Trend or Not, American Men’s Tennis Is Having a Breakthrough

For regular visitors to this website, it’s probably no surprise that one of our bloggers started cursorily following tennis in 2013 by going on his Kindle Fire while on a choir trip and checking how the Americans were doing in the single’s tournaments at Roland-Garros—specifically, by checking the ‘2013 French Open (Men’s/Women’s) Singles’ pages on Wikipedia.

For the last decade, we’ve had a slight interest in tennis. It’s a fun sport to watch, it’s got some good stars, it’s easy enough to tune in four times a year. There’s also a bit of an allure here with the American piece of that story. On the men’s side, American tennis is in a torturous drought. It’s been twenty years since Andy Roddick won the United States its last major in men’s singles. You have to go back to Wimbledon in 2009 to find the last time an American man even made the finals, when Roddick and Roger Federer went thirty games in the final set before Federer triumphed. Really, most of the last twenty years of American tennis come back to Roddick, which is a problem, given he’s been retired for over half that span.

Perhaps, though, there’s hope.

Tonight (our time) or tomorrow (Australian time), the 2023 Australian Open quarterfinals begin. Involved on the men’s side are three Americans, and with two playing one another, the United States is guaranteed at least one semifinalist. The Americans are collectively substantial underdogs—the implied probability one of the three wins this major is, using Bovada’s odds, only about 13%—but they’re there. The Americans are there. The last time we had this many men in the quarterfinals of a major was the 2005 U.S. Open, where Andre Agassi was joined by James Blake and Robby Ginepri. Better still, all three quarterfinalists are young. Tommy Paul’s the oldest, at 25, while Sebastian Korda and Ben Shelton check in at 22 and 20, respectively, putting Paul perhaps near his peak but leaving both Korda and Shelton with room to develop.

The thing about America being so bad at men’s tennis for so long is that this year is already a roaring relative success, and it’s only January. We have three quarterfinalists at the Australian Open. The last time we had three quarterfinalists between all four majors combined was 2018, and we haven’t had more than that since 2007. At one point we went four years without putting a single men’s player in the quarterfinals of a single major. In 2021, we managed zero. In the Australian Open specifically—typically one of our better competitions—we managed a total of three men’s quarterfinalists from 2011 through 2022 combined. Fluke or real, this is a breakthrough.

Here’s all of that in a graph:

And here it is in a table:

Korda plays tonight, at 10:00 PM EST on ESPN2. He’s a narrow favorite in the betting markets over Karen Khachanov, who really boosts his American enemy credentials by not only being Russian, but by being quite literally a Karen. Shelton and Paul play tomorrow night at a time that’s yet to be announced. Paul’s the moderate favorite in that one.

Over the rest of the year, don’t expect similar success. This is a step forward, but expecting more than a quarterfinalist or two at Wimbledon or the U.S. Open means expecting the best performance from the Americans in more than a decade, and you may have noticed we haven’t put a single man in the French Open quarterfinals since ’03, which doesn’t bode well for our chances there this year.

Still, we’ve got three left in this thing, and the likeliest outcome is that we’ll have two semifinalists. So, if Korda wins and you’re an insomniac (or an early riser), pull hard for Jiri Lehecka against Stefanos Tsitsipas. If Tsitsipas is eliminated, the odds say Korda will be the second-best player left.