NEW YORK — Frances Tiafoe‘s vision was blurry from the tears. He was thrilled — overwhelmed, even — when the last point was over and it hit him that, yes, he had ended Rafael Nadal‘s 22-match Grand Slam-winning streak on Monday and reached the US Open quarterfinals for the first time.
“I felt like the world stopped,” Tiafoe said. “I couldn’t hear anything for a minute.”
Then Tiafoe, 24, found himself “losing it in the locker room” when he saw that NBA superstar LeBron James gave him a Twitter shoutout.
“Bro,” Tiafoe said, “I was going crazy.”
What meant the most to Tiafoe about his 6-4, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3 victory over No. 2 seed Nadal in the fourth round at Flushing Meadows, though, was looking up in his Arthur Ashe Stadium guest box and knowing his parents, Constant and Alphina, were there.
“To see them experience me beat Rafa Nadal — they’ve seen me have big wins, but to beat those Mount Rushmore guys?” said Tiafoe, a 22nd-seeded American. “For them, I can’t imagine what was going through their heads. I mean, they’re going to remember today for the rest of their lives.”
His parents emigrated to the United States from Sierra Leone in West Africa amid its civil war in the 1990s. They ended up in Maryland, where Constant helped construct a tennis training center for juniors then became a maintenance man there. Alphina, Tiafoe said, was “a nurse, working two jobs, working overtime through the nights.” Tiafoe and his twin brother, Franklin, were born in 1998, and soon would be spending hour upon hour where Dad’s job was, rackets in hand.
Maybe one day, went the dream, a college scholarship would come of it.
“It wasn’t anything supposed to be like this,” Frances Tiafoe said Monday evening, hours after by far his biggest victory.
He is the youngest American man to get this far at the US Open since Andy Roddick in 2006, but this was not a case of a one-sided crowd backing one of its own. Nadal is about as popular as it gets in tennis, and he heard plenty of support as the volume raised after the retractable roof was shut in the fourth set.
Nadal was 31-2 in majors against Americans entering Monday’s match and had won 27 straight since losing to James Blake in 2005.
“It’s something to tell the kids, the grandkids: ‘Yeah, I beat Rafa,'” Tiafoe said with a big smile.
He served better than Nadal. More surprisingly, he returned better too. And he kept his cool, remained in the moment and never let the stakes or the opponent get to him. Nadal, 36, from Spain, had won…
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