NEW YORK — As he watched one last errant forehand from his No. 4-ranked US Open opponent land wide, Taylor Fritz dropped his neon-colored racket, clenched both fists and screamed, “Come on!”
Fritz gathered himself and his equipment, walked to the net for a hug with Alexander Zverev, who twice was a Grand Slam runner-up, then stepped to the center of Arthur Ashe Stadium, spread his arms wide and yelled again, “Come on!”
After years of climbing the rankings, of becoming the top American man in tennis, of coming close to making a breakthrough at one of his sport’s four most important events, Fritz finally came through at home, beating Zverev 7-6 (2), 3-6, 6-4, 7-6 (3) on Tuesday at Flushing Meadows to reach a major semifinals for the first time.
It was the 12th-seeded Fritz’s fourth win over an ATP top-10 player in a major this season, the most by an American man in one year since Andre Agassi won five in 1999. Before this season, Fritz was 0-11 in majors against the ATP top 10.
Fritz, a 26-year-old from California, entered the day with an 0-4 record in Slam quarterfinals. Now he has joined Frances Tiafoe (2022 and 2024 US Open), Tommy Paul (2023 Australian Open) and Ben Shelton (2023 US Open) as the only active American men with major semifinals appearances.
“I’ve had a lot of looks at quarterfinals over the last couple of years, and today just felt different,” Fritz told the crowd that supported him throughout the win. “I really felt like it was my time to take it a step further.”
He will meet the 20th-seeded Tiafoe on Friday. Tiafoe advanced over No. 9 Grigor Dimitrov of Bulgaria when Dimitrov stopped playing because of an injury in the fourth set Tuesday night. Tiafoe was leading 6-3, 7-6 (5), 6-3, 4-1 when Dimitrov retired from the match.
“It’s cool I’m in the semis. But I very much have the mindset of ‘the job’s not done,'” Fritz said. “A question I got asked pretty much every time I lost in my quarterfinals was, ‘What’s it going to take to go further?’ And the answer I gave was always: ‘Just keep putting myself in these situations, and I’ll become more comfortable in these situations and get better.’ That’s definitely what happened now. The quarterfinals didn’t feel like, I don’t know, this big thing to me like it has been, I guess, in the past.”
The Fritz-Tiafoe semifinals — “That could be crazy,” Fritz said before the matchup was decided — is the first between a pair of American men at any major since 2005, when Agassi defeated…
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