Frances Tiafoe has nothing to apologize for. He helped reinvigorate men’s tennis | Opinion
Frances Tiafoe apologized to the crowd, but he had nothing to apologize for.
He had just lost a heartbreaking semifinal at the U.S. Open, but he had won the admiration of millions who had never paid much attention or gone out of their way to watch him play tennis.
In the aftermath of a five-set loss to 19-year-old phenom Carlos Alcaraz after 4 hours, 19 minutes on Friday, Tiafoe vowed to win this tournament one day.
But maybe that’s beside the point.
If these last two weeks represent who the 24-year old American can be, the next decade of men’s tennis is going to be really, really fun to watch.
There shouldn’t be even an ounce of shame for Tiafoe losing an epic (6-7, 6-3, 6-1, 6-7, 6-3) to Alcaraz, who is the best teenage prospect to emerge since Rafael Nadal burst onto the scene in 2005 as an 18-year-old winning the French Open. Tiafoe battled, played with tremendous heart, came up with otherworldly shots and pushed Alcaraz to the brink. It just wasn’t quite enough.
But the high quality of the match, the entertainment value of these two brilliant players going back and forth under the lights at Arthur Ashe Stadium and the charisma they both displayed made Friday’s semifinal a special event that should give both old tennis fans and recent ones a lot of hope for what the sport can be.
“Obviously I would have loved to win tonight,” Tiafoe said. “But I think tennis won tonight.”
For the all the concern about what it’s going to look like when Roger Federer, Nadal and Novak Djokovic fade away for good, the beautiful thing about this sport is that there’s always someone else coming and raising the bar for what’s possible. If this is what Grand Slam tennis looks like in the post-Big Three era, the sport is going to be more than fine.
There is little doubt that Alcaraz, who will play his first Grand Slam final on Sunday against Norway’s Casper Ruud, is going to have a lot of these moments. He is such an overwhelming talent, with an almost unprecedented package of power, touch, fitness and nerve, that Grand Slam titles could very well come in bunches.
The question is whether this U.S. Open was a moment in time for Tiafoe or the start of something big. Let’s hope it’s the latter, because when Tiafoe is as sharp and dialed in as he was during this tournament, he makes the entire tour more interesting, more relatable and a whole lot more fun.
These are all things that tennis needs badly as it transitions away from a two-decade era dominated by Federer, Nadal and Djokovic in the men’s game and Serena Williams on the women’s side. Having an exciting Black American male in the mix for big titles would be a tremendous gift to a sport that sometimes struggles to break through to the masses outside of the four Grand Slams.
But it will be up to Tiafoe to make that happen. And hopefully he can use this U.S. Open run as inspiration for greater achievements rather than a one-off run that will be hard to replicate in the future.
Truthfully, it’s hard to know which path his career will take. As close as Tiafoe came to playing for a Grand Slam title, the reality is that he’s never come close to a result like this before. As Chris Fowler pointed out on ESPN, the biggest semifinal he had ever played in before Friday was last fall in the Vienna Erste Bank Open.
That isn’t at all an indictment of Tiafoe’s career. On Monday, he will be a career-high 19th in the world rankings, which is a pretty amazing achievement in any context. But in basketball, football or baseball, being the 19th-best player in the world makes you tens of millions of dollars annually and earns worldwide fame and respect. In tennis, it earns you a nice living without a lot of cultural relevance.
is good enough to beat Nadal and nearly good enough to be in the U.S. Open final, but the key is building enough winning muscle memory so that a run like this doesn’t seem like a Cinderella story.
With Alcaraz surviving three consecutive five-set matches and Tiafoe breaking through to his first Slam semifinal, this U.S. Open felt like the first time tennis went mainstream outside of the Big Three. If he can capitalize on this remarkable run and continue to produce that high level play, Tiafoe has a big role in making sure it stays that way.