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. 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.
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