Frances Tiafoe doesn't remember how many times people have tried to fix his forehand. “Many, many times” is his best guess. It is, for lack of a better description, a wild stroke. There's a lot of action in the take back—as the ball comes his way, his right arm begins to describe strange pathways behind his body, like a dragon wing unfurling—and more wrist in the shot than any instructor would typically teach. But the technique, if you want to call it that, allows him to generate incredible amounts of torque as his body turns through the tennis ball. The effect is of a slingshot being pulled way back, and then fired. Balls come off his forehand side incredibly heavy, dizzy with spin. They seem to be going up, not down, when they cross the opposite service line, before falling—rapidly now, as if dropped from a cliff—and then bounding quickly toward the back of the court. “Flick, flick, and more flick,” he said, sketching the motion of the stroke in the air.
The reason people are always trying to fix Tiafoe's forehand is that no one taught him how to hit one in the first place. Tiafoe taught himself. The shot encodes his whole history on a tennis court. It encodes his whole life, really. Tiafoe grew up in College Park, Maryland, in Prince George's County, not far from the Junior Tennis Champions Center. His parents emigrated from Sierra Leone, and his father, Constant, helped build the nearby tennis academy as a member of the construction crew. Constant stayed on as the facility's maintenance man and, at times, spent his nights in a back room at the complex, in a lightly converted office. Tiafoe wasn't in the program at the JTCC at first; he just slept there sometimes—in his father's bed, if his father was working through the night, or on a massage table Tiafoe and his twin brother, Franklin, would pull out of a closet and share. Tiafoe doesn't remember the first time he held a racket; by the time his first memories kick in, the racket is already in his hand. He's alone in front of the facility's hitting wall when no one else is using it, pretending to play Roger Federer at the U.S. Open. He's bringing his arm backward and then forward, imagining himself as his idol, Juan Martín del Potro.
Today, Tiafoe's forehand looks a bit like someone's attempt to imitate del Potro's without the benefit of a mirror or an instructor, neither of which Tiafoe reliably had in the beginning. When he was 6 years old, coaches at the JTCC finally noticed the kid hitting on his own, with ever increasing force and intensity, against a wall. They decided to admit him and his brother to the program. That was probably the first time someone really tried to change Tiafoe's technique. As a junior, he used to be polite about the suggestions for improvement coaches would make. But now he just tells whomever that the stroke is untouchable. He's 21 years old and the 35th-ranked man in the world. The only American who ranks higher is 34-year-old John Isner, who has won many tiebreakers with his giant serve and will almost certainly never win a major. No American man has since Andy Roddick, in 2003. Tiafoe, who in just a few years on the tour has already established himself among the sport's greatest showmen, is our country's latest and maybe best, most realistic hope: a player with the tools, the swagger, and the competitive drive to contend with anyone. In 2017, in the first round of his third U.S. Open, he took Federer to five sets. Last year he beat del Potro in three sets at the Delray Beach Open, a tournament he would go on to win. That was his first ATP title. This is his forehand.
One day in April, I watched Tiafoe hit a bunch of them. He was getting ready for the clay-court season, practicing at Congressional Country Club, in Bethesda, not too far from where he grew up. It was finally, tentatively, spring, and the green clay courts at Congressional were the best facsimile in the area for the surfaces Tiafoe would encounter during the ATP's upcoming European swing. Congressional is traditional, and particular, about its dress code, which on the courts is a strict all-white. Last time Tiafoe was here, he got in trouble for violating the code; a member had complained about the neon green highlights on his shoes—Tiafoe's world ranking be damned. So today he and his coach, Zack Evenden, and his friend and hitting partner for the day, Chase Custer, were careful to change into all-white shoes on the bench by the side of one of the courts.
Tiafoe, tall and lithe, stood up to take to the clay: ramrod-straight back, chest like a ship's prow, bowed legs, feet that point outward—for as long as he can remember, he's walked nearly on tiptoe, on the outside edges of his feet, so gingerly and deliberately it sometimes looks as if he's in pain. He was wearing a thin silver chain with a little crown on it and white shorts. Evenden, a 27-year-old former player from London whom Tiafoe calls Z, took one side of the court, Tiafoe the other, and they began to warm up. “Burn the legs!” Tiafoe yelled as he slid back and forth across the court. When he missed a volley, he shouted: “Don't miss that, Frances!” Custer, who has a shock of blond hair and a cheerful vibe, joined Evenden on the opposite side of the court from Tiafoe, and the three men began hitting in earnest: one and ones—one crosscourt shot, one shot down the line—and then two and twos.
