NEW YORK — There are some nights when Frances Tiafoe turns Arthur Ashe Stadium into a rocking house party.
His house. His music thumping from the loudspeakers. Nearly 24,000 friends, cousins, kings, queens, stars of the silver screen and hardwood, and of course an all-time tennis great or half a dozen of them bounce to his beat, shaking every level of the big tennis court by Flushing Bay.
Tuesday night on Ashe was something else. Not better or worse, especially with Tiafoe rolling into the first all-American U.S. Open semifinal since 2005. The same party crowd filled nearly every seat high and low, from courtside to way up near the roof. Kevin Hart, Jason Sudeikis, Roger Federer, Sabrina Ionescu, and a bunch of other A-listers stopped by.
This night, and the 6-3, 6-7(5), 6-3, 4-1 win with an asterisk over an eventually hobbled Grigor Dimitrov? It was not the vibe.
Dimitrov served a double fault to end the third set. That wasn’t out of the ordinary, in the wake of the three double faults — two for Dimitrov, one for Tiafoe — that ended the second set in the Bulgarian’s favour.
As he sat down, Dimitrov grabbed at his leg, and gestured to his team, chopping his hand through the night air as if to say that this was it. He looked up, and smiled ruefully, scarcely able to believe that this was happening to him, here and now.
He limped off court. He limped back on. Tiafoe served out his first game to love. Dimitrov delivered a first serve at 84mph, as he gainfully tried to continue what had already been two hours and forty-five minutes of strange, attritional tennis.
It got stranger.
Tiafoe did what players often do when an opponent is struggling physically. He hit balls straight to Dimitrov, unable to turn off the pattern-play switch in his brain and move him around the court. Then he shaped one of those whipped, arcing cross-court forehand he hits so well short and wide. Dimitrov didn’t even move.
Tiafoe went up 2-0. Dimitrov stayed on the court. At 15-0 Tiafoe, Dimitrov clapped his racket at his box, as if asking for some appreciation for staying out there, a beaten man limping. Tiafoe served a double fault at 40-0. He won the game anyway. The air was gone from the stadium. This wasn’t how this was supposed to be.
At 4-1, they hugged at the net, and Tiafoe was into the place he wanted to be, the same place he was two years ago, ready to face Carlos Alcaraz and start another house party.
The whole night didn’t go this way. There was some smooth jazz and R&B humming through the speakers; glasses clinking with expensive bubbly stuff inside.
There were a couple of moments of rising energy too, like that celebratory sprint across the baseline, racket raised high after another Dimitrov forehand into the net delivered the first set to Tiafoe. Or when Dimitrov crawled his way to even from a service break down in the second set, with some nifty stab volleys and wrist-flick strokes that have always earned him all those style points.
A few games later, Dmitrov’s legs gave out, the effects of a torturous five-set, fourth-round win on sweaty Sunday coming home to roost. So when it was over, for the guy who throws the parties like no one else these days, this was a chill night. No broken furniture. Everybody gets home safe, and saves themselves for what’s coming on the weekend.
For American men’s tennis, these are the biggest few days in 14 years.
Tiafoe’s win over Dimitrov sets up a semifinal showdown with his buddy from his early teens, Taylor Fritz, who beat Alexander Zverev of Germany in four sets on Tuesday afternoon. Fritz and “Big Foe,” as everyone calls Tiafoe, started hitting balls at national camps a dozen years ago. Tiafoe, and their other friend, Tommy Paul, were far better than Fritz back then. Fritz has flipped the script the past three years, mostly holding down the title of American No. 1, though Tiafoe is the bigger star.
“I’m going to have to be more aggressive,” Tiafoe said on court. “Ultimately man, I’m going to have to dig, dig, dig.
Semifinal of the U.S. Open, no excuses.”
Time was Americans ruled men’s tennis. But the world got bigger after the Iron Curtain fell. America’s reliance on its wealth and population to automatically produce the greatest players in the world proved to be its Achilles heel.
The USTA was late to figure this out. By the late 2000s, Andy Roddick was nearing the end of his career. The last American world No. 1, and the last American man to win the U.S. Open (in 2003) didn’t have any major talent behind him.
Tiafoe and Fritz were among the first players the federation focused on as it embarked on a decade-long plan to create players who could compete with the best. It ended up taking longer than that, with Fritz and his compatriots spending the past seven years getting beaten by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic, as well as a host of better, more consistent players from Europe.
Come Friday, they will have to go out and beat each other.
(Fatih Aktas / Anadolu via Getty Images)
