Will Taylor Fritz vs. Frances Tiafoe finally yield Andy Roddick successor at Grand Slam?
Nobody, it seems, has grown more tired of Andy Roddick’s name coming up this time of year than Andy Roddick.
The former tennis player turned podcaster is the last American man to win a Grand Slam singles title. Since his retirement a dozen years ago, nobody else has even come close enough to play the last match of the tournament with the trophy in sight. And at the U.S. Open especially, Roddick’s 2003 triumph is not usually invoked as a great memory for American men’s tennis but an annual reminder of how dry the well has been since he left the game.
And he’s had enough.
“I want it all to end,” Roddick said on his latest episode of “Served with Andy Roddick“.
“I’ve gotten more juice out of the squeeze than any human has gotten out of anything ever. I'd love nothing more than for an American to win on Sunday. I hate it, I get this anxious feeling every time they have to answer for it. I (expletive) hate it for them. I want them to have it.”
For the first time in 15 years, there’s at least a chance Roddick will no longer have to bear that burden.
Friday’s U.S. Open semifinal between No. 12 seed Taylor Fritz and No. 20 seed Frances Tiafoe will be a historic moment in this era of men’s tennis. Regardless of who wins, there will be an American flag on the scoreboard at a Grand Slam final.
It’s about dang time.
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No disrespect to Roddick, whose remarkable career included 32 ATP titles, a No. 1 ranking, five Grand Slam finals and would have been a whole lot better if not for a personal tormentor named Roger Federer. But 21 years is long past the expiration date for a one-time Slam champion to occupy this much space in the tennis discourse.
In a country of 333 million people that has found a way to produce elite champions in nearly every other major sport — including women’s tennis, by the way — it’s both remarkable and unacceptable that this Slam-less streak is now old enough to drink a beer.
For everyone’s sake, can we just finally do this thing and move on? Doesn’t even matter who. Taylor? Frances? Fight it out between yourselves Friday and then go get ‘em Sunday.
At this point, it’s not just a matter of American pride. It’s so that literally none of you — including Ben Shelton, Sebastian Korda, Tommy Paul and whoever comes after them — ever have to answer the question again.
“We openly speak about it,” Tiafoe said after beating Grigor Dimitrov in the quarterfinals. "We’ve all been knocking on the door. Taylor has been in and out of the top 10, I was top 10 this time last year. Ben is so dang good. It’s only a matter of time.
“… And the game is open. It's not like it once was where you make a quarterfinal and you play Rafa (Nadal) and you're looking at flights. That’s just the reality. Now it's totally different, and no one is unbeatable especially later in the season where maybe guys are a little bit cooked, not as fresh, and they’re vulnerable. It's pretty exciting.”
I’ll be completely honest here: Even though it’s true that the entire dynamic of men’s tennis has changed now that Nadal and Federer have aged out of the sport and Novak Djokovic isn’t far behind them, I did not think any of the Americans from the Tiafoe/Fritz generation would be the ones to end the streak. The gap between their level of success and the top echelon now occupied by younger stars like Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner just seemed a little bit too big.
And maybe it is. Though Alcaraz went out of the U.S. Open early, Sinner is still around and hunting his second Slam of the year. Make no mistake, he’s a significant favorite to win the title.
But at this point, it’s not inconceivable for either Fritz or Tiafoe to win this thing. They’re both playing great tennis. They both own a previous win over Sinner. And Sunday, whoever emerges from their semifinal will have a whole stadium — a whole country, really — behind them.
“That would be awesome for the fans to be guaranteed that one of us would be going to the finals,” Fritz said after he won his quarterfinal.
American fans deserve it. After American men made so much history from Arthur Ashe to Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe to the Andre Agassi-Pete Sampras rivalry, it’s been a long wait for something like this. Way too long.
The reasons for this 20-year downturn have been analyzed as intensely as the Zapruder film, and there’s no shortage of theories and excuses. When the sport became more international, Americans (and Australians, by the way) had less of an advantage. Europeans grow up playing on clay, so they learn how to construct points better than the serve-and-forehand style that dominates American tennis. The USTA development system wasn’t doing enough, or maybe was doing too much. Tennis costs too much, so the best young athletes go to other sports.
Or maybe it’s just that there wasn’t much space for American talent when three of the greatest players ever were around at the same time and winning almost everything.
But eventually, the worm will turn. Maybe, hopefully, this weekend. And if so, it’ll be a story that highlights why American tennis still has the potential to be relevant.
Fritz was born to do this. He is the son of two former professional tennis players, groomed from Day 1 to win big titles.
Tiafoe is the son of immigrants from Sierra Leone and started playing the sport because his father was the maintenance man at a tennis facility in College Park, Maryland.
In this country, both paths to athletic success are possible. And during the final Sunday, one of them will get closer to the sport’s ultimate glory than any American man since Roddick lost a gut-wrenching five-set final to Federer at Wimbledon in 2009.
It’s time for some new milestones in American tennis rather than clinging to trophies won more than two decades ago. Even Roddick agrees with that.
Follow Dan Wolken on social media @DanWolken