In yet another graveyard shift at the US Open, Ben Shelton showed he can hang around late, ousting defending champion Carlos Alcaraz in five sets in a quarter-final that started on Tuesday night and finished on Wednesday morning. When Shelton fired the final ball out wide for his seventh ace of the night, the clock on the Arthur Ashe Stadium court read 3.33am. It was the latest-ever finish at the Open and the fifth-latest finish in grand slam history.
After embracing Alcaraz at the net, he pumped his fists and greeted his coach’s box with a primal scream. Parents have a name for this: the zoomies. Then Shelton looked to the stands and gestured at his mother and his girlfriend, soccer star Trinity Rodman. In his on-court interview, he asked that his sister, Emma, be given the day off. She had spent the entire night and much of the early morning watching her little brother play.
“I’m tired,” he told a gaggle of bleary-eyed reporters. “That was a war, an epic match.”
Shelton had not only equaled his deepest run in a grand slam; he made sure that the US will have at least one representative in Sunday’s final – he will play compatriot Frances Tiafoe in the semi-finals. The victor could become the first American man to win the US Open since Andy Roddick in 2003. One of them will become the first Black American man to reach a US Open final since Ashe in 1972.
Shelton, seeded eighth, enters the semi-final with a 3-1 head-to-head edge, including a win over Tiafoe in the 2023 US Open quarter-final that announced him as a force to be reckoned with. And as much as Shelton believed in his potential to contend for major titles (“I wanna be that dude in the draw that there’s not one player who wants to see me”, he said three years ago), he still had yet to prove he could meet the big moments.
That’s not to knock Shelton. A 6ft 4in southpaw with a thunderous serve, he’s the best American men’s prospect to come along in a generation. He’s also exactly what US commentators had been wishing for with their pleas for some basketball forward or football wide receiver to pick up a racket and focus on tennis instead. In short order, Shelton went from winning a college national championship at the University of Florida to cracking the top 50 in the world to pushing Novak Djokovic in the 2023 US Open semi-finals. During that tournament, Shelton celebrated his victories by holding an imaginary phone to his ear, a gesture meant to show he had “answered the call”. But when Djokovic beat him en route to winning the title, the Serb infamously stole the celebration for himself.
This season has seen Shelton overtake Tiafoe, Tommy Paul and Taylor Fritz as the American men’s standard bearer while racking up titles on Munich clay and Stuttgart grass and defending his Masters 1000 crown in Canada. But despite that progress, there remained a gap between what Shelton looked capable of doing and what he actually did on the biggest stages: he held a 9-24 record against top-10 players and an 0-17 mark against the top three coming into the match against Alcaraz. The fact that the last three of his top-10 victories had all come against Fritz didn’t exactly portend a star turn against Alcaraz – who entered Tuesday’s match with a 3-0 record against Shelton.
Early on, it seemed the seven-time grand slam champion would find his way to the finish line even as he was still shaking off the rust from an extended layoff to heal an injured wrist. Alcaraz struck the ball firmly enough to stay in the long rallies with Shelton and nose ahead in a first-set tiebreak. (“I was pissed,” Shelton said afterward.) But no sooner had Alcaraz taken the match lead, his feel deserted him and the errors began piling up on his forehand and serve.
Seeing his opening, Shelton pounced, reeling off nine straight games on the way to a two-sets-to-one advantage. Shelton outmuscled Alcaraz from the service line, lashing 145mph fastballs with ease. He also outfoxed him at net, retrieving Alcaraz’s surprise drop shots and countering with some impressive volley work of his own. He extended what are ordinarily short rallies for Alcaraz by forcing him to hit extra balls for winners, pressing to end exchanges that went on too long, and goading him into more mistakes.
“I made him play a lot,” Shelton said. “I didn’t worry or stress too much when he hit his spot, hit unreturnable or an ace. I think for me to be able to hang in there in the rallies, have a gameplan from the ground and be able to execute that gameplan and not be losing all the baseline points also helps with the return.”
Altogether, Alcaraz finished with 134 errors – 53 of them unforced. Making matters worse, he didn’t have his own reliable serve or even his steady return game to fall back on. “Obviously when he’s serving, he puts a lot of pressure on you,” the Spaniard said afterward, smiling despite the tough loss. “You’re trying to put the return in. It’s an unknown if you’re going to play the point or [if] he’s going to get a free point with his serve. In these moments, he takes a lot of [the] advantage. It’s not an excuse, but I would say [his serve] is an important weapon in those moments.”
Alcaraz would storm back, of course, compensating for his miscalibrated game by chipping away at Shelton’s lethal first strike to give himself 11 break-point chances, converting three. (Until this match, Shelton hadn’t been broken in his prior eight sets.) As the pressure mounted, the defending champion showed signs of wear, hunching over his racket for support and angrily shooing away a cameraman from his chair before vomiting into a towel monogrammed to commemorate his US Open victory last year. Meanwhile Shelton held his nerve through to the tiebreak, scoring a late mini-break to go up 7-6 and consolidating with a pair of aces, the last torching the radar at 146mph to become the first American to defeat Alcaraz at a major. (The 14th try was the charm.)
Long before that blistering final shot touched down, the tennis center custodians were mopping up the aisles inside the stadium in preparation for Wednesday’s matches. When the diminished crowd that hung on till the bitter end wasn’t tearing their hair out over which player to support, the beeping of the grounds crew utility trucks trundling outside the stadium would pierce through the din like a bedside alarm clock. Shelton now has a golden opportunity to contend for a major, without Alcaraz and the injured Jannik Sinner standing in his way. It’s a big moment – one that, after Tuesday night and some of Wednesday morning, is so hazy it almost feels like a dream.
Leave a Reply