Ben Shelton Battles Back to Win U.S. Open First Round

Under the lights of Arthur Ashe Stadium, Ben Shelton looked nothing like a contender. For half an hour, he barely looked present.

Fourteen unforced errors. Two double faults. One lonely hold of serve. A 1-6 first set on the board and Tallon Griekspoor striding around the court like a man ready to claim another big-name scalp after his upset of Alexander Zverev in Montreal.

Shelton was supposed to be the standard-bearer, the eighth seed, the top American in the men’s draw, the man carrying the weight of a 21-year wait for a homegrown champion at the U.S. Open. Instead, he opened his campaign like a rookie lost in the occasion.

Then the switch flipped.

“I started off a little bit nervous tonight, but I found my rhythm at some point through the second set,” Shelton said afterward, and you could almost timestamp the moment. His feet sharpened. The serve, suddenly, bit harder. The forehand stopped flying and started landing on lines.

Griekspoor, who had made the first set look like a hitting session, suddenly found himself dragged into rallies he didn’t control. Shelton broke three times in the second set, returning fire with a 6-1 of his own, a mirror image of the opener that reset the night and jolted the crowd awake.

Match Tension

The match tightened into something more tense in the third. Griekspoor’s attacking game still bothered Shelton, just as the American had warned.

“Obviously, a lot of credit to Tallon, he's a good player to play, he doesn’t give you a lot of rhythm,” Shelton said. “He has an attacking game style and I found things really difficult for the first set tonight.”

Those difficulties lingered long enough to drag the third set into a tiebreak, but this time it was the Dutchman’s game that blinked. The errors that had barely existed in the opening half hour began to creep in. By the time Griekspoor tossed in his sixth double fault of the match, Shelton had the breaker 7-3 and the scoreboard edge that mattered most: two sets to one.

From there, the American took the match by the throat.

Shelton stormed to a 4-0 lead in the fourth set, hammering serves, stepping inside the baseline, and finally dictating with the kind of authority expected from a defending Canadian Open champion. Griekspoor’s shoulders dropped a fraction; Shelton’s body language did the opposite. The early nerves were long gone, replaced by the swagger that carried him deep at Flushing Meadows last year.

The final scoreline — 1-6 6-1 7-6(3) 6-2 — will read like a routine four-set win on paper. It was nothing of the sort. It was a salvage job, a recovery mission from a disastrous start in a season where his Grand Slam results have not matched his talent or his ranking.

Shelton is still chasing a first major title and trying to become the first American man since 2003 to win this tournament. On Monday night, he at least took the first, sometimes awkward, step.

Next up is Poland’s Hubert Hurkacz in the second round — a step up in power, precision, and pedigree. If Shelton wants to keep that long American wait from stretching to 22 years, he cannot afford another opening like this one.