Tiafoe, alone on his side, moved quickly—even on a pro tour full of speedy athletes, Tiafoe is noticeably faster than many of his opponents. He has the LeBron James quality of appearing to almost idle in place before suddenly reappearing, yards from where you last saw him. He took most balls early, green clay exploding off them at impact. He hit forehands first—Custer and Evenden were routinely hitting balls above their waists, if not their shoulders, trying to get them back in play—and then backhands. Tiafoe's backhand is a completely different stroke: shorter, flatter, more disguised. It's incredibly hard to tell where the ball's going until the second after it leaves his racket. When he hit a slice from either side, it came in low across the net and never got above Custer's or Evenden's knees.
Breathing heavily, the three men finally took a break on the side of the court. When they did, a club employee came over to discreetly ask that Custer change his shirt, which was white but had a Nike logo on it that was too big for the club's taste. “This is crazy,” Custer said, shaking his head. Tiafoe was wearing a tight white spandex undershirt—as close as he had to what the dress code required. It was already nearly soaked through with sweat. Sitting on a bench as Custer switched shirts, Tiafoe gestured at his own skin. “If they get mad about the black showing through, well—it's too good.”
The first time most casual fans were introduced to Tiafoe, he was on a tennis court, but he wasn't playing tennis, exactly. In 2017, at a Challenger event in Sarasota, Florida, Tiafoe was a set up on the journeyman American Mitchell Krueger when their match was interrupted by the uninhibited sounds of a couple fucking in an apartment building just across a lake from the court. (Or, as the ATP Tour's YouTube channel gently put it: “Frisky Couple's Loud Love Making Distracts Challenger Players.”) Tiafoe, incredulous, finally yelled: “It can't be that good!” The moment went viral. “The next day I was on WorldStar,” Tiafoe told me. “Everybody was talking about it. I was getting a bunch of texts. Go to Chipotle the next day, they're like, ‘Oh, my God—that's the guy that said it can't be that good.’ ”
We were sitting on the rooftop of the apartment building by the water in D.C. he had recently moved into on a part-time basis, watching the sun set. American tennis players live on the road more than they live anywhere else, but when they go home, it's often to Florida, where the tax laws are generous and the USTA has a campus in Orlando. Tiafoe lives and often trains there. He shares his apartment in Orlando with his father and brother, the latter of whom attends community college and plays ITF Circuit events. But Tiafoe likes to come back to D.C., where his friends are, and where his mother, Alphina, still lives, in a two-story house he recently bought her.
While in D.C., Tiafoe trains six days out of seven, starting at 8:30 in the morning, usually at the JTCC, where, two years after he and his brother were first formally admitted to the program, a newly hired coach, Mikhail Kouznetsov, took a particular interest in Tiafoe. “He saw me serving on my own, kind of helped me, we bonded. He helped me for nine years; his wife would take me to tournaments; he paid my entry fees. I would stay at his house once, twice a week. Just talking about tennis. He'd take me bowling. We had such a great bond. If it wasn't for him, I definitely wouldn't be where I am today. He gave me a tremendous amount of opportunity.” In turn, Tiafoe often won the tournaments Kouznetsov and the program helped him enter. Unlike many of his opponents, who had the financial backing to keep going no matter what, Tiafoe had to win in order to prove he was worth the help he was getting. He's been doing it ever since, he said.
But he is also 21 now, and trying to have a life, however sporadic, outside of tennis. He has a girlfriend who will graduate soon from UCLA, and when he can, he flies out to visit her. He likes to go to D.C. sports games and hear them announce his name in the arena. He has an aversion to walking even very short distances—away from a tennis court, anyway—so he enjoys his place in D.C., where there is a CVS and a Trader Joe's and a Shake Shack within a few feet of his front door. He said he likes to sit in his apartment, a one-bedroom, and watch stand-up specials on Netflix: Kevin Hart, Eddie Murphy, Chris Tucker, Richard Pryor.
So there was something apt about the fact that for a while after that viral moment in Sarasota, “I wasn't known for hitting a tennis ball—I was known for cracking a joke,” he said. Tennis is so difficult and durational that it can bring out the personalities of even its mildest players. But Tiafoe is…memorable. He's intensely expressive on the court: After a great shot, he might just stand there for a moment, shaking his fist, absorbing the echo, holding the pose. His nickname, which is self-explanatory, is Big Foe. He has it engraved inside his rackets. (His unofficial slogan? Big Foe on the Come-Up.) Earlier this year, at the Australian Open, which served as a kind of coming-out party for Tiafoe, his celebrations after victories became increasingly intense and elaborate. In the second round of the tournament, Tiafoe defeated Kevin Anderson—a top-ten player who had beaten Tiafoe in their three prior meetings—after which Tiafoe pulled up the right sleeve of his shirt and pounded his biceps, screaming, at the center of court. In the next round, he came back from two sets to one down to beat the Italian Andreas Seppi, then took off his shirt and did LeBron James's signature silencer celebration: palms down, knees up, thumping his chest.
