The Circuit

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

  The system both rewards and corrects itself. A one and two seed should be good enough to beat the rest of the field, so the draw separates them, provides for that presumption, and the reward for those top two seeds (and for the tournament organizers) is that the two best players face off against each other. If the two players are indeed that far ahead of the rest of the field, their rankings and hence their seedings perpetuate this and the matchup replicates itself again and again, tournament after tournament.

  These are the currents swimming under the surface structure of a Grand Slam draw. Even before a tournament starts, once the seed is implemented and the sections are arranged you can read a draw like the box score of a baseball game. It’s not just who will win the things—points and positioning suddenly appear before our eyes. The pundits have their ideas of what may happen and express it to the fans. Fans have their ideas of what may happen and express it among themselves. Gamblers have their ideas of what may happen and put money down on it. And the players, the moving pieces in all of this, suddenly have a sense of their possible roles in the drama. Maybe they talk it over with their coaches. Maybe they keep it all to themselves.

  But seeding … seeding lights up a draw like a Christmas tree.

  When the new rankings came out, Murray saw the number two beside his name for the first time in almost a year. He’d worked so hard to shake himself free of it. Wasn’t he paying for it now? Hadn’t he been paying for it all year? Didn’t he all but set fire to his body at the end of 2016 on that impossible and legendary run to become the end-of-the-year number one? The new number-two-ranked player in the world wondered what he should do.

  There is nothing mysterious about seeding. Nadal would be the first seed at this U.S. Open, Murray would be two. Federer would be three. Barring the rarest of circumstances, seeding simply follows the tour rankings. At the 2017 Australian Open the top twenty-seven seeds of the tournament corresponded with the rankings of the top-twenty-seven-ranked players in the world. And so, even with so many top players having already withdrawn from the Open, it was easy to know what the seeds going into the 2017 U.S. Open would be. Let’s look at the first seventeen seeds.

  1. Rafael Nadal (Spain)

  2. Andy Murray (UK)

  3. Roger Federer (Switzerland)

  4. Alexander Zverev (Germany)

  5. Marin Čilić (Croatia)

  6. Dominic Thiem (Austria)

  7. Grigor Dimitrov (Bulgaria)

  8. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga (France)

  9. David Goffin (Belgium)

  10. John Isner (USA)

  11. Roberto Bautista Agut (Spain)

  12. Pablo Carreño Busta (Spain)

  13. Jack Sock (USA)

  14. Nick Kyrgios (Australia)

  15. Tomáš Berdych (Czech Republic)

  16. Lucas Pouille (France)

  17. Sam Querrey (USA)

  If the seeds of a tournament are a blueprint of hierarchy and expectation, then the expectation on seeing the draw of this U.S. Open was that it was going to be a terrible tournament. Outside Nadal, Murray, and Federer, this was a murderer’s row of players who can astound you in one round and absolutely mortify you the next. Even the surging Sascha Zverev, sporting by far his highest-ever seed at a Grand Slam, had never ever made it to the second week of one. His game thus far had been built for best-of-three-set matches and time and time again in his young career he had shrunk before the only true measure of a player’s greatness, the demands of best-of-five Grand Slams. Čilić won the U.S. Open in 2014 but since then had played to type as a player just as capable of being upset in an early round as he was of making and losing a semifinal or final. The rest? You could count a few surprise semifinals among them and enough of a track record to be dangerous in a draw but not anyone’s idea of a prohibitive favorite. I’m being kind here and I’m not sure why. Tennis is incredibly difficult to play well, and these are a few of the very few finest players in the entire world. This was an eyesore of a seeding chart, and one of the shittiest for a Grand Slam I’d ever seen in my life. Some of the air came out of the U.S. Open when whatever we all knew was put so plainly to see in the plainspoken factness of a list. And the seeds, given the literal luck of the draw, couldn’t help but hold to form: Zverev went out in the second round, Čilić in the third. Thiem in the fourth. Dimitrov in the second. Tsonga in the second. Goffin in the fourth. Isner in the third. Bautista Agut in the third. Carreño Busta, enjoying by far the best year of his career, reached the semifinals and then was routined by the twenty-eighth-seeded Kevin Anderson. Jack Sock lost on the first day of the tournament. Kyrgios lost in the first round. Berdych lost in the second round. Pouille lost in the fourth round. Querrey, playing in his home country and with a path to the final he would never in his life have dared to dream of, lost in the quarterfinals to the plucky Anderson in the Battle of Big Servers Who Don’t Move Well … at All. This wasn’t a tournament to dream of a Federer-Nadal matchup, it was a tournament that a Federer-Nadal matchup would have to save.

