‘Why not me’: Frances Tiafoe’s long tennis climb to defeating Rafael Nadal at the US Open

There are bad weeks, lost months, likely some underwhelming years. It is the exact opposite of overnight.

Consider Frances Tiafoe. Early Monday evening at the U.S. Open in New York City, the 24-year-old from Hyattsville, Md., won the biggest match of his life, defeating the tournament’s No.2 seed, Rafael Nadal, 6-4, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, to advance to a Wednesday quarterfinal. It is a spectacular win against a legendary opponent, and vaults Tiafoe to new status and visibility.

People who don’t follow tennis suddenly are asking: What’s the deal with this Frances Tiafoe?

Tiafoe did not arrive this weekend.

He was identified early as a potentially elite player, and his story is remarkable: The son of immigrants from Sierra Leone, Tiafoe started playing on the courts at the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, where his father, Frances Sr., worked in maintenance.

Young Frances was a constant presence at the centre, with father and son (and sometimes Frances’s twin brother, Franklin) sleeping on folding tables in a makeshift room after Dad finished work late at night.

A tennis scholarship for Frances Jr. followed, and Tiafoe began breaking through in his mid-teens, winning the prestigious Orange Bowl junior tournament in 2013.

The Next Great American Tennis Player is a treacherous mantle, and Tiafoe has been on a slow grind ever since. He has occasionally defeated dragons (he knocked third-seeded Stefanos Tsitsipas out of Wimbledon last year), but to date, he has won one ATP Tour event, the 2018 Delray Beach Open.

His ranking moved into the top 50 (he’s seeded 22nd at the Open), and he’s a well-liked talent with immense power and clever touch, but he has not been consistent enough to fully break through. He is no longer the teen comet — that title belongs to Spain’s wondrous 19-year-old, Carlos Alcaraz.

It became fair to wonder if Tiafoe would ever get to the place he imagined for himself.

Then Sunday. There are few athletes harder to topple than Nadal — even at 36, recovering from abdominal surgery, the Spaniard remains a ferocious competitor, capable of roaring back from any deficit.

There is a long list of tennis hopefuls who took a set off Nadal, even two sets, and then watched helplessly as he circled back and gnawed the motor off the back of their boat. There’s a reason Rafa’s won 22 majors.

Tiafoe beat Nadal by out-Nadaling him: playing physically, returning hard shots with harder shots, and moving his elder around ruthlessly.

He pushed Nadal to the wall, and just when Nadal appeared on the verge of a comeback, he pushed harder.

Everything clicked — a 135 MPH (217km/h) smoke bomb of a serve to close out a critical game; a teardrop slice that curled over the net so cutely that it made Tiafoe smirk. Nadal hadn’t lost a match at a major tournament this year — the Australian and French Open champion, who withdrew with an injury before the Wimbledon semis, was 22-0 at majors on the year.

But the veteran knew he was outgunned. “[Frances] was better than me,” he said.

When it was over, Tiafoe wept.

In his players box was his family, who’d seen his highs and lows and all the lonely spaces in between. Tiafoe buried his face in his hands, revealing a pair of rubber bracelets he wears on his right wrist: one in the colours of the University of Maryland football team, the other with an admonition in capital letters: BELIEVE. WHY NOT ME.

Later, to the assembled media, Tiafoe repeated the basics of his journey: child of immigrants, father’s job at the club, his mother, Alphina, working long nights as a nurse.

He will tell the story again if he beats No.9 seed Andrey Rublev Wednesday and continues to barrel through this tournament, now wide open for a first-time winner after the departures of Nadal and defending champ Daniil Medvedev, the latter dismissed Sunday by a rollicking Nick Kyrgios.

But the middle part of Tiafoe’s story may be the most critical part. That’s the part few people saw, or will talk much about: When he was in that humble, indefinite space between The Next Big Thing and now, when his career could have gone either way, and he kept fighting.

“When I first came on the scene, a lot of people had expectations about how I would do,” Tiafoe said. “I wasn’t ready for it mentally, I wasn’t mature enough for those moments. These past couple years, when the attention hasn’t been on me, I’ve been able to develop …”

“I’ve been putting my head down,” he said.

Heads up. It wasn’t overnight, but Frances Tiafoe is here.

– Wall Street Journal