“Instead of just doing the classic boring waves to the crowd and saying, ‘Thank you,’ it's kind of like: Why not do these NBA celebrations?” Tiafoe said on his rooftop. There were those who had suggested he tone it down, he said. But: “Why not do something different? I think tennis needs more personality in it, and a younger crowd to follow the game and to make tennis cool again, in my opinion.” He was a young black man succeeding in a sport in which the pathways for young black men—especially young black men without much, if anything, in the way of financial support—weren't obvious; he thought about that a lot, he said. Ultimately, “I want young kids to play tennis because of me. I want to really change people's lives with what I do for a living. When people count you out and say you're not gonna be that dude? Because of where you came from? Well, that's irrelevant.”
He said he was proud to have an actual personality on a tour that sometimes seemed like it rewarded, or at least wanted to reward, emotionless machines: “And I think that these young guys are almost, like, afraid of me in a sense, because I do have a personality. It's weird. People in tennis, they've been in a certain bubble for so long they don't even know who they are, because obviously it's just been tennis, tennis, tennis. And let it be just tennis, tennis, tennis. Be locked into that. But when tennis is done, then what? It's kinda like: Let's enjoy being great at the sport.”
Moments after Tiafoe's comeback victory against Seppi at the Australian Open, the broadcast captured him shouting: “How bad do you fucking want it?!” In the run-up to the tournament, Tiafoe's results had been listless; he came into the major unseeded. He was on YouTube one day when he encountered a video that he began to watch over and over. “There's this guy, Eric Thomas—he's a big motivational speaker,” Tiafoe said now, remembering it. “And he was saying, ‘If you want to be successful as bad as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful.’ And that kind of opened my eyes, like, ‘All right, damn. Do I want it that bad?’ And it just came out there: How bad do you fucking want it?”
Tennis is a brutally solitary sport. The truly elite tend to be marginally more physically gifted, as Tiafoe is. But there isn't necessarily much that separates the 35th-ranked player in the world from the 50th or the 10th, technically, except for composure and will. It takes a peculiar kind of ability to suffer alone for hours in front of tens of thousands of people. When Tiafoe was 15, he won the 2013 Orange Bowl, the tournament that helps decide the world's best junior. But many Orange Bowl winners have not gone on to much success on the tour: For every Roger Federer (1998) or Dominic Thiem (2011), there's a Brian Baker (2002) or Petru-Alexandru Luncanu (2006). The random cruelty of the game has a way of culling even its most talented players. Throughout his career, Tiafoe has been surrounded by other gifted aspiring professionals, most of whom came from a different world than he did. This was something he had become used to, growing up in tennis: “Sometimes it was tough, because they're wearing all nice things, and me and my brother are wearing, like, beat-up shirts and cargo shorts, with holes in the kicks. Sometimes you get the arrogant ones that clown and make jokes. My pops would say, ‘Man, stay the course. Stay the course, man, because you can really be something special in this game and you'll be the one laughing.’ Now, especially, I'm the one laughing.” A lot of the guys he used to play with, he said, are now “hedge-fund guys, working on Wall Street. They were going to be good regardless. They kinda came up in a great situation, and obviously a lot of them aren't playing tennis. If they are, maybe they're seniors in college and getting ready to work in the real world.”
The difference between him and them, he thought, was often just a matter of desire and pain tolerance. “The thing is, everybody wants to be famous,” he said. “Everybody wants to be successful. Everybody wants to be that dude, but not everybody wants to do the work for it. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why there's so many juniors and only a couple that make it. Because I really wanted it. I wanted it real bad.” Tiafoe is frequently cited as a member of the ATP's next generation of players, like the rising Greek star Stefanos Tsitsipas (who is 20) and two promising Canadians, Félix Auger-Aliassime (18) and Denis Shapovalov (20), all of whom have had rapid ascents in the sport over the past year or two. At some point, theoretically, they will inherit men's tennis after Federer and Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal finally give it up. But at the moment, Tiafoe said, they were all learning just how hard that task was going to be, to wrest the game away from their elders.
