At long last, an American man will be in the singles final this weekend in a “major” tennis tournament.
There was a time when that sentence above would be as newsworthy as writing that the sun appears to rise in the East every morning. No longer. Now, it’s as rare as a cicada emergence.
This year’s American cicadas are 26-year-olds Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe, who both won quarterfinal matches on Sept. 3 to advance to a semifinal showdown against each other at the U.S. Open in New York. The winner, whoever he is, will be the first American in a major tourney final since — get this — Andy Roddick took Roger Federer to a 14-16 fifth set back in 2009. Yes, 15 years ago. And it was even longer ago, in 2003, when the last American man, also Roddick, actually won a major.
For observers of a certain age, this tableau has been as baffling as the first Dadaist paintings must have seemed. If someone grew up in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, American dominance in men’s tennis seemed like a birthright. In the 36 years from 1971 through 2006, half of the U.S. Opens, 18, crowned American champions, while 15 of the 36 Wimbledons did. Except for a four-year drought in the late 1980s, Americans always had one, two, or as many as five of the main contenders in almost every Grand Slam event.
From Stan Smith and Arthur Ashe through Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe to Jim Courier, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, and Roddick — not to mention the cast of near-top-tier stars that included Vitas Gerulaitis, Roscoe Tanner, Michael Chang, and Todd Martin — Americans usually had multiple players fighting off an assortment of Swedes and Australians, except with random other Europeans and Latins usually dominating in France. Several times, five Americans finished among the top eight, and at least once, the United States provided all four semifinalists.
And then, suddenly, American men’s tennis hit quicksand. It wasn’t just that U.S. men couldn’t actually win titles over Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic. It was that they almost never could even reach the final four. If you even remember the Wimbledon semifinal runs of Sam Querrey or John Isner, please give yourself a gold star. Tiafoe, the son of immigrants from Sierra Leone, at least reached the semis in New York two years ago, and Tommy Paul did the same at the 2023 Australian Open. Aside from that, Americans regularly sank.
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Tiafoe, Fritz, and Paul, all born within a year of each other, have been threatening to make a splash for more than half a decade. Finally, at ages slightly elevated for first rises to the top, they appear to be not just leaping into but actually staying afloat in the deep end of men’s racket ranks. All three are above 6 feet tall, are fast, and boast powerful forehands. Fritz and Paul together won a bronze medal in doubles in the 2024 Olympics, and all three seem to like each other — very much unlike the days of the bitter Connors-McEnroe rivalry.
Maybe then, just maybe, American men’s tennis is emerging from the mire. Forgive the jingoism, but thank goodness. For a nation with nearly 24 million tennis players, the failure to produce a champion for so long has been hard to believe. If you had told McEnroe a quarter-century ago of the coming American tennis struggles, surely he would have said, “You cannot be serious!” But for U.S. fans finally seeing good results, “this [at the 3:14 mark] is what they pay for. This is what they want.”