Did the US Open Jump the Shark?

Welcome back to The Debrief, Box Score’s freewheeling conversation. This week, we’re talking tennis: what Ben Shelton’s historic run in Flushing means, how ESPN whiffed in its coverage, and why—with its midnight matches, massive crowds, and $100 chicken nuggets—the US Open may have jumped the shark for its real fans.

Cecil Harris
Author of Charging the Net: A History of Blacks in Tennis from Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe to the Williams Sisters and Different Strokes: Serena, Venus, and the Unfinished Black Tennis Revolution. 

Andrew Lawrence
Senior features writer at the Guardian US who has covered tennis and the US Open for the past 20 years at the Guardian and Sports Illustrated.

Matt Marolf
Tennis writer for the last 10 years who has been attending the US Open for the past 20+ years.

Alexander Zverev won the men’s US Open. But Ben Shelton stole the show. Shelton turned a football-dominated weekend into a national conversation about American tennis and looked like the crossover star the sport has been waiting for. When did it start to feel like Shelton’s run was bigger than tennis?

Andrew: Especially after the two Americans on the women’s side, Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula, lost in their semis, Shelton became the guy that people came to see. It just felt like we were building to a place where, if he wins this thing, this guy is gonna be the Kevin Hart of sports. We’re not gonna be able to turn on a screen without seeing him constantly selling us some kind of product.

Cecil: The cultural significance of Friday night’s semifinal between Shelton and Frances Tiafoe, in Ashe Stadium, to become the first Black man to play in a US Open final since Ashe in 1972 can’t be overstated. 

Shelton is a second-generation Black tennis pro, the son of Bryan Shelton, whom Ashe inspired to play. A sport that wasn’t always welcoming to Black athletes has in Shelton a superb athlete who chose tennis over football. Shelton and Tiafoe will inspire other young Black men to pursue tennis careers. That match—and Taylor Townsend’s career Grand Slam in doubles—will make the dream of a tennis career more real for kids from underrepresented groups.

Andrew: This final was different from Taylor Fritz in the final two years ago, where Fritz was basically like cannon fodder, “Thanks for getting here.” With Ben, there was this sense of, yes, he's here early in a lot of ways, but he just beat Carlos Alcaraz. He had the wind—and the crowd—at his back. Anytime he seemed like he was giving any sort of negative body language, there’d be a “U-S-A” chant, or some cheer to remind him of the assignment, and the fact that he has the country behind him.

Alas, Andy Roddick remains the answer to a trivia question—the last American man to win a Grand Slam, 23 years ago. After watching Shelton get to that historic final but then get handled by Zverev in four sets, are you more or less convinced he’s the guy who can finally break the drought?

Matt: Shelton is still only 23 years old. This was his first Slam final. And more than any of the other current crop of American men, he has that big weapon in the serve, and that aura that can really intimidate opponents at times. I think the nerves got the best of him, and he was probably a bit tired from two physically and very emotionally draining matches in the last few rounds. But I still think Shelton is a guy who can win a few majors. 

Andrew: I felt like the final was one of those situations where an established fighter catches a fighter on the rise early and is able to win a belt in that way. 

Shelton’s first serve was a disaster, and that’s usually the thing that he can fall back on. He gave up so many free points, double-faulting to give up break points. It was really the clearest indicator of maybe the nerves that he felt in that spot. That swagger was missing. And I don’t know if it was just because he had to play a different part because this was a different stage and a different phase, or if he was truly awed by the moment. 

Cecil: After winning that match and beating Tiafoe, Shelton came out and addressed the crowd, “I need you to bring your energy Sunday.” The crowd brought the energy—they wanted to carry him across the line. But Shelton just didn’t bring his A-game.  He was never able to put pressure on Zverev. It was surprisingly comfortable for Zverev to play his game. And that was not the Ben Shelton we saw in his first six matches.

