hours after Shelton won this quarter-final match over the seven-time Grand Slam champion, by a score of 6-7, 6-1, 6-3, 1-6 and 7-6, winning the 10-point tiebreaker by 10-7. But it was breakfast time in London and Paris and places where tennis thrives, and it sent California viewers to bed, although not to immediate sleep.
This was not just historic because it put Shelton and Frances Tiafoe into the men’s semifinals, the first time two Americans had done that in New York since Andre Agassi and Robby Ginepri in 2005. It also guaranteed there will be an American man in the finals for the first time since Taylor Fritz in 2024, and it inspired hope that Andy Roddick, now commentating on ESPN and The Tennis Channel, will soon give up his distinction as the last Yank to win a Grand Slam singles title, the 2003 U.S. Open vs. Juan Carlos Ferrero, who was Alcaraz’s coach until this year.
The fastest serve in U.S. Open annals was delivered by Oscar Otte, a 151-mpher in 2021. Shelton cranked one 150 mph into the net Tuesday, but was in the 140s regularly on serves that counted. He is a 6-foot-4 lefthander who has won seven times professionally and has been in Slam semifinals twice. He was ranked No. 9 in the world going into the Open, but he has a chance to be No. 1 in the hearts of advertisers, with his youthful animation and his appealing story. His dad Bryan has coached him all his life, all the way through the U. of Florida, where Shelton helped the Gators win an NCAA championship. His girlfriend is Trinity Rodman of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, and she was at courtside Tuesday, wearing an orange hat and seeming not at all stressed. The Shelton team heeded Billie Jean King’s famous contention that “pressure is a choice,” which is on a nameplate that the players see when they go to Ashe’s center court. It saw this one as not just the exit ramp where Alcaraz sends everyone else, but an opportunity.
Alcaraz had not played in a Slam since the Australian Open, which he won. He had a wrist injury.. It’s hard to say the layoff bothered him when he played so beautifully at times, but he did have seven damaging double-faults, and he was 3 for 11 in converting break points. Alcaraz broke Shelton near the end of the first set, but Shelton resisted inevitability by breaking Alcaraz right back, and even though the Spaniard won that first set in a tiebreak, the rules of engagement were drawn. At one point Shelton won nine consecutive games. He is one of the few who can make Alcaraz subservient, with his massive serve and his startling court coverage. As the night progressed, the match looked more like paintball than tennis. Alcaraz and Shelton were both on the deck at the end of several rallies. You started wondering if they should wear helmets.
“I’m a bit disappointed that I couldn’t win, but mostly I’m happy,” Alcaraz said. “Physically I was really tired in the third set but I found a way to push myself. The fifth set, I began to feel better and better. But I was playing against someone who is a beast.”
Shelton wouldn’t have been such a nocturnal beast if everyone else on Tuesday hadn’t decided to go the distance, too. Aryna Sabalenka won her match in a third-set tiebreaker, and Jessica Pegula needed three sets to get past Emma Navarro. So Alcaraz and Shelton didn’t start firing until 10:55 p.m. in New York.
But even if they hadn’t, the crowd would have buzzed its way home with the thrill of Tiafoe’s five-set win over Alex Michelsen, the 21-year-old from Orange County who had not lost a set. No American had won every set this deep into an Open since Jim Courier in 1991. Michelsen didn’t appear to be losing one on Tuesday, either, as he won the first two and had a 5-3 lead in the third. Tiafoe, 28 and a center court favorite for years, came back to win the third set 7-5, rolled past the crestfallen Michelsen 6-3 in the fourth, and hung on for a 7-6 tiebreak win in the fifth. At the end Michelsen sobbed vigorously as he buried his head in Tiafoe’s shoulder. He later admitted he had started looking over the next hill.
“You’re four points away from making an Open semifinal,” Michelsen said. “I know that’s a horrible way to look at it, because you can only play one point at a time. But I’m going to be back here again, I know it.”
Tiafoe is in the U.S. Open semifinal for the third time, and he was savvy enough to let Michelsen dig his own hole, with 62 unforced errors. The overwhelming favorite to join either Shelton or Tiafoe in the final is French Open champ Alexander Zverev, the top seed.
The tattered U.S. flag looks a little more robust with all this men’s success. But the truth is that American men’s tennis was never that bad. American players rank ninth, 10th, 12th, 15th and 17th in the world. No other nation has more men in the top 20. The U.S. also leads in Top 100 players, with 14. If you want to find a country with a tennis problem, try Australia, once an assembly line of champions which now has one player, Alex DeMinaur, in the top 70.
The U.S. simply needed someone to go deep in tournaments, and Fritz is beginning to do that. But, really, there was only one dominant nation in tennis in this century, and that was the formidable land of Fednadalvic, consisting of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. They carried the sport for at least two decades, and then came Alcaraz and Yannick Sinner. But if more Americans see Shelton or Tiafoe accepting trophies, the U-S-A chants won’t seem so forlorn. The women have been representing quite well, with Madison Keys, Coco Gauff and Sloane Stephens winning slams.. Gauff is alive in this women’s draw, as is Pegula.
There will be the ritualistic kvetching over a sport that runs roughshod over its own schedule. But manic mornings at the U.S. Open have become its identity. What’s the solution? Use the secondary courts and play all this delicious matches simultaneously? Probably not. Staying up late gives the fan a unique ownership, a badge of devotion, or fatigue, that he or she can wear to the office later that day.
Besides, there’s something special about a sport without clocks. You can score seven runs in the bottom of the ninth. You can stumble into a triple-bogey on the 72nd hole. And you can keep playing deuce and ad until the cows come home or, in this case, the cabs. Shelton and Tiafoe now get two days off, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to stay on the safe side of midnight.
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