It’s an early Thursday evening at the Pier 42 tennis courts, an industrial-looking public park in lower Manhattan adjoining the east river, and a crowd has gathered in a large open-air space dotted with concrete picnic tables. Wearing athleisure and carrying tennis backpacks, its members skew young, their faces expectant. Many have formed a line leading up to a gray truck situated in the park’s center. Through its narrow concession window, it’s just possible to see American tennis star Ben Shelton reaching through to sign autographs and pose for pictures.
Pier 42 is usually attended by locals, and sparsely. Tonight, it’s playing host to a spectacle built around Shelton. The 22-year-old has become one of the most recognizable faces in tennis, with a curly tangle of TikTok-looking hair and a wide smile. A sea of spectators, event producers, photographers, videographers, downtown tennis pros, social media coordinators, public relations staffers, agents, and guests invited by the event’s sponsor, Swiss running brand On, fill the park to capacity. Earlier, Shelton took to the court with a wide mix of challengers, hitting alongside elementary-school girls and hard-nosed challengers eager to take a point off the current world No. 7.
Shelton gamely chipped volleys and chased short balls. “You’ve got a good forehand,” he told one woman who looked to be college-aged. “You hit it a bit like me, but better.” During the requisite group selfie at the end of the session, Shelton stood on his tip-toes, straining to capture his 100 or so new hitting partners with his iPhone camera. Afterward, there are additional obligations for the young tennis celebrity. He’s asked to hand out socks and tennis products from the truck. He takes more photos: with event staff, with attendees. All of this hustling, nonstop motion for Shelton is adjacent, of course, to the tennis tournament that will be starting in New York City in three days’ time.
It’s impossible to gauge, watching Shelton move cautiously, almost protectively through the crowd in a hoodie, if these contractual demands are a pleasure or a burden. When he reminds me that his day began with a practice session miles away in Flushing, I can detect faint fatigue. “I can sleep anywhere,” Shelton assures me. “I can sleep on a rock.” The only thing getting in the way of his rest is the tournament itself. “It’s always buzzing. I don’t know how to describe it,” he adds. “You can’t really understand it unless you’ve been out there and felt it.”
The “out there” Shelton is referring to, one assumes, is the court itself. Any of the surfaces at the National Tennis Center, where he’s steadily risen from sidecourts (albeit sidecourts filled to the permissible human limit) to the compound’s center stages, at Louis Armstrong Stadium and Arthur Ashe Stadium, where Shelton has become a star attraction. He is something of a long-dreamed-of American powerhouse famous primarily for a serve that looks, and sounds, like a subatomic collision. The energy he exudes during matches, a rippling high-voltage current, is frequently released in short-burst celebrations. Shelton’s ecstatic howls are a signature now, and they’re often paired with a vice-grip fist shake that he vigorously directs toward his box.
These displays of emotion have occasionally rubbed fans and opponents the wrong way. “I don’t really understand that. I definitely don’t think it’s hokey,” Shelton says. “It’s something about the whole narrative of tennis being a ‘gentleman’s sport’ that I wish would change.”
There are other things he wishes would change about tennis, too: “One thing that pisses me off is players [who] don’t clean up after themselves.” Shelton mentions this lightly, but there’s some incredulousness sprinkled in. One senses that, despite his presentation as an aw-shucks kind of superstar, there’s also a score-keeping side to him. How can these so-called professionals leave half-drunk bottles of Evian lying around, or wet towels on the locker room floor when the bin is right there? “It just pisses me off because it’s not that hard,” he says. “They build these crazy facilities for us, spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and we just kind of trash it.”
In many ways, Shelton has become a hometown hero in a city notoriously reluctant to offer such designations. More than most places, perhaps with the exception of Gainesville, Florida, where he went to college, or Orlando, where his family lives, he has history in New York City. Shelton made his professional debut here back in 2021. It’s a place where he has both overperformed and suffered the kinds of defeats that might stunt a still-developing player. After an odds-defying run to the US Open quarter-finals in 2023, Shelton was emphatically beaten by Novak Djokovic, who capped off the match by mocking Ben’s signature phone celebration. (Djokovic, with no shortage of corniness, mimed hanging up said phone.) Then, in last year’s Open, Shelton was stunned in a late-round loss to one of his closest friends on the tour, fellow American Francis Tiafoe.
That history comes with pressure. This is the first time Shelton has played in the Open while ranked in the top ten. He and 27-year-old Taylor Fritz are the only American players. Earlier this month, Shelton won his major championship in Montreal. (Seconds after the final point, he sprinted to the player’s box to hug his father, Bryan, who’s also his coach.) The win seems to suggest that Shelton’s upward trajectory will continue. Of the top ten players around him, only Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz seem to be truly problematic. “How high can he rise?” asked Giri Nathan at The Second Serve.
Still, it’s a new kind of thing. One that comes with being asked 600 times a day if you’re going to be the first American to win a slam since Andy Roddick. (“That’s for the media to figure out,” Shelton says with a sigh.) And with being misunderstood by tennis audiences. (“I don’t know, for being cocky? For being antagonistic? For being disrespectful? For me, it’s just sports.”) And, in this case, with dating another rising professional athlete, the soccer player Trinity Rodman. (“Everything I do is going to be in the public eye at some point or other, so I might as well do it.”)
As the evening winds down, Shelton is swept away from the stragglers to a more distant court. A stylist talks him into wearing a pale fleece. It’s vintage and a bit distressed, and for some reason he’s wearing it inside-out, collar flared up. It looks edgy but restrained, cocky but controlled.
While his agent watches, while his security detail watches, while On’s public relations team watches, Shelton poses for a photographer. He rotates through positions and placements. He does it all gamely, disinterestedly.
Does he need all of this? Does he want all of this? Is it lonely out there?
“I don’t think it’s lonely. I feed off crowds,” he says, taking a seat against the net as the photographer presses in. “It’s the one thing that kind of keeps me going.”
