Three hours and 17 minutes on Ashe
Ben Shelton served 20 aces and made three double faults. One of those double faults, the second of the night, ended the match.
The eighth seed beat Frances Tiafoe 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, 7-5 in the US Open semi-finals overnight in New York. Shelton becomes the first Black American man to reach the men’s singles final at Flushing Meadows since Arthur Ashe in 1972, in the stadium that carries Ashe’s name.
He lost the opening set. Then he took the match apart. Across the second and third sets he hit 25 winners against nine unforced errors, and he went after the Tiafoe second serve without mercy: 23 points won out of 29, five of them return winners.
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Tiafoe fought, then ran out of answers
The fourth set was where Tiafoe made his stand. He had three break points in the opening game and converted none of them. After that he did not win more than a single point in any of Shelton’s last five service games.
At 6-5, Shelton took the first three points on the Tiafoe serve, gave one back, and closed it out on that double fault. He finished with 47 winners against 31 errors, 75 percent of first serves in and 66 of 86 points won behind them. Tiafoe ended level at 27 winners and 28 unforced errors.
Both men arrived tired. Shelton had needed five sets to beat Carlos Alcaraz in the quarter-finals. Tiafoe had come back from two sets down against Alex Michelsen. “He’s like a big brother to me,” Shelton said afterwards.
Zverev waits, and the head-to-head is grim
Sunday brings Alexander Zverev, who had dealt with Karen Khachanov 6-3, 7-6 (7), 7-6 (6) a few hours earlier on the same day. Shelton has played the German five times and lost five times, all of them inside a 16-month stretch in 2024 and 2025, none of them at a Grand Slam.
It is a first major final for Shelton at 23. His previous best runs were the 2023 US Open quarter-finals, where Novak Djokovic stopped him, and the semi-finals at the 2025 Australian Open.
No American man has won a major since Andy Roddick took this title in 2003. No Black American man has played a Slam final since MaliVai Washington lost at Wimbledon in 1996.
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