Sports can make you forget where you are. They can be so spectacular that your body’s biological need for sleep is temporarily suspended, and your inability to keep your eyes open past midnight on a weekday is placed in indefinite cryostasis — you must watch the rest of this, because Carlos Alcaraz and Ben Shelton are figuring some stuff out.
I live on the east coast of the United States, the time zone in which this impossible match was played. Because the day’s US Open events saw 16 out of 16 possible sets played across two women’s and two men’s quarterfinals, Shelton and Alcaraz did not get on the court until after 11 p.m. They proceeded to play a tennis match, but it was more of a philosophical expression of being, some kind of extraterrestrial, interstellar experience than it was a sporting event. It was not the greatest tennis match I’ve ever seen. It was … something else. Not better, but something more.
The first set landed like a groundbreaking PhD thesis on all of our desks to peer review. Shelton tried to serve and volley to some success, Alcaraz ultimately broke him but then was quickly broken back. Both men had clearly called the operator and dialed the hell in before stepping on the baseline, and a tiebreak saw Alcaraz snatch the set from the jaws of a deficit.
The middle three sets will not look like much to normal human beings who did not pan-fry their sleep schedule to watch tennis on a Tuesday, but they were in fact tortuous, seemingly never-ending battles for inches. Service games slowed to a crawl, everything was difficult and celebrated and glorious. They went band for band, note for note, shot for shot … until the fifth set. Then it all went quiet.
Six games each, six service holds each. A 10-point match tiebreak to decide whatever sorcery we had just witnessed. Then that tiebreak was 3-3, then 5-5. Then, at 6-6, Shelton produced a 146-mile-per-hour serve that gave him the advantage. 146 MPH, after 4.5 hours, at 3:30 in the morning. He never gave it up. At 3:33 a.m., up 9-7 in the tiebreak, Shelton found 146 MPH again, this time for an ace. Game, set, match.
Tennis is glorious because it is the purest expression of single combat in sports. Not even boxing, with its corners and stitch-men and referees, can mimic the kind of duel that this level of tennis achieves. Alcaraz versus Shelton was ultimately two guys nonviolently beating the ever-living crap out of each other for four and a half hours with negligible influence from the outside world. At just about 3:30 in the morning, they finally decided who would walk away. But the point of the duel was not the winner — the point was the duel.
The winner of Shelton vs. Alcaraz is irrelevant to the character of the match and the special cultural moment it created. There is no other moment in American history where ESPN cameras will continuously cut to Kevin Hart to prove that he is sticking it out in the middle of the night with these two gladiators. Never has an athlete been so deserving of praise in a match they lost, and Carlos Alcaraz walked off the court smiling.
Shelton may yet continue this run and become the first American man to win a Grand Slam since 2003. By winning, he faces Frances Tiafoe and guarantees an American finalist. But it doesn’t matter. It just … doesn’t matter what happens after this because that match did not exist on the same plane as other ones. There will be better tennis matches, there have been better tennis matches — the 2025 French Open final was better. But it wasn’t special like this one. It wasn’t singular. Because this match was beyond that; it cannot be comprehended or compared. All I can do here is help you experience it as best I can, because that’s all any of us that stayed up for it did anyhow. I think I’ll go to sleep now.
