NEW YORK – For the past two decades, the script, the movie, and the ending have been the same when questioning why American male tennis players haven’t won a major Grand Slam title since 2003.
The American women, however, do not face such a problem or criticism, with Madison Keys and Coco Gauff winning Grand Slams in the past calendar year, while consistently making deep runs in every tournament.
‘It hasn’t been much of a competition, no offense to them, but now it is,’ Gauff said about her male counterparts at the Cincinnati Open. ‘We’ve had three straight slams with American in the finals, so I think we’re doing pretty good on our end. They have to catch up.’
Gauff’s words, whether said half-jokingly or not, are a constant point of contention around the tennis world, and weeks before every Grand Slam championship, chatter and columns like this one saturate the atmosphere, putting a possible damper on the tournament before it even gets started.
There are certainly other, more defined title droughts in North American sports, whether it is a team or an individual, but none with a definitive answer as to why this is the case.
It’s certainly not talent that is the cause of recent championship success in tennis, as there are three players (Taylor Fritz, Ben Shelton, and Tommy Paul) born in the United States who are currently in the Top 20 of the ATP Rankings, and a fourth American, Frances Tiafoe, who is a two-time US Open semifinalist.
It’s gotten to the point where the question isn’t when one of these men will win a Grand Slam championship, but rather who is the last American still playing in a major tournament, and when did they get eliminated.
The latest answer is Fritz as the last American standing, who continued his losing streak against Novak Djokovic in a four-set defeat in the US Open quarterfinals on Tuesday night. Fritz has lost each of his 11 lifetime matches against Djokovic, a 38-year-old with a sometimes aching body, but also an all-time great 24-time Grand Slam champion who will appear in his 53rd Grand Slam semifinal on Friday.
Fritz, even if he didn’t know that he wore his headband upside down for nearly half the match against Djokovic, knew the uphill battle that awaited him in the same draw as some of the sport’s top players.
‘I was really excited at the fact that kind of like that’s what I was looking at in the draw, oh, I will have the opportunity to do the coolest thing ever, play Novak, potentially try to go through Novak, Carlos, and Sinner. I thought that was kind of cool. I like the challenge,’ Fritz said after the match.
‘I’m sure he, being the challenger he is, is very excited for that challenge.’
Before Fritz’s run to the US Open final last year, it had been 15 years since an American man had reached a major singles final.
The name Andy Roddick looms large these days when discussing the reasons for the non-title drought, as he is the last American to win a Grand Slam title and the last to be ranked No. 1 in singles.
Roddick’s ace on championship point against Juan Carlos Ferrero in that 2003 US Open set off a wave of excitement for the future of tennis in this country. Roddick, an International Tennis Hall of Famer, went on to appear in three Wimbledon finals before announcing his retirement at age 30 in 2012.
So, the question is, who has the best chance of breaking through with that elusive championship? Presumably, the aforementioned players above certainly have plenty of chances over the next few years, as all of them are under the age of 30.
There may be two problems with those facts:
Their contemporaries and biggest competition are also young, namely Italy’s Jannik Sinner and Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz, who are 24 and 22 years old, respectively.
And those two, who are ranked No. 1 and 2 in the world, have won each of the last seven Grand Slam championships, demonstrating levels of dominance comparable to those of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Djokovic over the years, when very few men have hoisted championship trophies while they were in their prime.
Shelton, at age 22, with his dynamic left-handed serve and supreme athleticism to match, has reached two Grand Slam semifinals and won his first Masters 1000-level title at the Canadian Open last month, but had to withdraw from this year’s US Open because of a shoulder injury.
‘I’d love to see it,’ Shelton said. ‘[Frances Tiafoe] is always on a different level when he plays here. Fritz was in the finals. Tommy always plays really well here, too.. We’ve got a lot of guys who can make deep runs here and play against the best players in the world. I think that it’s a matter of time for us.’
Paul has been ranked as high as eighth in the world, and Tiafoe has slid down the rankings over the summer thanks to a second-round exit at Wimbledon and being dispatched in the third round at Flushing Meadows, admitting after that defeat that he didn’t know how he was going to recover from that latest disappointment.
‘I can’t wait for it to happen,’ Shelton said before the US Open about the drought, ‘and we kind of move on to a different question.’
Agreed, Mr. Shelton, and those who are invested in the sport no doubt can’t wait to stop asking it.