U.S. men’s tennis used to be a powerhouse. What happened?

If you buy something from an SB Nation link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

“In the next year or year and half, I think you will see one of the Americans win a major.”

That’s John McEnroe, seven-time Grand Slam champion and widely considered one of the greatest male tennis players of all time, speaking at a Eurosport event on February 13, 2023 about the future of American men’s tennis, something he spent the 1980s ensuring the success of.

Success in professional tennis means winning a major, also known as Grand Slams. There are only four every year: the Australian Open, the French Open, the Wimbledon Championships, the US Open, and this year’s Wimbledon in July was the final major in the 18 months since McEnroe made his prediction.

Two American men — Taylor Fritz and Tommy Paul — made the quarterfinals, the first Grand Slam to feature multiple in the last eight since 2000. Fritz even defeated fourth-ranked Alexander Zverev en route to the quarterfinals, and Paul took the first set off third-ranked and eventual champion Carlos Alcaraz and broke Alcaraz on his service game early in the second set.

But as has happened at every Grand Slam since 2003, neither managed to win. There were auspicious moments, promising results, and even the illusion of progress. Fellow American Francis Tiafoe pushed Alcaraz to the brink in a five-set thriller earlier in the tournament, and it looked as if — finally — an American man might break through into the top tier. There were plenty of moral victories.

Yet, once again, there were no actual victories.

Wimbledon was merely the latest in a 21-year major drought for American men’s tennis, a period also known as my entire life. Since Andy Roddick captured the 2003 US Open over Juan Carlos Ferrero in straight sets, no American man has won a Grand Slam. And since 2009 — when Roddick was the runner-up to Roger Federer at Wimbledon — no American man has even reached a major final. I was six years old.

This is in stark contrast to American women’s tennis. In my lifetime, American women have won 24 major championships supported by continuous topflight talent; from Venus and Serena Williams’ consistency to one-offs from Sloane Stevens and Sofia Kenin all the way through the next generation captained by Coco Gauff.

Yet American men were shut out, and continue to knock on a door that shows no signs of opening.

There’s more than a few reasons American men’s tennis finds itself in this box — from the level of competition, national interest to bad luck — but all of them beg the same questions: how did this happen, and is there a way out? Will this be the generation of players that brings American men’s tennis into the future, or will they be the latest in a long line of contenders that got close, but not quite close enough? And who might be the one to finally do it?

But for me, it all yields to a simple, one sentence anxiety, born from a lifelong love of tennis and two decades of hearing my dad talk about how great American men were when he was growing up:

Will I see an American man win a Grand Slam in my lifetime?

Ironically, American men’s lack of success since Roddick probably isn’t their fault.

2003 is an important year in men’s tennis, because it marked the beginning of the apocalypse. The 2003 Wimbledon Championships — the major immediately before Roddick’s victory — saw the first of the eventual 20 Grand Slams won by the Swiss Maestro: Roger Federer.

Federer was the first of the three horsemen that would bring about the end of parity in men’s tennis. Along with Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, they won 65 of the 79 Grand Slams played between the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2024.

Those three men are widely considered the three greatest players in the history of men’s tennis, collectively obliterating the scene for two decades and counting, as — even with Federer and Nadal out of the picture — Djokovic continues to compete for Grand Slams, holding the all-time record with 24.

It’s not as though American men are unique in their national failure since 2003. With Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic representing Switzerland, Spain, and Serbia respectfully, only nine total nations have won a major since 2004 began.

That situation would be understandable if American men’s tennis was like American men’s soccer: no history of success in a sport traditionally dominated by other countries and regions of the word. A victory for the United States Men’s National Team in the World Cup or Copa América would be a revolutionary moment, marking the team’s first venture into international victory at the highest level.

But it hasn’t always been this way. In fact, America is the single most successful nation in the history of men’s tennis… by a lot.

They weren’t just more successful before 2003; they were utterly dominant. In the 21 years preceding Roddick’s victory, American men won 34 Grand Slams, more than a third of all available championships over that span. This came on the backs of legends like Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Jimmy Connors, and John McEnroe.

And it goes back even further. Connors and Arthur Ashe were consistent major winners in the early 1970s, and even before the Open Era — beginning in 1968 when professional players could compete in all Grand Slams — American men captured the occasional major. Even though the late-1950s and 1960s were largely dominated by Australian players, Americans Tony Trabert to Alex Olmedo still snagged wins, and Jack Kramer and Frank Parker dominated the game through the 1940s.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Americans weren’t just consistent contenders for Grand Slams, they were the best players in the world. They didn’t have to figure out how to beat the rest of the world; the rest of the world had to figure out how to beat them. Once McEnroe left the scene in the late 1980s, it looked like they had figured it out, with European players Ivan Lendl, Stefan Edberg and Mats Wilander dominating the scene in the back half of the 1980s.

But even during this drought, American men still found a one-off major through 17-year-old Michael Chang in the 1989 French Open. He walked so Courier, Sampras and Agassi could run just a few years later, and despite their four-year intermission, American men were once again the premier players in the world.

