"I felt like the world stopped."
Frances Tiafoe couldn’t hear a thing. His eyes filled with tears. He buried his face in his hands. He bent over in disbelief on the blue asphalt.
"It was such a blur," the 24-year-old said after stunning the all-time great Rafael Nadal in the Round of 16 at the US Open. "I've never felt something like that in my life, honestly."
For Tiafoe, an affable, athletic American player with a remarkable origin story, there will now always be the before and after. Before, when he was a well-regarded member of a crew of young Americans who have been on their way up but collectively failed to crack tennis’s glass ceiling. And after, when Tiafoe ascended heights he’d never known and knocked off one of the sport’s “Mount Rushmore guys,” as he put it.
September 6, 2022 is a date that will mark Tiafoe. A seismic victory like that, on the American’s home turf, on Labor Day before a packed and deafening Arthur Ashe Stadium, is likely to be career- and maybe even life-changing.
Tiafoe seemed to grasp the gravity of the shift, only hours after leaving the court. “You see all these young guys get Rafa, Fed, Novak,” he told journalists. “Am I ever going to be able to say I beat one of them?,” he said he had wondered. "Today I was like, 'No, I'm going to do that.'"
Watch Tiafoe's R16 Press Conference:
"So now, it's something to tell the kids, the grandkids, Yeah, I beat Rafa. Hopefully I never play him again,” said Big Foe with a magnetic smile.
Tiafoe had played Nadal twice before in 2019, and in five sets never managed to win more than four games. “I'm a different person now, different player,” the American declared.
Tiafoe had success on tour in his early 20s, winning his first ATP title in 2018 and reaching the quarterfinals of the Australian Open the following year. He shot into the Top 30. But he then fell into a prolonged slump. Since his teens Tiafoe had been touted as promising, a superb athlete and great ball striker with blazing footspeed, but, as he began his pro career, many questioned whether he had the dedication to challenge the elites in the Grand Slams. Tiafoe became better known for brief moments of on-court electricity and ripping off his shirt and pounding his chest, a la LeBron James, Tiafoe’s personal hero.
This year, though, playing with newfound commitment and confidence, Tiafoe has ascended to his highest ranking (No. 24). And he is hungry for more. As he boldly predicted before taking on Nadal, “I’m definitely going to come after him.”
It is natural to view Tiafoe’s monumental victory over Nadal as evidence of a coterie of American men coming of age. Or a long-awaited generational changing of the guard. It may indeed prove to be both of those things, but Frances Tiafoe’s story is unique.
His is the quintessential American immigrant success story. And his family knows from life-changing events.
“I'm a son of immigrants,” he told the press on Monday–a story he has surely repeated countless times. His parents individually fled the civil war in Sierra Leone in West Africa and immigrated to the United States in the 1990s. “They met here, had me and my twin brother,” continued Tiafoe. Their father, Frances Tiafoe Sr., began as a construction worker and eventually became head of maintenance at the elite Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Maryland. Their mother, Alphina, was “a nurse, working two jobs, working overtime through the nights.” For more than a decade, the family even lived most of the week in a spare room on the grounds of the tennis center, which they refashioned into an apartment of sorts. The boys often slept on a massage table.
Young Frances hung around the courts, watched the kids in the expensive junior program and, given his dad’s job, was able to pick up a racquet and get some free lessons from the sympathetic coach, Mikhail Kouznetsov, who became a mentor. Improbably, Tiafoe blossomed into a prodigy, eventually becoming the No. 2 junior in the world.
“Us being around tennis was kind of us getting out of our neighborhood,” said Tiafoe. “It wasn't supposed to be like this. My dad was like, ‘It would be awesome if you guys can use this as a full scholarship to school.’ I mean, we couldn't afford a university. So use the game of tennis.”
On Labor Day, Tiafoe’s parents were in the player box in Arthur Ashe Stadium, witnessing one of their sons pull off his own American Dream. “To see them experience me beat Rafa Nadal, they've seen me have big wins, but to beat those 'Mount Rushmore' guys, for them, I can't imagine what was going through their heads,” Tiafoe said.
“Yeah, I mean, they're going to remember today for the rest of their lives.”
One imagines their son will, too. Tiafoe related how surreal it was to discover that LeBron James had tweeted at him after the match. “CONGRATS Young King!!,” it read.
“Man, I was losing it in the locker room,” said Tiafoe. “Bro, I was going crazy. I mean, that's my guy.”
Tiafoe wasn’t sure how to handle the attention from King James. “I was like, 'Do I retweet it as soon as he sent it?' Not wanting to appear overeager–or thirsty, in the parlance of social media–Tiafoe thought to himself, “You know what, I'm going to be cool and act like I didn't see it and then retweet it three hours later.”
As the 2022 US Open got underway last week, Tiafoe confessed that he was happy to be flying under the radar. Asked what he thought about those comments now, Tiafoe understood that his world had changed.
“Now that's over, man. There's no dark horse any more."