At the Australian, after Tiafoe beat Seppi, he played the graceful Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov in the Round of 16. Tiafoe had lost to Dimitrov in their two prior matches in 2018. But this time, in a nearly four-hour, four-set contest that featured two tiebreakers, Tiafoe finally broke through. The match was grueling and intense—the final score was 7–5, 7–6 (6), 6–7 (1), 7–5—and probably the best win of Tiafoe's life to that point. Three days later, Tiafoe played Nadal in the tournament's quarterfinal. Big Foe was on a roll. But one of Nadal's many elite skills is the ability to be present, and engaged, throughout an entire match. He is famously the most committed player on the tour, and less prone to the listless fugues that occasionally descend even on players as talented as Djokovic or Federer. “He can bring intensity, off the charts, from the first point to the last point,” Tiafoe said. At the end of the greatest week of Tiafoe's professional life, Nadal ran him off the court, 6–3, 6–4, 6–2. How bad do you really fucking want it?
The Junior Tennis Champions Center, where Tiafoe first learned to play, is in a wooded suburb full of empty space outside D.C., right next to the University of Maryland. On the day before he was scheduled to depart for Barcelona, where he'd begin the clay-court season that would culminate at Roland-Garros in June, he gave me a tour. Tiafoe is here often, and everybody—from the administrators to the coaches to the students—seemed to know him. Kids shyly approached and wished him luck in his next tournament. He, in turn, called out to every person passing, noting their clothing—“Go Terps!”—or, if they were mid-drill, giving them energy as he passed, grunting along with them: “Uh!” We passed a small boy shooting baskets at a hoop set up right by the blue hitting wall where Tiafoe taught himself to play. “To the lane, boy,” Tiafoe said. “To the lane!”
He paused by the wall. When journalists tell the story of Tiafoe's early life, it's often a story of serendipity: how lucky he was to grow up at a tennis academy. The reality is slightly more complicated. “For a long time, I wasn't in the program, because they didn't know what it was going to be, right?” Tiafoe said. “They were just, ‘Okay, this kid just comes down after school and hits against the wall.’ ” It was only after Tiafoe showed promise on his own that the JTCC allowed him in. Kouznetsov, one of his first coaches, had been a great help to him, he said; so had the program. But his ascension was often lonely. His mother, he said, had barely been able to attend a match of his until he turned professional, on account of the nursing work she still does. “My mom didn't really watch me as a junior at all. Obviously she watches me now all the time. My dad was there a lot. He'd watch me. But I knew there was gonna come a time where they could come anytime that they want, do whatever they want to. I always thought way ahead.”
Tiafoe continued through the facility, leading me inside the academy's main administrative building, to a cramped office at the end of the corridor, with a couple desks in it, a handful of rackets leaning against a wall, and a printed-out photo of Tiafoe on the court at the Australian Open taped to one of the walls. He greeted the office's two occupants and then turned to continue onward. “That's where my dad used to stay,” he said, almost in passing, his back already to the door. “This area used to be vending machines,” he said, indicating a blank space in a hallway.
I followed him through the JTCC's indoor court complex and then outside, where there were more courts. He and his brother used to hit with each other out here, he said. His father, he noted, had helped pour much of this concrete. I asked him why he thought he had made it as a tennis player and his twin brother hadn't. “I took it a little more seriously,” he said, looking away. “Took more advantages. It's tough, man. He had the same chances. But that's the way the cookie crumbles.” Franklin was still playing; who knew what might yet happen? “He's good, he's okay,” Tiafoe said.
We went back inside. “This is where me and my brother used to sleep,” Tiafoe said. We were standing at the door of another office, with a small couch, a desk, and an egg-shaped chair, with bay windows that looked out onto the same hitting wall we'd just been standing by. He opened a little closet. “In there,” he said—that was where the massage table was, the one they'd drag out to sleep on. He seemed unmoved to be standing in the same bare room where he used to spend the night. “Everyone goes and says it's tough,” he said, “but at the end of the day, I was being a kid and I was playing tennis. I played the sport for free, and in a good environment, ultimately. So I wouldn't say it was tough. I'd say more that it built character for me, put a lot of hair on my chest.… Because obviously I used tennis as a way out. Like, all right, well: I've been blessed with a crazy opportunity, I want to get my mom out, I want to get my pops and my brother, put them in all situations where…” He trailed off.
“It's not about where you grew up,” he said finally, making his way toward the door. “It's about where we're going.”
Zach Baron is GQ's senior staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2019 issue with the title "Big Foe on the Come-Up."
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Photographs by Erik Madigan Heck
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Grooming by Barry White at barrywhitemensgrooming.com
Produced by Studio Lou, Louise Lund
Location: JTCC