And they remained remarkably consistent. Once Chang broke the seal in 1989, American men one at least one of the four Grand Slams for the next 14 years until Roddick capped the run in 2003.

American men lead the field in total Open Era major wins with 52, with Spain in a distant second at 32. If you count pre-Open Era wins, America has 147 to Australia’s 100, with Great Britain at 48 in third. In fact, in the entire recorded history of men’s tennis, American men had never gone more than five years without capturing at least one Grand Slam title.

They were so successful in the early days, that the International Tennis Hall of Fame is in Newport, Rhode Island.

But in 2003, it was over. I was born, and the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic triumvirate decided that American men would no longer be able to capture Grand Slams. The closest they got was in 2009, with Roddick’s loss to Federer at Wimbledon coming through a 4 hour, 17 minute, five-set marathon that ended with a 16-14 fifth set; over twice as long as a regular set due to Wimbledon’s unique ruleset at the time.

But the successes of those three always somehow felt inevitable. Americans or otherwise, the rest of the men’s tennis world only managed a few outliers in the last 21 years, with nobody able to consistently challenge the three. But with such a strong history of top-level players, it’s worth asking why there was no serious American challenger during that span. The highest ranked player during their primes was John Isner, though he only managed a single major semifinal in his career.

Where was the top-level player? There hasn’t been an American man on the level of Sampras or Agassi since they retired, and no current American has shown top-level consistency either. The glass ceiling of good-but-not-good-enough has remained intact.

The reason for the lack of truly elite players is a difficult question to answer and an impossible one to prove. Talent and development aren’t predictable, and it’s anyone’s guess why Carlos Alcaraz was born in El Palmar, Spain instead of Des Moines, Iowa.

Jim Courier — an American four-time Grand Slam champion — chalks up the issue to a democratization of coaching, with most of the best tennis academies and coaches operating in the United States before the turn of the 21st Century.

“Back in the Seventies, America had a lot of the best coaches in the world, whether it was Harry Hopman, the great Australian who had set up shop in Florida, or Nick Bollettieri who was revolutionising training by having an academy,” Courier said to The Times in 2020. “A lot of the international players would come to America to get the best information, and maybe that wasn’t as prevalent in smaller countries in Europe.”

That is certainly no longer the case. Top coaches hail from all over the globe, and America no longer has a monopoly on topflight coaching as it had in the past. However, it’s hard to say if other countries actually have better developmental resources, especially given the overwhelming success of American women throughout the same period.

However, simple financial priority may explain that one disparity, with the best young athletes naturally pursuing the most lucrative sports. Due to the unfortunate history of pay disparities between men’s and women’s sports, tennis is one of the few with equal prize money. It is also by far the most lucrative sport for female athletes — American or otherwise — with seven of the top eight highest paid female athletes being tennis players. By contrast, zero male tennis players are in the top 50, a list dominated by professional football and basketball players.

Popularity could also partially explain the disparity. Americans rank outside the Top 20 nations with the highest percentage of tennis fans, with a pedestrian eight percent saying they follow the sport.

This could be a reason for the lack of recent victory, leading to less monetary investment and interest from top young athletes — a theory often used to explain the failures of American men’s soccer — though it’s equally likely that the lack of success has led to fewer fans in a downward feedback loop. Additionally, at the US Open, the Women’s Final has routinely outperformed the Men’s Final in US-based viewership, likely due to the frequent presence of American women at the top level.

It’s no surprise that Spain tops the list of most tennis-interested nations, with a pipeline of greatness running directly from Nadal to today’s dominant force in Alcaraz. So who might reignite American interest in men’s tennis?

In the Association of Tennis Professionals’ (ATP) — the governing body of men’s tennis — world rankings, there are five Americans in the Top 30: Taylor Fritz, Tommy Paul, Ben Shelton, Sebastian Korda, and Frances Tiafoe.

Shelton is the most recent of the group to reach a major semifinal at the 2023 US Open, but was eviscerated by soon-to-be-champion Djokovic in straight sets, his only encounter with a Top-10 ranked player to date. Fritz has consistently performed well at majors and throughout the tour, but has yet to reach a Grand Slam semifinal, losing at Wimbledon to Lorenzo Musetti — a lower ranked player who he was favored to beat — in five sets to be held up in the quarterfinals again.

By far the biggest issue for American men has been a general inability to beat top players. Prior to defeating Zverev, Fritz was 0-9 versus Top-5 ranked players in Grand Slams. Tennis is an individual sport, and one has to be able to beat the best players in the world in five set matches, the unique characteristic of the Grand Slams, in order to win them.

Fritz beat Nadal in the 2022 Indian Wells Open — an ATP 1000 event and one of the most prestigious non-Grand Slam tournaments of the year — but has been largely unable to beat top players in five set matches; only registering two wins on Top-10 players in Grand Slams total and never once over a Top-3 player, usually by far the most likely group to win a major.

But the closest an American man has come to a major win since Roddick’s 2009 loss was at the 2022 US Open, during a legendary run by Frances Tiafoe.