  And if it were to happen, it would have to be in the semifinals. Andy Murray was the second-ranked player in the world. He was the number two seed. If the draw said anything, it was that he and Rafa Nadal were supposed to play in the finals. This was what we wanted. The two best players in the world really going at it. That was his story and he was sticking to it.

  The next day Andy Murray withdrew from the 2017 U.S. Open. No one saw it coming. Because no top player withdraws from a tournament after the draw’s been made, especially not due to an injury he’s been dealing with for months. It throws the draw into utter chaos. He would say he had done pretty much everything he could to get himself ready for New York after taking a number of weeks off after Wimbledon.

  “I obviously spoke to a lot of hip specialists,” he would continue.

  Obviously.

  “Tried obviously resting, rehabbing, to try and get myself ready here.” Obviously.

  “Was actually practicing okay the last few days,” he went on, “but it’s too sore for me to win the tournament. And ultimately, that’s what I was here to try and do.”

  Murray hadn’t re-injured himself, further injured himself, or sustained a new injury. He simply realized that he couldn’t win the U.S. Open after not having won a tournament since the first week of March and having been last seen some six weeks ago as a physical shell of himself. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, watching the draw take an unchangeable diamond form on Friday, and then announcing the following day that he was unfit to play … what to say? If Murray had withdrawn from the tournament just one day earlier, Federer would have simply slipped into the second seed in the other half of the draw from Nadal. But instead, by the rules of the U.S. Open, no one would replace Murray in the number two seed. He was not playing, but he was still number two. Asked about it, Nadal could hardly hide his bemusement, and called it “a little bit strange that he retired just the morning after the draw was made.”

  Q: Did you get a chance to talk with Andy before he left? Were you surprised to hear that he pulled out, given that you were here and practicing?

  RAFAEL NADAL: Yeah, no. I saw him when I arrived here, and I was just saying hi to him.

  But I always thought that he was gonna be playing if he was here practicing, no? Was a little bit strange that he retired just the morning after the draw was made. Was something that is a little bit strange and difficult to understand, but the worst thing is, yeah, he is not healthy and I wish him a very fast recovery.

  Injuries are bad for everybody. I know better than all of them (smiling). So I wish him fast and good recovery. That’s the most important thing.

  Q: Strange in what way?

  RAFAEL NADAL: Strange in what?

  Q: You said his decision was strange, the timing of his decision was strange. What do you mean by that?

  RAFAEL NADAL: Strange? Yeah, of course. Because normally when you retire on—was Saturday morning? And the draw was made Friday? Normally you want to keep practicin
g, keep trying until the last moment. You don’t retire Saturday morning. You retire Monday morning or Sunday afternoon, not Saturday morning.

  If not, you can do it before the draw. That’s why I said it’s strange. But of course he has his reason, and for sure the negative—the only news and the negative news was that he will not be playing here.