Andrew: There’s so much of his game that still is unpolished. In addition to the tools that he brings to the job, it’s his mentality and desire and focus that really make me want to invest in his long-term success, because he’s not trying to just get the US Open trophy to get the monkey off America’s back. He wants to be a Final Boss. He wants to be in the mix with Sinner and Alcaraz.

Shelton was the star of the match of the Open, one of the best matches of the year—but unless you were willing to stay up until 3:30 in the morning on the East Coast, you were asleep for his quarterfinal win over Carlos Alcaraz, an Ali-Frazier-level spectacle staged at an hour when much of America was asleep. But that was just one of several marathon matches that ran into the wee hours and played to dwindling audiences. Is it time for radical changes?

Cecil: I’d like to see bold changes. You can’t ask people to watch tennis when you’re scheduling it at hours when they can’t watch. The new tournament director at the Australian Open is considering getting Tennis Australia to approve a change that would require all men's matches to be best of three until the semifinals to avoid these very late nights. I’m hoping they can at least give it a try. 

Matt: I don’t want to lose the drama of best-of-five matches, which are often the most memorable matches in the sport. But the current best-of-five format has outlived its usefulness, as matches simply go on way too long in the modern game, which features such long rallies.

Let’s think outside the box. My proposed solution: best of five matches with ad scoring, but with a tiebreak at 4-4 instead of 6-6. Five games wins a set, and you go to a tiebreak if you each win four games. While the idea that “best-of-five matches is what makes majors special” is somewhat true, best-of-five wasn’t always exclusive to the majors. What really makes the majors truly different is the size of the draws, and the global stage those tournaments provide.

Andrew: There's just no reason your main event should be starting at 11:30 at night. This is what they do for boxing events in Las Vegas. This is a tennis match. The USTA obviously wants to milk as much from that giant cash register called Arthur Ashe Stadium as they possibly can. 

But all this takes is using more of the real estate and moving the times up a little bit. Why not start the day session at 10 a.m., and then start the evening session at 6 p.m.?  Make better use of the other stadium courts they have now. I just feel like when your fix to a scheduling problem is, “Let's fundamentally change the way this sport is played and scored,” you're really overreaching. 

So we started the year thinking we were firmly in the Sincaraz Era. As the Open played out, Alcaraz looked primed to repeat, but then Shelton upstaged him in the quarters, and Zverev won the whole thing, his second Slam this year. So much for a two-man show. Is a more wide-open men’s game actually better for tennis?

Matt: I think tennis is at its best when it’s based on rivalries with a few other players in the mix. We just went through the Big 3 era. I don't necessarily want to go through 15 years of a Big 2 era with Alcaraz and Sinner meeting in every major final, but I do think having a few prominent players with established popular rivalries, with some great matches that have really brought the fans in, is when the sport is at its best. But I’m not convinced anyone outside of Alcaraz and Sinner right now is going to be consistently at the end of these majors, especially as threats. 

Cecil: I like it when there are more players in the mix. Even when Serena was dominating on the women’s side, it was exciting, but now you have different women winning majors, and I think that's better for tennis in general. On the men’s side, now you can go into a tournament and rattle off a half-dozen names and make a case for each of them. I think that's more interesting. 

Andrew:  I love two final bosses, and when those two bosses get together, the tennis that they produce is just amazing. I'm happy to have guys in the mix who wanna take their shot at them and have a guy occasionally break through, but it's clear those two, Sinner and Alcaraz, are still on a level that nobody can reach right now. That French Open final that they played together was absolute cinema. It's still hard to imagine another pairing like that producing tennis on that level.

We also watched the hierarchy change in real time on the women’s side. Aryna Sabalenka had been a polarizing No. 1 player for nearly two years, but she left New York without a major in 2026. Elena Rybakina, meanwhile, not only took the title but became No. 1. And the enduring image from the women’s final? It might be Sabalenka smashing her racket after her loss to Rybakina. 

Matt:  I was really turned off by the way she acted at the end of the match—sitting with her team, cursing at the camera when it came near her.

