With win over Rafael Nadal, Frances Tiafoe has chance to inspire young American players
Frances Tiafoe returns to Rafael Nadal during the 2022 U.S. Open at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on Monday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Has American men’s tennis turned an important corner?
At least one significant spectator at Frances Tiafoe’s stunning upset of Rafael Nadal in the fourth round of the U.S. Open on Monday is hoping so.
Martin Blackman, the USTA’s head of player development, said you can’t over estimate the potential impact of having Tiafoe, a charismatic American player of color, get to the quarterfinals by beating a legend like Nadal in four sets.
“I’m not going to say it made my week cause we’re greedy and want to go a lot deeper,” Blackman said Tuesday, “but it was a beautiful moment. There were a lot of dots connecting between the bust of Althea Gibson outside of Arthur Ashe Stadium, Arthur Ashe Stadium and now Serena [Williams retiring]. A lot of important dots were connected.”
It has been nearly 20 years since the last American man won a Grand Slam title. Tiafoe, who meets No. 9 Andrey Rublev in the quarterfinals Wednesday, is looking to become the first American winner since Andry Roddick at the 2003 U.S. Open. At age 24, he is the youngest American quarterfinalist at the U.S. Open since Roddick in 2006.
Tiafoe, ranked 26th, now leads the pack of up-and-coming young Americans that also includes No. 10 Taylor Fritz, No. 28 Reilly Opelka and No. 29 Tommy Paul . With the win Monday, Tiafoe becomes the first of them to eliminate one of tennis’ Big Three — which also includes Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer — out of a Grand Slam tournament.
Yet, perhaps the only thing more stunning than Tiafoe’s upset of Nadal is his compelling back story.
Blackman first met Tiafoe and his identical tennis-playing twin brother, Franklin, when they were 8 years old playing at the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Maryland, and he was an instructor there.
According to the 15-acre club’s website, the current cost of the fulltime junior program there is $31,500. The twins, however, had free access to the sport because their father worked as a maintenance man there.
Constant Tiafoe and his wife Alphina Kamara immigrated to Maryland from Sierra Leone in the 1990s to escape the civil war. His father got a job working on the construction crew that built the tennis center and afterward was offered a job as a groundskeeper and maintenance man. Their mother often worked nights as a nurse and the family was so strapped for cash that the boys for a time lived with their father in a storage room at the facility.
The entire family was on hand Monday to watch his big win and he said that is one of the things that kept him going against one of the greatest players in the history of the game.
“I just had a big passion for the game. Not even mainly for me, but to do it for them,” he said of his parents. “To see them experience me beat Rafa Nadal. They’ve seen me have big wins, but to beat those Mount Rushmore guys. I can’t imagine what was going through their head.”
Tiafoe said he always dreamed big as a kid because he could see what was possible on television.
“Watching Serena and Venus play finals of Grand Slams when I was super young, I was like how cool would it be to play Wimbledon, to play Arthur Ashe and stuff like that,” Tiafoe said.
The Williams sisters are widely credited with inspiring a whole generation of young women of color to play the game, including Naomi Osaka, Sloane Stephens, Madison Keys, Taylor Townsend and Coco Gauff. Blackman is hoping Tiafoe will have the same influence on young boys.
“I think so 100%,” he said. “The better Frances does, the more boys of color see themselves in the game.”
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.