  Čilić was moved to Murray’s slot in the draw and remained the fifth seed. Kohlschreiber, the first player at the cutoff line for seeding, became the thirty-third seed. There were still only thirty-two seeds: Murray now existing and not existing. Rafa and Roger would have to settle for their semifinal. Maybe one of them would get the 2,000 points from winning the whole thing. But Murray had guaranteed that only one or the other would get the points for reaching the final. Either Rafa or Roger could possibly get a maximum of 720 points from reaching the semifinal. If they both made the final, one was guaranteed 1,200 and the other 2,000. Being in the same side of the draw took 880 points off the table for one of them. Who would know whether that would play out at a later date? Points last for 365 days, give or take a day. So points in play at the U.S. Open would be part of the story in ranking and seeding all the way up to the 2018 U.S. Open. The draw had lost a star extremely late. But the star had already gone; it just took a while for the message to arrive.

  Andy Murray left New York with a message that he would announce his plans for the rest of the 2017 season in the following days. It was only going to be one way; he’d been finished since July but fought to deny it. Days later, he confirmed that he was done for the year. It wasn’t news as much as recognition of what was already obvious to everyone but him. He needed help. His hips were failing him. It was harder to accept in New York. When he won it all there in 2012 it had marked the first time in five years that Federer and Djokovic had not played each other for the championship. In the final that few saw coming, he started brightly against Djokovic by winning the first two sets as they went down to the wire. Then he lost his way in the third and fourth sets before righting himself and powering past the great Serb in the fifth. He was twenty-five, tireless, and strong. The trophy seemed small in his hands. He knew even back then, especially back then, that the great players in his way were a wall that he would have to break down. He learned how to force his way in. One tournament at a time. He grew accustomed to ruining the expectations of others who expected, at times explicitly wished for, other outcomes. He played the game to be in every final. He had lost eight Grand Slam finals; he knew there was glory in being there.

  It was the best-played match Murray would play all year. It brought him to tears.

  In January 2018 at 7:30 one morning, he was wheeled into an operating room in Melbourne to have surgery on his hip. He still hadn’t played a competitive match since Wimbledon the previous July.

  FEDERER VS. TIAFOE

  It’s the second day of the U.S. Open and late on a Tuesday night that’s tumbled over into early Wednesday morning. Arthur Ashe Stadium is still full. Deep into the deciding fifth set, the roof is closed, as it has been all night, causing the constant run-run of idle chatter by tens of thousands in the stands to swell and circle over and around the court as a resigned, halfhearted attempt at silence. Some there were transfixed. Some were simply trapped. New York was experiencing an early taste of bitter autumn. Due to the evening’s constant downpour, the uncharacteristically cold gusts of air blasting past the Food Village, and the flooded walkways once lined with concession stands, no one is milling about outside. Sometimes people with a pass to the grounds but not to Ashe would stick around and watch the stadium match on the large screen on the outside wall facing the south plaza. Sometimes there was the simple joy in being a remainder from the daytime matches on the smaller side courts now empty and ignored under the floodlights. All of the day’s other matches have been played or washed out and postponed. Two days in, and the tournament was already chasing its tail around—so many stars having withdrawn with injuries, high seeds being eliminated, and the fallout from Andy Murray’s manipulation of the draw still being felt. It’s dark outside, uncharacteristically dark for New York, where the lights are always on. Midnight blue has given way to cloud rule, a matte black of after-midnight darkness. A darkness that had creeped inside Ashe with all of us, seeping through the white roof suspended high above the single hard court down below at its center and from where several embankments of lights descend down onto the court, leaving an almost-apologetic chrome glaze in the air. It traps the corporate drunkenness in it like heat. Roger Federer readied himself to serve to unseeded nineteen-year-old American Frances Tiafoe from Maryland, two-sets-all, 5–3 in the fifth, 40–all: two points from winning the match but also two points from edging toward disaster. He starts his toss, bends his knees, twists into trophy position, and rises to meet the ball.

  * * *

  Born in January 1998, Frances Tiafoe and his twin brother, Franklin, are the children of immigrants from Sierra Leone, where as a child his father labored in the country’s diamond mines. His mother and father, Alphina and Constant, fled the country in the early 1990s and settled in Hyattsville, Maryland, one of the constellation of suburbs surrounding Washington, D.C.