Andrew: And her players’ box: Paris Hilton, Jake Paul. A full house of deplorables.

Matt: Not exactly making me reconsider my feelings on her, based on the way she's acted in the past, and the people she's associated herself with. That’s not even to mention the constant shrieking. I wish Rybakina was a little bit more outgoing and gave us at least some personality. There must be some middle ground between a Sabalenka and a Rybakina. People were saying, “Oh, wow, she did two fist pumps this time. She was really excited to win this one.” Two fist pumps is more than you normally get.

Andrew: She played an extraordinary final. I watched that entire thing and was just riveted—not just by how cleanly she hits the ball, but just the textbook composure that she showed in that match when her serve completely went away. She was hitting in the high 20 percent on her first serve at one point in the match, and she at no point let it unravel her in a way that it would unravel most players.

ESPN shelled out $2 billion for US Open rights and this year more than ever they seemed determined to make sure you watched it their way—RedZone-style coverage, a brigade of telegenic former players in the booth, matches behind the ESPN Unlimited paywall. How did they do?

Matt:  I think it's a shame they got rid of some of their best commentators this past year, like Pam Shriver, who’s one of my favorites, and Darren Cahill, who was great with his insights. Andy Roddick’s been a great addition, especially as someone that played with the Djokovics of the world a little more recently than, say, the McEnroes who are a few generations behind, especially John. But  they’ve added a lot of hosts from other sports who are not actually that knowledgeable on tennis.

Cecil: And if you’re going to pay for the rights to an event, I wish you’d cover the event. For instance, tell the audience what is in Zverev's background, with domestic abuse allegations. Because when I watch other sports, they will tell you about a basketball player who's gone astray. But with Zverev, they've decided to sort of, to whitewash him and stay away from issues.

Matt: I normally try not to watch Zverev matches for many reasons, including the way he was never really punished in any significant way and instead has been protected by not only the ATP, but by ESPN, by Tennis Channel, by many networks. It is just really distasteful. 

Andrew: If it weren’t for the other baggage that he carried into that match, match point in the final would’ve been an awesome moment of an athlete in the zone where he literally has to be told there is no next ball to play because you just won the tournament. I've never seen anything like that. 

We’ve been seeing US Open prices creep up to outrageous levels for years. And still, it felt like something tipped this year—$300 grounds passes, $100 chicken nuggets, $1,400 gold tennis necklaces selling out at the Open store. At some point, are we just talking about rising prices, or is the Open making a pretty explicit statement about who it wants on the grounds, and who it doesn’t?

Andrew: And it’s not just the influencers with the ring lights. It's just the general vibe of people who are there. The press seats now are in the 200 section at Arthur Ashe. We used to have seats down on the court where you could actually hear and see more of the action. Now you can barely make out the players’ faces. We sat in a section where there were all sorts of Ticketmaster patrons around us, and there was a woman watching the women's final for a good half of a set taking pictures of herself, documenting the fact that she was at this final.

I feel like that is what the US Open has become. It’s a backdrop for collecting clout points and flaunting those clout points. Never mind that this tournament is probably one of the best tournaments all around from start to finish, but that's completely immaterial to probably 60% to 70% of the people that go now. 

Cecil: The Open T-shirts I bought for $50 last year now cost $75. It’s tennis for the 1%. They need to make it more accessible. They need to do something about the jacked-up ticket prices. But in the end, just like the players salvaged the World Cup after those grossly expensive tickets, the players salvaged the event.  

Matt:  This is the year where it really jumped the shark for me. I have gone to the US Open every year for 20-plus years. This is the first year I did not go to the main draw at all. I went to Fan Week a couple times; I went for free last Thursday to watch the men’s doubles semifinals. They’ve ruined the live experience for a lot of the more tennis purists such as me. It’s just too crowded, it’s too expensive, and it’s uncomfortable to be there. I'd rather watch at home. 🎾

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