A bad half hour on Arthur Ashe
Ben Shelton lost the opening set 6-1 in less than thirty minutes. He held serve once. He racked up 14 unforced errors, two of them double faults, and Tallon Griekspoor kept swinging through him. The eighth seed then won three sets in a row and came off court with a 1-6, 6-1, 7-6(3), 6-2 win in the US Open first round.
“I started off a little bit nervous tonight, but I found my rhythm at some point through the second set,” Shelton said afterwards. “Obviously, a lot of credit to Tallon, he’s a good player to play, he doesn’t give you a lot of rhythm. He has an attacking game style and I found things really difficult for the first set tonight.”
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Three breaks, then a tiebreak
The correction arrived fast. Shelton broke Griekspoor three times in the second set and levelled the match without needing a tiebreak. The third went the distance instead, and errors decided it. Griekspoor served his sixth double fault of the night inside the breaker, handing Shelton the advantage he needed to close it out 7-3.
From there the American ran to a 4-0 lead in the fourth and finished the job. Griekspoor had arrived in New York off an upset of top seed Alexander Zverev in Montreal, which explains why the opening half hour looked as ugly as it did.
The wait goes on
Shelton is chasing a first Grand Slam title and carrying the weight of a longer drought. No American man has won this tournament since 2003. His own Grand Slam year has been thin, but he defended his Canadian Open title earlier this month, which brought him to Flushing Meadows with something to point at.
Hubert Hurkacz is next in round two. Iga Swiatek also came through the night session, beating Wang Xiyu 6-2, 6-3 in 88 minutes at Louis Armstrong Stadium to set up a meeting with Nadia Podoroska.
The serve worked once Shelton stopped rushing it. Whether the first set was nerves or something that returns later in the fortnight is the question he now carries into the second round.
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