  Frances Tiafoe of the United States in action against Roger Federer of Switzerland in a five-set first-round match at Arthur Ashe Stadium, August 29, 2017. (Photograph by Mohammed Elshamy / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images)

  Eventually, Constant found a steady job working as a member of the maintenance staff of the Junior Championship Tennis Center in nearby College Park, Maryland. They provided him with an office that he could use as a living space. Alphina worked weekday night shifts as a nurse. And so Monday through Friday, from 1999 until 2010, Frances and Franklin lived with their father, Constant, on the grounds of a suburban tennis center in a 120-square-foot room—it had one window.

  Since the twins were living on the facility and looking for things to do as their father worked, tennis became the obvious diversion. The talent displayed by both, but especially Frances, turned the diversion into an immersion. He began to receive coaching, and then extra coaching. Among the children of parents paying for their chance of becoming pros, he became the unexpected prodigy. In 2013, fifteen years after Federer won the prestigious Orange Bowl junior tennis tournament, Tiafoe at fifteen years old became the youngest boys’ singles champion in its history. At seventeen, he played in the French Open and the U.S. Open on wild cards. These are amazing achievements for a young player but also achievements similar to those of many professional players you have ended up never hearing of. For every Federer or Edberg, who were absolutely dominant junior players, there are twenty dominant junior players who didn’t make it at the highest level of the circuit and spend their careers battling it out on a rung below, the Challenger Tour. That said, Tiafoe has physical gifts that translate well to competing against the very best players in the world. His foot speed is peerless, his racket speed and the easy power it generates are impressive, his serve at such a young age is already a weapon.

  He’s aided by the fact that he seems to like to compete. A strong dose of Challenger tournaments far from the glitz of the ATP Tour has helped him. A young Nadal skipped out on junior tournaments in favor of hardening his game and himself on the Challenger circuit. Federer, Djokovic, and Murray were distinguished juniors. Wawrinka passed through juniors without making much of a dent. Every player is an island. When Tiafoe readied to return Federer’s serve at 3–5, 40–all in the fifth set, he was ranked seventieth in the world despite coming into the match with only three wins for the year on the main circuit; he had fattened up on points from Challenger tournaments in Dallas, San Francisco, Sarasota, and Aix-en-Provence.

  As with any minor league, the Challenger circuit presents obstacles players on the ATP World Tour don’t have to face. In his first-round match in Sarasota against fellow American Mitchell Krueger, serving up 6–3, 3–2 in the match, the distinct and unmistakable sounds of two people fucking suddenly began to pierce the air.
They played on. The sounds went on for a couple of minutes. Mitchell eventually responded by picking up a tennis ball and smacking it out of the grounds in the general direction of the noise. It continued. Tiafoe, trying to get on with it and serve again, paused and then yelled out to himself, the crowd, and the source of sounds: “It can’t be that good!” Then he spun the ball on his racket playfully, got on with it, and won the final three games of the match on the trot.

  Of course, a Challenger match at the Sarasota Open isn’t a match at the U.S. Open, and Tiafoe isn’t immune to pressure. It was only a year ago that he was up two sets to none on John Isner, the perennial top-ranked American on the circuit in these days when an Agassi or a Sampras seems a distant memory. That was the debut for the new Grandstand, a medium-sized bowl-like stadium with views of the city skyline. The crowd pushed unabashedly for the charismatic kid as he swung from his heels and chased down everything, much to the increasingly obvious chagrin of the six-foot-ten Isner, a saturnine player who makes his living off his serve. Tiafoe served for that match at 5–3 in the third, but couldn’t seal the deal. Then, after going to a tiebreaker in that same set, he led 1–3 and served at 5–5—the moments slipped away from the eighteen-year-old. As did the set. He was still up two sets to one but the loss washed over Tiafoe like a tidal wave. He lost the next two sets and the match. You could feel it coming after he lost the tiebreak in the third. Almost as if to emphasize the opportunity lost in the third set, Isner closed him out clinically in a second tiebreak, this one in the fifth set.