Tiafoe beat Nadal in the fourth round, becoming the first American to beat the Spaniard in a major since James Blake in 2005. He then went on to reach the semifinals where he would fall to Nadal’s spiritual successor in Alcaraz, going the distance in a four-hour, five set marathon that gave me more hope for American men’s tennis than I had felt in years.

But the issue hasn’t been hope. Flashes and sparks have flown throughout my life, with Paul taking a set off Alcaraz during Wimbledon and Fritz defeating Zverev. Reaching major semifinals and beating top players is a good start, but it has always been met by a total lack of follow through.

And tennis is all about follow through. When you swing your racket, your shot will be floaty and soft if you don’t complete the motion. Hitting defensive stabs might win a few points, but eventually you have to grip a forehand and hit a winner. That’s the follow through. That’s how you win.

McEnroe’s unfulfilled prophecy, that an American man would win in the next 18 months came on February 13, 2023 also known as my 20th birthday.

I love tennis because life gave it to me. My great-grandmother loved the game her whole life and was married to legendary coach Harry Hopman, who taught McEnroe and fellow American champion Vitas Gerulaitis in the 1970s. It’s been passed down through my family through the decades, but every prior generation had one thing in common: they saw an American man win a Grand Slam.

I never had to worry about American women’s tennis. Venus and Serena had me covered for pretty much my entire life. I always rooted for them, but was never concerned that I would be staring down eternity if they lost a quarterfinal. Because we all knew they’d be back; they were the best.

But the men’s side has me thinking about forever, something no sports fan wants to do. Cutting through the history, the explanations and the excuses is an existential fear that this actually may never happen again. Sure, Federer and Nadal are gone and Djokovic can’t stick around forever, but what of the next generation that is already coming into view? Alcaraz could be just as unbeatable as those three were in their primes, and Europe continues to produce weaponized 20-year-olds with explosive forehands and surgical precision like Jannik Sinner and Daniil Medvedev.

At the moment, I don’t see the current crop of American men keeping up. It’s led people like me to ask if Roddick will forever be known as the last American man to win a major, something he himself is probably sick of.

“No one’s benefited more from one win,” he said to GQ in 2023. “Ever. Had an American man won the next year, you wouldn’t be here.”

Ironically, the man Roddick defeated in 2003, Juan Carlos Ferrero, is now coaching Carlos Alcaraz, today’s strongest roadblock to Americans. You could say the Spanish continuity running from Ferrero through Nadal to Alcaraz started just as the once-unbroken generations of American champions finally fell. History has a patriotic sense of humor, and as Alcaraz captured his second straight Wimbledon, McEnroe was in the broadcast booth and Agassi watched from the stands.

Some would argue that it doesn’t matter. Tennis is an individual sport, and none of the Grand Slams are based on national affiliation. Some would say that tennis isn’t a patriotic sport at all, and never has been.

I don’t think I could disagree more. Apart from the obvious importance of the Olympics and Davis and Hopman Cups — explicitly national tournaments where players compete directly for their country — every major tournament broadcast has each player’s flag prominently displayed next to their name. There is a reason that Wimbledon made the provocative choice to ban Russian and Belarusian players during the 2022 Championships due to the invasion of Ukraine, with most tournaments now only allowing them to compete under neutral flags.

Friendly patriotic competition through sports has been a staple of the post World War II world order, and tennis is one of the few yearly sports where nationality remains prominent. At the 2024 Australian Open, it was a big deal that Sinner became the first Italian to win a Grand Slam, male or female. And the aforementioned popularity of tennis in Spain is directly tied to their run of spectacular players.

For American tennis fans like myself, getting the men’s game out of its straight jacket matters. It’s inconceivable that such a broad history of success could be followed up by an indefinite string of failures, and seems plainly unlikely that America has failed to produce even a consistent challenger, let alone a champion.

The good news? As the triumvirate retires, none of the Top-30 ranked Americans have even turned 28. Shelton is only 21, with lots of room to improve and compete at the highest level. The bad news? Alcaraz is also 21, and Sinner is 22. It’s going to take a lot for an American man to ultimately succeed with those figures, and it’s hard to imagine any of the current crop consistently challenging the best in the world. It would take a major development to change that.

Or, someone could just get lucky.

It’s pretty frequently better to be lucky than good in sports. Winning a championship — any championship — is so unlikely due to the sheer volume of other players or teams available. It’s almost unheard of for a team or player to have minus-odds — a betting line for an outcome being more likely than not — going into a season or tournament. Way too much can go wrong, so the field is always more likely than the “best” competitor.

As depressing as it may seem, maybe that’s the current playbook for American men’s tennis. Keep pushing forward, keep banging your head against that wall and hope — because rebellions are built on hope — that enough goes right one of these days to get an American man another shot at a Grand Slam final.

It’s not the solution I wanted to offer, but rather than looking for a silver bullet, I simply propose we try to open the door. Get back to a final, and figure it out from there. It isn’t going to be a one-step or two-step process; it’ll be a crazy long staircase.

But there’s an end to it somewhere, and I am determined to see it one day. Even if it takes another 21 years.